Words at Intermission: Paul Hansen

On a non-pandemic evening, a Seattle theatre patron may venture to the 5^th Avenue Theatre, look into the orchestra pit, and orient their gaze toward the percussion section. There at the drums, sporting round-framed glasses and a flowing mane, is Paul Hansen.

It’s a bit of a cliché to say that he’s done it all, but he kind of has: the accomplished percussionist has accompanied famous musical acts and theatrical productions; he’s recorded soundtracks for film, television, and video games. And he has a reputation for being able to play almost anything.

“I’m an extra in the symphony,” he tells me.

He also dabbles with the Seattle Symphony.

“They’ll often bring me in to play some of the more exotic instruments that nobody else wants to touch. You know what a flexatone is? It’s sort of a handheld musical saw, and it takes a very distinctive touch, and it’s not one that most orchestral musicians are comfortable playing. I’ve got a set of chromatic jaw harps, so I’ll go in and play a Charles Ives symphony. They kind of look at me as the guy who will dive into anything.”

Hearing about his background, it’s easy to see how Paul got into the field of atypical instrumentation. Born and raised in Seattle, Paul grew up in a musical family. His sisters played the strings and his mother the piano, while his father, a celebrated organist, was also the music director for a local children’s television show called Wunda Wunda.

“Part of the time I’d be listening to him practice his Bach,” he tells me, “and the rest of the time he’d be at the TV station accompanying the stories and grabbing the slide whistle and, you know, doing the duck calls and all the sound effects for the shows, and I’d watch him do this live on TV and I’d go, ‘that’s a really cool job.’ So there was this sort of parallel track starting to build—you could be a legitimate musician and a storyteller with your music at the same time.”

An admittedly reluctant piano student, Paul took up the drums and quickly found himself in the orchestra pits of local theatre houses, accompanying the musicals. Meanwhile, he also started acting, performing as a member of the troupe at Poncho Theatre (now Seattle Children’s Theatre).

“I was there for 3 or 4 years,” he says. “For a long time I didn’t know if I was gonna be an actor or a musician, but since they kept sending me backstage to do the music and sound effects, I got the message,” he laughs.

“I always tell people: ‘well, I’m not a musician—but I play one in the pit.’”

His talent and experience as a percussionist led him to the University of Washington. His professor, who had spent years performing with touring acts as they passed through Seattle, was on the cusp of retirement—and he passed a lot of high-profile work to Paul.

“It was around that time when personality acts would go on tour—like Liberace or Johnny Mathis. They used to pull into a town like Seattle, hire the band, rehearse the band, and then they’d take you around four or five cities; you’d do Portland, Anchorage, Olympia, Seattle, and then they’d go onto the next region. So I’m 17 years old and on the Liberace band bus. And I did a lot of work, worked my way through college actually, doing these little tours. And that was almost better education than school.”

One of these personality acts was a little show featuring a soft-spoken guy named Fred Rogers.

“He came to town one day in 1985 and did two shows at the Paramount. Just him, a bare stage, puppets, he also had Lady Aberlin and Mr. McFeely with him, and he brought his pianist and bass player—but not his drummer. And somehow, I got called for this one. And that was a really memorable experience. It was—these kids, three thousand kids out there, just stone silent, just focused on this man. I can really see what made him such a wonderful, caring human being.”

Not long after that, a shoulder injury took Paul out of performing; he wasn’t sure if he’d ever be able to play the drums again. He briefly went back to school to learn to be a court reporter, but before he could finish, his shoulder made a full recovery. His luck didn’t end there; while focusing on life outside of the orchestra pit, Paul met Janice, a local filmmaker—and his wife of 37 years.

“Janice, 37?” he calls out. (“Something like that,” I hear from a distant voice.) “Something like that,” he repeats with a smile.

“We met at a local film studio that was run by one of our underground guerrilla filmmakers. I was his film editor.” Like I said, he does it all.

“[Janice] was finishing a short film which was a surrealist kabuki short. And we started talking, a few sparks flew, and we decided I should do the soundtrack for her film—it’s a ten-minute short, which is now in the permanent collection at the museum of modern art, called Beyond Kabuki. I’ve done all her film shorts since then.”

Having met his future wife, and with a fully recovered shoulder, Paul got back to percussion with a passion. In a couple of decades he had recorded countless soundtracks for movies and video games (“any number of Mortal Kombats, a few Halos…”), he had amassed a resume of over 90 musicals, and he had become the resident percussionist at Seattle’s 5^th Avenue Theatre.

“Well, sort of,” he says. “None of us have official titles—it’s just a show-to-show contract. But I’ve become a face there, and I think to a lot of the audience, I’ve become sort of the mascot of the pit. They know they can always come up to the pit rail and chat.”

A former touring house, 5^th Avenue now produces its own shows and is often the final proving ground for Broadway-bound musicals. Paul’s worked on plenty of new musicals there, including Hairspray, a Broadway hit based on the 1988 Jon Waters film of the same name. I ask Paul what it was like to work on the show—and what it was like to watch it become a massive hit.

“Oh man! It was so wild because the first performances were, ‘what’s Hairspray?’ and all that, so it’d have a half a house, or a two-thirds house, and by the end of the run they were scalping tickets in the street. We could see it kind of blowing up right in front of us, and it was really our first experience with that sort of thing in Seattle—really putting a show up from the ground up.

“A lot of the time, you just have so much input to how the percussion book is going to fit in with the show. Some orchestrators, what they put on paper is gospel; play what’s on the page. And then others, if you work with them after a while, sometimes they’ll just put in a sketch of what to do and you fill it in. A lot of that, if it works, then that’ll become a part of the show. Yeah, so, Christmas Story and Hairspray, those books are pretty much as I left them.”

Talking to Paul about his career, it’s clear how much he loves his work in musical theatre. And being asked how to explain the importance of percussion in musical theatre storytelling, his explanation is almost spiritual.

“Oh god, I never know how to put this,” he laughs. “I do see it as the essential stitch in the musical net that holds up the action onstage, maybe that’s a good way to put it. A lot of the things you can do with your choice of sound effects, choice of a tambourine—if there’s something you can do that can lift what’s going on onstage into something the actors can float on, and the audience can float on…it’s just so much more than the notes on the page. You really have to understand dramatically what’s happening onstage—you are a part of the drama, whether you know it or not.

“When we come to a first rehearsal, I’ll bring three triangles—‘cause it’s gotta be just the right triangle for that moment. You know, is it the triangle of a diamond ring, or is it a sunbeam poking through a cloud? This is really the only way I can think of it.”

Paul was providing such detail-oriented percussion work for 5^th Avenue’s production of Sister Act when the COVID-19 pandemic forced the closure of the nation’s theaters. Washington being the first state to experience an outbreak, I ask Paul about the experience.

“The first outbreak was about two miles outside my back door, across Lake Washington. At first, they were telling us it’d be a two-week lockdown. It’s gonna be two weeks—oh no, it’ll be two months. Yeah, we’ll be back in the theater in June. Well, maybe we’ll be able to come back in July. Christmas. It just kept getting pushed back and pushed back.”

Left without full-time employment for these past several months, Paul has been able to collect unemployment. He also works for an online sheet music publishing company, so the two sources of income serve to supplement each other. But the extended benefits provided by the CARES act will expire at the end of the month, and current congressional negotiations to further extend these benefits into the new year are moving very slowly. I ask Paul about the government response to the pandemic, and how they should understand our employment situation.

“We’re not being recognized as important to society,” he says. “We may not be executives at publishing companies or banks or anything like that, but we are the people you depend on to get you through your day to day things. When you come home at night, we’re the ones you look at on television, or on your streaming; we’re the ones you go out to the opera and hear. Many of us have devoted our lives to this craft, and at age 60, it’s not so simple to shift gears on a dime and do something else—as someone once said.

“I don’t want to have to shift gears. I don’t want to have to go back to school and learn computer coding. It’s not what I spent my life focusing on. So we could use help. Not just financial support, but in helping get this thing under control. I just hope that at some point, we will be able to get on the other end of this thing. Knock on wood, we have a vaccine in place before we have to start dipping into our retirements just to keep ourselves going.”

With the prospect of another stimulus package, many unemployed Americans have hope for a slight reprieve. And while the light at the end of the tunnel seems distant, Paul’s thankful that he has company.

“The thing that gets me through is that I’ve got a beautiful wife of 37 years here with me, so I’m not alone. And all I can say is, there are so many of us in this same boat, that even though you may be alone in your apartment, you’re not alone in your feelings, and your desire to get back together again, and create our art, and create our little worlds for people.

“Mask up and stay safe, and don’t go out there and we’ll eventually see the other side of this thing. I hope. Because I really want to be out there with all you folks again.” ↓