Surprise, Surprise!

Bil grew up in South Minneapolis and had a childhood friend whose family owned an opera company, Minnesota Singers Theatre. He was lured into the theatre world through the light opera of Gilbert and Sullivan.

Then, he went straight from high school to doing special effects at the Guthrie Theater. “One of my first tasks was for the bakery scene of ‘Cyrano.’ I had to climb into the giant air handler in the basement and wait for my cue. Then, I sprayed this cinnamon oil into the rushing air. I thought the director was crazy, but he knew it would work. As the set rolled on, the audience could smell the cinnamon of the bakery. It was brilliant. The subtlety of the special effect had a lasting impact on me.”

Bil says that work and that world were all-consuming. He often worked seven days a week. “Working non-stop was hard, but I met a ton of amazing people,” he said. Todd Rungren, Louie Anderson, Bonnie Raitt, Emo Phillips, Rod Stewart, Sam Kinison, Graham Chapman are just a few of the greats Bil worked with.

“In those days, the fame of a person was measured by the audience size, and in Graham Chapman’s case, by the amount of garbage the audience threw onstage. It blew my mind. He actually egged the audience on as they threw rotten tomatoes at him. It was insane, but incredibly memorable,” Bil said.

But his life wasn’t all theatre, he also had a wild and crazy ride as a roadie for The Replacements, “the original grunge band, before there was Seattle grunge,” Bil said. He was hired as the Minneapolis-based group’s sound man, and “because I was the only guy who didn’t drink, I did most of the driving during tours, too.”

Theatre life — on stage or on the road — can be exhausting, and Bil discovered in the mid-1990s that he had to walk away from an all-theatre all-the-time lifestyle for a while. He got married, raised two sons, bought a hobby farm in May Township. He settled down with IT work and surrounded himself with chickens, horses, llamas, and, yes, a donkey.

Yet, he was never without a theatre connection. For years, he helped out at several Twin Cities theatres, using the skills he had honed at the Guthrie. He even brought those skills to the residents of Marine on St. Croix to create an annual holiday show, “The Stockings Were Hung’” with his late friend Dan Boardman. “It was a rock ’n’ roll talent show that the community was 110 percent behind, if not center stage!”

Then, he met Calyssa Hall in 2015. She was doing lights and sound for the sixth-grade play at Marine Elementary School. Bil’s sons had participated in the annual play, and he knew that the parents did all the backstage work. That particular year, there was a shortage of parents with stagecraft, and the sixth-grade, teacher/director Abbie Brown, called on both Calyssa and Bil to get the technical aspects of the show in line.

Two years later, Calyssa retrieved Bil’s business card and phoned him for help with The Zephyr’s first Christmas play, “A Candle in the Window.”

Full-time theatre had hooked him again. He was named The Zephyr’s managing director in 2019. He’s at the theatre most days now, working hard to keep The Zephyr vital and viable during the Covid-19 restrictions. He is one of the creative minds behind the boxes of merriment that will accompany the audio version of this year’s production of “It’s a Wonderful Life.”

Bil claims the one thing he doesn’t do at the theatre is perform on stage. “I’m strictly smoke and mirrors,” he said. But any audience member who has witnessed one of Bil’s passionate pleas to fill out a sustaining-membership card might disagree. There’s no denying that this man also has a commanding presence when he’s in the spotlight.