Drummer and percussionist Stan Lunetta has played 3,534 performances – give or take – at the Music Circus over the past 54 seasons. Tonight will be his last.
"When we do the last night of 'Hairspray,' whatever I hit last, that will be it," Lunetta said of the show that will end the season for Sacramento's musical theater institution.
Lunetta has also been the principal timpanist for the Sacramento Philharmonic since 1963 and served in the same role for the Sacramento Opera and the Sacramento Choral Society Orchestra.
In addition, Lunetta has hired all the musicians for these organizations and the Music Circus. At age 71, he is retiring from the role of music contractor as well.
"I've served my turn," Lunetta said. "I want to quit while I'm ahead and not have people thinking, 'Isn't it time for Stan to hang it up?' I didn't want that."
Richard Lewis, who runs the Music Circus, started working with Lunetta in 1969 when Lewis was a production assistant helping the drummer set up in the pit.
"I think he has more than two arms. The amount of stuff he can hit is astonishing," Lewis said.
Lunetta's trumpeter son Larry said his father quietly changed perceptions about the quality of professional musicians in Sacramento.
"He made it a better place for all the people who play music for a living," said Larry Lunetta. "Guys I met in Los Angeles were using him to contract for people like (Johnny) Mathis and Steve (Lawrence) and Eydie (Gorme). They'd come through here and then take our band to the Bay Area."
Lunetta is a man of varied and fascinating parts. He studied composition under avant garde icons John Cage and Karlheinz Stockhausen and has a master's degree in music from the University of California, Davis.
He founded, published and edited a magazine called SOURCE: Music of the Avant Garde. The eleven issues are collector's items and considered authoritative research sources.
Lunetta also makes sculptures and has created his own electronic percussion instruments. His rig in the Music Circus pit actually looks like sculpture, evolving through necessity and accumulation.
"All of the stuff that I do, especially at Music Circus, is a one-of-a-kind thing. Nobody else really plays things the way I do," Lunetta said.
Lunetta didn't get to perform during the first three years of the Music Circus. A high school student, he was selling ice cream back under the old canvas tent that long housed the theater.
He was ready, though, when his big chance came along his first year out of school. Conductor Gershon Kingsley got into an argument with the drummer, who was dismissed.
The teenage prodigy was called as the replacement for "South Pacific."
In 1972, Lunetta founded the theatrical electronic percussion ensemble AMRA/AMRA. The group went overseas to perform, playing at the International Carnival of Experimental Sound in London. It was one of only two weeks Lunetta has missed at Music Circus.
The same group also performed at the California Institute of the Arts in Valencia. Musician Ken Horton remembers Lunetta was playing at the time at Lake Tahoe with Elvis Presley.
"After an Elvis show, he drove all the way to Valencia, played the concert, then drove all the way back to Tahoe to play the next Elvis show," said Horton.
Larry Lunetta, who will also be in the pit orchestra tonight, said his father has been hinting at retiring throughout the season.
"He did say to me a couple of times, 'If I do every show this season, I will have done every show I wanted to do," the younger Lunetta said.
Larry Lunetta, who's been an in-house music contractor on Broadway, will take over contracting for California Musical Theatre (which operates the Music Circus and Broadway Sacramento).
The contracting has been a Lunetta family affair with Stan Lunetta's wife, Sharon, doing all the bookkeeping.
Lunetta is clearly leaving on a personal high note, saying the recently completed production of "Swing" was "the most fun show I've ever played."
"It was nonstop for him as a drummer. The drummer of that show is the conductor of that show," Larry Lunetta said. "At 71 years old, he was able to play that show and walk away. That was great."
