From the time he was a youngster, Gilfry sang in choirs and musicals at church, where he met his future wife and fellow performer, Tina Estupinian ’80, though they would not date until years later as students at Cal State Fullerton.

When the Gilfrys moved to Claremont in 1971, Rodney’s father bought a new stereo system. “He would play symphonies and violin concertos at full tilt, and was really remarkable to watch because he would sit down with the conductor’s score of a Tchaikovsky symphony and conduct—and he just wept. He was so taken by the music, there were tears streaming down his face. That was my introduction to how music can affect someone, and that really made a big impression on me.”

If Tchaikovsky could move his father, Gilfry would find out in high school the power of his own instrument. In addition to singing in the choir, he was on the wrestling team. Once, when a choral festival and wrestling tournament were scheduled on the same Saturday, Gilfry opted for the festival and on the following Monday, found that his team lost their match by one weight class—his.

In an effort to shame Gilfry in front of his teammates for letting them down, the coach demanded that he sing something for them. “I didn’t know what to sing, so I sang ‘Mary Had a Little Lamb.’ It was do or die …. I put my heart into it, and the team cheered for me. The coach was really embarrassed and made me do 100 push-ups.

“But I thought, ‘Wow, this really affects people when I sing—I have a good voice.’ And that’s when I first got the idea that this was something powerful.”

It was in high school, too, that he discovered how much he liked performing. Cast in the title role for the school’s musical Li’l Abner, he relished the experience of being on stage in front of an audience. That performance also impressed his father, who prior to that moment “thought that vocal music was not as high an art form as instrumental music. He was always really supportive, but it wasn’t until Li’l Abner that he was won over.

“At the end of the performance, I remember my dad coming backstage and saying, ‘Son, you’re not a ham, you’re the whole hog!’ He was grinning from ear to ear, and that was kind of an affirmation for me that this was something that was good to do.”

“Nathan, [the] paranoid schizophrenic Jewish lover sung by American baritone Rodney Gilfry, steals the show with his presence and ability to generate laughs.”—Sunday Times, London