Some people keep journals. Dr. Stuart Bloom writes songs.
Bloom will sing them April 19-23 in "How to Avoid Burnout in 73 Minutes." The musical comedy at the Southern Theater covers how he came to be an actor/doctor and how a career shift helped him rebound from the lows of his work.
Active in theater at Golden Valley High School in the 1970s, Bloom studied at New York University and worked as an actor, including a role in the national tour of the "Doonesbury" musical that kicked off in 1984. But he didn't love it. Things shifted when he visited Minnesota after his father was diagnosed with stomach cancer.
"It was the first time anybody really close to me had been sick and that changes everything," said Bloom, whose wife, Carolyn, was reading a book about cancer at the time. "I looked at it and said, 'I should be an oncologist.' The truth was I'd had no pre-med classes. I hadn't had science since high school. But Carolyn said, 'I think you'd be a great one.'"
Which is how he ended up back in Brooklyn, taking inorganic chemistry and racking up debt by entering medical school at age 33. In between dissections, he was still writing songs. He continued during three years at Hennepin County Medical Center, where he whipped up an operetta, and later at Minnesota Oncology.
Bloom always loved his patients and his work. But after many years at Minnesota Oncology, the business side of medicine was bringing him down.
"Five years ago, I started looking at the songs and realizing, 'Hmm, there's an arc here,'" said Bloom, of Hopkins. "I thought, 'This could be a show.'"
Eventually "Burnout" came together, under the guidance of director Peter Moore. Bloom rented a theater for sold-out runs in 2019 and 2021, boosted by word-of-mouth in the medical community. Joined on stage by former journalist Eric Ringham as his inner voice, he has performed for doctors in Rochester, Minn., and elsewhere.
