Todd Walroth, pharmacy manager for Eskenazi Health Acute Care Services, has been singing since fourth grade. He joined musical theater in high school and then the Purdue Varsity Glee Club at Purdue University, even traveling internationally for it. Once his career as a pharmacist took off, however, Walroth wouldn’t perform on stage again for twenty years.

At Eskenazi Health, Walroth was drawn to the fast pace of critical care. After nearly twenty years, he is still inspired by “our patient population and our mission and the work that we get to do really beyond these walls to help our patients . . . . ” He was also continually moved by the patient recoveries from severe burns he assisted with in more than a decade with the Richard M. Fairbanks Burn Center at Eskenazi Health.

He did miss, however, his hours onstage. His daughters — Allie, 14, and Brynn, 12 — finally lured him back. He and his wife Sara, also a theater veteran, observed with eagerness when their daughters “gravitated toward dance and theater,” says Walroth.

Walroth assisted with his kids’ performances, house managing while his wife helped with costumes. Soon, the two of them wanted to join the fun onstage. “We’re here all the time,” he recalls saying to his wife. “Why don’t we do it?” “So we did,” he adds, “and we had a blast.”

“It ended up being just a really good escape from everything,” Walroth says. He could “just disconnect . . . just kind of have fun, be with Sara and the girls, something we can all do as a family . . . . ”

He loved when fiction and reality blurred, as when his whole family played an imaginary one in “The Music Man.” He’d acted in the same musical while in high school. “I remember there was a bunch of families in it,” he says, “people with their kids, and I remember thinking someday how cool that would be to do with my own family and then here we were . . . . that was like a real full circle moment . . . . ”

The blurring of reality and fiction, however, has also led to peculiar moments, as when his wife was cast as the Wicked Witch and he was cast as the scarecrow in “The Wizard of Oz,” and “the whole time she was literally trying to light me on fire, with actual fire on stage . . . . I’m a burn pharmacist. I worked on the burn unit for a long time, so the fact that she was literally trying to light me on fire was [on] all these levels really messing with me.”

Walroth laughed at the “ridiculous” level of his caution but still ensured his wife had a “huge arm glove thing” while throwing her fireballs at him.

He soon discovered many parallels between his theater experiences and his work. “Pharmacy and health care is such a team environment,” he says. “You literally can’t care for a patient by yourself. You need a nurse, you need a doctor, you need a pharmacist, social worker, respiratory therapist — all the different roles. You can’t really put on a show by yourself . . . . You’re always part of an ensemble.”

Part of that ensemble, of course, is his own department. Walroth appreciates his team and particularly enjoys mentoring residents; he has won several awards in recognition of his mentorship skills.

Moments he can’t control on stage still throw Walroth, as when a technological issue forced everyone to ad lib for several minutes during a show, which “felt like the longest three hours of my life.” “I’m a pharmacist,” he adds. “I want to know my lines. I want to have everything memorized, and I want to be in control of everything happening while I’m up there.” He’s begun directing to challenge himself to relax some of that control.

Many mementos in his office recall Walroth’s performances: a framed “Cinderella” poster with signatures from the first ensemble he directed; a rubber grasshopper toy celebrating his role in “James and the Giant Peach.” Among his favorites are those of his family in full costume and one of himself with three of his previous pharmacy mentees, who came to see him in “The Wizard of Oz.”

Walroth has one real regret when it comes to his time on the stage: just how long he waited to return.