Downtown Portland’s Director Park isn’t a room and doesn’t have doors.

If it did, Maeve Stier would have blown them off last Sunday while being named Favorite Busker of the Year at Portland’s first-ever Buskathon.

Busking is street performing while asking for donations. It’s a time-honored form of public performance that Portland took to heart during three days of performances, Thursday and Saturday, April 10 to 12, culminating in Sunday’s busk-off before about 100 people in Director Park.

Greta Lau, 20, of Tacoma, Washington, won the Rising Star competition, offering an acoustic guitar performance to beat out three others.

Among them were Angela Thomas, performing under the nom de plume Angel Marie. The 17-year-old from Grant High School performed an electric guitar number she wrote. “I really just wanted to do this for the experience,” she said, still basking in the applause of her performance. “This is something I want to do for the rest of my life.”

Angel Marie said she is self-taught as both a guitarist and a songwriter.

Maeve Stier netted the afternoon’s longest standing ovation. Dressed in a sort of 1930s Paris chic outfit and carrying an accordion, she sat, adjusted the mic, then proceeded to stun the audience, belting out an operatic performance of one of Gilda’s arias from Act I of Verdi’s “Rigoletto.”

A stunned audience sat, open-mouthed, during the surprise performance — one doesn’t expect an operatically trained soprano to be behind a squeezebox. Then leaped to their feet when she finished.

Stier, 25, performed with the orchestra on Broadway in 2024 for the revival of “Cabaret,” starring Eddie Redmayne as the Emcee and Gayle Rankin as Sally Bowles. She is an operatically trained singer who, during the pandemic, couldn’t find much opera work. She took up the accordion to accompany herself and, from there, did some musical theater and some previous street busking before landing the Broadway gig last year.

“I hated New York. I didn’t have all the creative freedom I had here. So I came home,” she said.

Stier has been busking in Laurelhurst Park for the past few years. She claims she began doing so when her roommates kicked her out of the apartment for performing the accordion poorly.

Judging Stier and the others was a panel of Portland music professionals, including Christina Fuller, co-owner of Fuller Events and the Portland Blues Festival; Agyei Marshall, a multi-instrumentalist and producer; Tony Ozier, musician and Portland’s “Funk Pioneer;” Jennifer Carrizo, senior talent buyer for McMenamins; and David Pollack, co-founder of Curbside Serenade.

Emceeing the event was drag queen Inanna Miss of Portland, who introduced herself as “the tallest drag queen in captivity.”

The competition featured finalists selected by fans from a field of 30 artists who played more than 200 sets across 18 venues over the previous three days.

Some, like Angel Marie, are new to the art of busking. Others, like Jeremy Famà, are veterans. Famà sang an original song and performed the trumpet, decked out in a Tyrolean hat and full beard like some sort of Portland hipster/Gypsy Jazz hybrid. “This is what I do for a living,” said Famà, who comes from Maryland but has been in Portland for a decade.

Amongst the oddest performances was Colescott Rubin’s tuba/unicycler/juggler/bassist/songwriter gig, which is all part of a pitch he plans to make later this year for his own television show for children.

Rounding out the afternoon was a high-octane couple of numbers from the Brassless Chaps, a 17-member-strong ensemble calling itself “the premiere queer, antifascist band in Portland.”

The event was presented by the Visit Downtown Campaign and produced by Downtown Portland Clean & Safe, with support from the Portland Metro Chamber, Travel Oregon, Travel Portland and Friends of Noise.