Michael Brindisi, longtime Chanhassen Dinner Theatres artistic director, dies at 76
Michael Brindisi, Chanhassen Dinner Theatres' president and artistic director, died unexpectedly Wednesday following a very brief illness. He was 76.
'Michael belongs on the Mount Rushmore of Twin Cities theater presenters,' said former Pioneer Press theater critic Dominic Papatola, who called Brindisi one of the kindest and most genuine in the business. He's also one of the most versatile, having spent decades directing and acting at CDT as well as scores of other theaters in the region.
'I can't think of a better situation,' Brindisi told Papatola in a 2002 interview when asked why he stuck with CDT. 'I have four or five months to prepare for a show. My wife and daughter work here. We have an acting company. And we're doing good work. Where else would I go?'
Brindisi grew up in a working-class Italian neighborhood of Philadelphia and fell in love with theater after seeing a production of 'Golden Boy' with Sammy Davis Jr. while in high school. Brindisi went on to study theater at Temple University, but flunked out because he skipped classes in favor of acting in plays.
A recruiter from the now-defunct Lea College in Albert Lea convinced Brindisi to move to Minnesota.
It turned out to be a much better fit, as Brindisi directed his first show at Lea College and he went on to serve as artistic director for Albert Lea Community Theatre. In the early '70s, he began bouncing between Minnesota and New York, where he landed work in the Broadway production of 'Once in a Lifetime' and in the first national tour of 'Grease.'
In Minnesota, CDT's then-artistic director Gary Gisselman saw Brindisi in a comedy revue at Dudley Riggs' Brave New Workshop and hired him for his first professional acting job at Chanhassen, a $90-a-week gig as an accordion player in Thornton Wilder's 'The Matchmaker.'
In 1981, Brindisi met Michelle Barber when they were both in different plays. They later married and spent three summers in Bemidji running the Paul Bunyan Playhouse, where Brindisi directed close to 30 shows. They also founded the Minnesota Festival Theatre in Albert Lea, which ran for more than 20 years.
Gisselman cast Brindisi once again in 1987 as Motel in 'Fiddler on the Roof.' After it wrapped, Britta Bloomberg, the daughter of CDT's founder, Herb Bloomberg, asked if he'd like to take over as artistic director. As Brindisi remembered in 2002: 'I said, 'You bet your ass I would.' '
Veteran actor Tony Vierling first met Brindisi in 1982 when he spoke at Vierling's acting class at Iowa State University. Five years later, Vierling acted in 'Fiddler' alongside Brindisi. The pair hit it off and Brindisi cast Vierling in his first show as artistic director, 'The Mystery of Edwin Drood.' Vierling has since appeared in 51 CDT productions.
'One of the things that has made working at Chanhassen such a unique thing is that you instantly feel like you're in a family,' Vierling said. 'There's a very specific familial feeling he nurtures out there. He genuinely likes people and loves doing the work with the actors.'
Brindisi was also an inadvertent matchmaker. In 2007, he traveled to New York to audition actors. He hired Michael Gruber to perform in CDT's 'Easter Parade,' which featured Vierling in the ensemble. The two fell for each other and later married. 'We would have never met without Michael,' Vierling said. 'He changed the direction of both our lives.'
Brindisi was a family man both at home and at CDT. Brindisi and Barber's daughter, Cat Brindisi-Darrow, grew up in the theater and made it her profession. Her extensive resume includes work as an actor, director, producer, writer and choreographer. Last year, she returned to Chanhassen to co-direct 'Beautiful: the Carole King Musical' with her father.
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In 2010, Brindisi took on a new challenge when he purchased Chanhassen Dinner Theatres as part of group of employees and regional investors. He was one of three managing partners alongside Tamara Kangas Erickson and Steven L. Peters.
Friday night, Chanhassen Dinner Theatres opens a new production of 'Grease,' which broke an attendance record when the company first staged it in 2006 and nearly matched those numbers on the second go-round in 2017.
Years ago, as a gag, Brindisi framed a photo of himself back when he was in the national tour of 'Grease' and hung it backstage. He told the cast that way he'll always be keeping an eye on them.
'Little did he know that was going to be the way he watches us now,' Vierling said. 'His presence will still be there, we just won't see him. That's the hard part.'
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"And it was just a very trusting process, because neither of us are fluent enough to have that kind of dialectical specificity that you would in English." "It was super cool to just be watching an actor perform a scene that you've written in English that has been translated a couple of times, but you still completely understand it, just by the generosity of their performance." For Craig, he has an extensive resume of acting roles, including projects like Boy Erased and episodes of Dropout. Among the esteemed alumni of the Upright Citizens Brigade, he had a writing "itch" for a long time, and was "in awe" of Crano's work as a director. "Truthfully, in a weird way, it felt like such a far off, distant job, because everything felt really difficult, and I think with this project it just made me understand that it was just something I truly love and truly wanted to do," Craig said. "I love the idea of creative control and being in a really collaborative situation. Acting allows you to do that momentarily, but I think like every other job that you can do on a film is much longer lasting, and I think that's something I was truly seeking." For Crano, he also grew up as a theatre kid, moving on to writing plays in college. "The first time I got laughs for jokes I was like, 'Oh, this is it. Let's figure out how to do this,'" he said. "I was playwriting in London, my mom got sick in the States, so I came back, and I started writing a movie, because I was living in [Los Angeles] and I thought, well there are no playwrights in L.A., I better write a movie.'" That's when Crano found a mentor in Peter Friedlander, who's currently the head of scripted series, U.S. and Canada, at Netflix. "I had written this feature and ... we met with a bunch of directors, great directors, directors I truly admire, and they would be like, 'It should be like this.' And I'd be like, 'Yeah, that's fine, but maybe it's more like this.' 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"And it's very helpful in an environment where you're getting a lot of no's, to have a partner who's literally like, 'Oh, it's just no for now. Great, let's move on. Let's find somebody who's going to say yes, maybe we'll come back to that no later.' I'm the pessimist who's sitting in the corner going, 'Somebody just rejected me, I don't know what to do.' ... It just makes you move, and that's that's very helpful for me."
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While Nick Kroll and Andrew Rannells voice some pretty hysterical characters in Big Mouth, they're now sharing the screen in the horror-comedy I Don't Understand You (now in theatres). Written and directed by married filmmakers David Joseph Craig and Brian Crano, the movie had a particularly interesting starting point. In I Don't Understand You Kroll and Rannells play a couple, Dom and Cole, who have just fallen victim to adoption fraud, but things are looking up. A pregnant woman named Candace (Amanda Seyfried) thinks they're the right fit for the family to adopt her child. But just before that happens, Dom and Cole take a romantic Italian vacation. Things take a turn when they get lost outside of Rome, trying to find a restaurant. As their stranded in an unknown location, the trip turns to bloody Italian chaos. As Craig and Crano identified, the first portion of the movie, up until the couple gets stuck going to the restaurant, is quite close to the real adoption experience the filmmakers had. "We were adopting a child. We had been through an adoption scam, which was heartbreaking, and then had a completely different experience when we matched with the birth mother of our son," Crano told Yahoo. "But we found out that we were going to have him literally like two days before we were going on our 10th anniversary trip." "And we were like, 'Shit, should we not go?' But we decided to do it, and you're so emotionally opened up and vulnerable in that moment that it felt like a very similar experience to being in a horror movie, even though it's a joyful kind of situation." A key element of I Don't Understand You is that feeling of shock once the story turns from a romance-comedy to something much bloodier. It feels abrupt, but it's that jolt of the contrast that also makes that moment feel particularly impactful to watch. "Our sense of filmmaker is so much based on surprise, Craig said. "As a cinephile, my main decade to go to are outlandish '90s movies, because they just take you to a different space, and as long as you have a reality to the characters that are already at hand, you can kind of take them wherever." "Personally, the situation of adoption was a constant jolt [from] one emotion to another that we felt like that was the right way to tell a story like this, which was literally, fall in love with a couple and then send them into a complete nightmare. And I think you can only get that way if you do it abruptly, and kind of manically." While Rannells and Kroll have that funny and sweet chemistry the story needs, these were roles that weren't written for them. But it works because Crano and Craig know how to write in each other's voices so well, that's where a lot of the dialogue is pulled from. Additionally, the filmmakers had the "creative trust" in each other to pitch any idea, as random as it may have seemed, to see if it could work for the film. "When you're with somebody you've lived with for 15 years, there is very little that I can do that would embarrass me in front of David," Crano said. "So that level of creative freedom is very generative." "We were able to screw up in front of each other a lot without it affecting the rest of our day," Craig added. Of course, with the language barrier between the filmmakers and the Italian cast, it was a real collaboration to help make the script feel authentic for those characters. "All of the Italian actors and crew were very helpful in terms of being like, 'Well I feel like my character is is from the south and wouldn't say it in this way.' And helped us build the language," Crano said. "And it was just a very trusting process, because neither of us are fluent enough to have that kind of dialectical specificity that you would in English." "It was super cool to just be watching an actor perform a scene that you've written in English that has been translated a couple of times, but you still completely understand it, just by the generosity of their performance." For Craig, he has an extensive resume of acting roles, including projects like Boy Erased and episodes of Dropout. Among the esteemed alumni of the Upright Citizens Brigade, he had a writing "itch" for a long time, and was "in awe" of Crano's work as a director. "Truthfully, in a weird way, it felt like such a far off, distang job, because everything felt really difficult, and I think with this project it just made me understand that it was just something I truly love and truly wanted to do," Craig said. "I love the idea of creative control and being in a really collaborative situation. Acting allows you to do that momentarily, but I think like every other job that you can do on a film is much longer lasting, and I think that's something I was truly seeking." For Crano, he also grew up as a theatre kid, moving on to writing plays in college. "The first time I got laughs for jokes I was like, 'Oh, this is it. Let's figure out how to do this,'" he said. "I was playwriting in London, my mom got sick in the States, so I came back, and I started writing a movie, because I was living in [Los Angeles] and I thought, well there are no playwrights in L.A., I better write a movie.'" That's when Crano found a mentor in Peter Friedlander, who's currently the head of scripted series, U.S. and Canada, at Netflix. "I had written this feature and ... we met with a bunch of directors, great directors, directors I truly admire, and they would be like, 'It should be like this.' And I'd be like, 'Yeah, that's fine, but maybe it's more like this.' And after about five of those Peter was like, 'You're going to direct it. We'll make some shorts. We'll see if you can do it.' He just sort of saw it," Crano recalled. "It's nice to be seen in any capacity for your ability, but [I started to realize] this is not so different from writing, it's just sort of writing and physical space and storytelling, and I love to do it. ... It is a very difficult job, because it requires so much money to test the theory, to even see if you can." But being able to work together on I Don't Understand You, the couple were able to learn things about and from each other through the filmmaking process. "David is lovely to everyone," Crano said. "He is much nicer than I am at a sort of base level, and makes everyone feel that they can perform at the best of their ability. And that's a really good lesson." "Brian literally doesn't take anything personally," Craig added. "Almost to a fault." "And it's very helpful in an environment where you're getting a lot of no's, to have a partner who's literally like, 'Oh, it's just no for now. Great, let's move on. Let's find somebody who's going to say yes, maybe we'll come back to that no later.' I'm the pessimist who's sitting in the corner going, 'Somebody just rejected me, I don't know what to do.' ... It just makes you move, and that's that's very helpful for me."
