Back in the Saddle : Director Riding High Again

SAN DIEGO — For Graciela Daniele, 1990 tested her strength and rewarded her resolve.

The year began with Broadway’s withering response to “Dangerous Games,” a tango musical she originally wrote, directed and choreographed for the La Jolla Playhouse and two other co-producing theaters in 1989. After encouraging runs in those theaters, the show opened and closed in New York to devastating reviews after only four regular performances.

But 1990 also ended with raves for “Once on This Island,” a 90-minute musical adaptation of Rosa Guy’s 1985 novel, “My Love, My Love,” which she first directed and choreographed at New York’s Playwrights Horizons.

The show, a contemporary update of “The Little Mermaid,” tells the tale of a poor black girl in the Caribbean who saves a rich mixed-race aristocrat who crashes his sports car near her village. The girl falls in love with him and pursues him, trying to overcome the walls between money and class, just as the Little Mermaid strove to overcome the differences in land and ocean life.

This unpretentious 11-person show--to Daniele’s self-confessed surprise--captivated critics and audiences with its passion, its lush looks, its humor and its dancing, and was moved to Broadway for a yearlong run that earned eight Tony nominations.

Now Daniele is hot, directing “Captains Courageous,” a new musical for Ford’s Theatre in Washington that opens Sept. 22, and choreographing the musical version of Neil Simon’s “The Goodbye Girl” for a March opening on Broadway.

She has also directed the touring version of “Once on This Island,” which will be presented by the Nederlander Organization’s San Diego Playgoers Series today through Sunday at the San Diego Civic Theatre.

Because of “Dangerous Games,” “Once on This Island” almost didn’t happen. Daniele doubted her ability to do it.

“We closed on Saturday, and on Sunday I remember spending the day in bed with a blanket over my head,” she said on the phone from New York, remembering the “Dangerous Games” reception.

“I don’t read reviews at all because I know I’m going to know about them immediately. If the phone doesn’t ring at 9 in the morning, it’s bad and if it doesn’t ring at all, you commit suicide. Well, it didn’t ring at all.

“My first concern was to the author and lyricist of ‘Once on This Island.’ This was a big opportunity for them, and they were putting it into the lap of someone who was being run out of town. I remember talking to them, and I said, ‘Listen guys, if you don’t want me, I will totally understand.’ ”

Of course, to put this in perspective one has to know that Daniele nearly always offers to back out before she starts something--particularly something she loves.

Before she directed the acclaimed “March of the Falsettos and Falsettoland,” William Finn’s two one-act musicals about a gay Jewish man, his lover, his son and his ex-wife for the Hartford Stage Company in 1991 (the success of which was responsible for pushing the show to Broadway as “Falsettoland”), her reaction was: “I was the wrong person! I’m a woman, I’m Latin, I’m heterosexual, I’m not urban, I love the country, and I don’t even speak English very well.”

But Hartford’s artistic director, Mark Lamos, told her that her outside perspective was part of what made her right for the project. In the case of “Once on This Island,” the composing team of Lynn Ahrens and Stephen Flaherty, who had enlisted her for the job, would not take no for an answer.

Daniele is glad they didn’t. It helped that two days after the demise of “Dangerous Games,” she was back on her feet “and facing this new adventure,” as she puts it.

Daniele, 52, has been facing adventure her whole life.

Brought up in Argentina, she remembers the fear of growing up under the rule of Juan and Eva Peron. (The show, “Evita,” she said dryly, “had nothing to do with reality”). The violence and repression of those times later inspired her work on “Dangerous Games.”

She left Argentina at 15 with $200 in her pocket and the goal of becoming a ballet dancer. She became one, dancing in troupes across Europe, but, when she saw a production of “West Side Story,” she knew she had to have a Broadway career. Within two weeks of arriving in New York, she was hired in “What Makes Sammy Run?”

Michael Bennett and Bob Fosse became her mentors and encouraged her development into a choreographer. She won Tony nominations for her choreography of “The Mystery of Edwin Drood,” “The Rink” and “Pirates of Penzance,” and later won nominations for “Once on This Island.”

But, with the exception of “The Goodbye Girl,” the opportunities for new choreography were drying up. There were the ever-present revivals, of course, but she didn’t want to do revivals anymore.

And so, after a few directing misfires, which included co-directing “Blood Wedding” at the Old Globe Theatre in 1988, she has found herself a member of that tiny select pool of Broadway director-choreographers. The only other ones, now that Bob Fosse, Michael Bennett and Gower Champion are gone, are Tommy Tune and Jerome Robbins. And Robbins has been working primarily on revivals in recent years.

“I never thought of myself as a director, I never expected or dreamt that I would be. But. in order to do what I want to do, the only position I could take was to direct. That was the only way to swim across the river, up the stream. And what I’m finding is that directing is not as hard as choreographing, even though I know a lot of directors are going to hate me for saying this. It’s a lot of work, but it’s not hard. It’s like running a large household like my grandmother did.”

In a typical Daniele play, everything is choreographed. “Once on This Island” was described by one critic as “wall-to-wall movement.” In “Captains Courageous,” she said she is choreographing “the ropes and rigging and sails--every single moment.”

Directing has allowed her to realize her vision of the world as constant motion.

“Choreography is painting with movement, painting forever. I walk on the street, I look at an intersection and the light goes green and I’m amazed at the hundreds and thousands of people walking in so many directions, walking and talking and gesturing with nobody bumping into anybody. It’s the most extraordinary choreography, nobody could come up with it. I see choreography in the way the plants and the trees move when the wind hits them, I see choreography in the sea.”

And yet, it is not the potential for dance alone that makes her commit herself to a piece. To do a project, or rather to have someone overcome the doubts with which she approaches nearly every project, it has to touch her.

“I’m a woman, I’m Latin, I’m a hot tamale, I fight for what I love, and I love life,” she said with a laugh.

A Daniele show is also an intimate work, a show about relationships rather than special effects, a show without the crashing chandeliers or helicopters landing on the stage.

“I’m a sucker for emotional things--anything that involves passion or the controversial point of view. I try to do theater that I really believe in. ‘Once on This Island’ was dealing with a topical issue, racism, put in the form of folk tale in the Caribbean Island. But still it’s about someone who does not belong, someone from one world falling in love with someone from another world with such innocence and purity that I was utterly moved by it.”