By Tom Nondorf
24 Aug 2010
What is the origin of the Danieley name?
Jason Danieley, Debra Monk, Michael McCormick and Karen Ziemba in Curtains photo by Joan Marcus
Danieley is Irish. Probably from the north of Ireland. Pronunciation-wise, everyone wants to make me Italian. But when I did Curtains with David Hyde Pierce, he wrote me an off-color limerick, including probably the only three rhymes for Danieley in the English language, "annually," "manually," and "cocker spanielly."
You grew up in St. Louis. What got you involved in theatre?
I started singing when I was four. My dad is a Southern Baptist preacher. My mother played the organ at church and my grandmother played the piano, so I come from a very musical family. My family had a band when I was growing up. It was grandparents and uncles and parents playing their instruments and singing, and I would sing at church from the age of four. I was really just singing until high school. Like a lot of people, I got the bug in high school. Got the lead as a freshman, then I said, "Hmm, this is fun, and the girl-to-guy ratio is pretty fantastic, so let's explore this a little bit." [Laughs.] I really wasn't sure about going into musical theatre until later in high school. I was always singing professionally, like with the St. Louis Symphony on a riverboat or at Six Flags, things like that. I think I get the musical influence from my mom and the theatrical from my preacher dad.
You had your Broadway breakthrough in The Full Monty. How do you look back on that?
It was a fantastic experience. Another great company of people, specifically the six core guys. We were so close and they were such extraordinary actors as well. You could do anything you wanted onstage. It was such a great book and a great score, it was very thrilling to be a part of that.
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What can you tell me about your band, the Frontier Heroes?
The band is based on my family band growing up. I call it "back porch Americana" only because it is very eclectic, and I don't think there is a real category for it. Basically any kind of American popular music. Old-time music like Stephen Foster, to country, to blues, to jazz standards to Broadway. We'll do some country, and we'll do Sammy Cahn and Jimmy Van Heusen and Stevie Wonder. Anything and everything that is American popular music, but done in a homespun, back porch, St. Louis kind of feel where there's a piano and bass and fiddle and mandolin and guitar. We've been playing for a few years now at Joe's Pub, and Birdland and Feinstein's... It's great because the way I heard Broadway music for the first time was piano and a banjo and a washtub bass. There's something really kind of wonderful to hear music stripped down to this Americana roots sound. We're starting a once-a-month gig, we'll be at a theatre called 45 Bleecker which is down on Bleecker and Lafayette. One day a month, we'll come down after our stage shows and do an hour-and-a-half set, get the music out there a little more.
Usually, the way it has kind of worked out so far [in prior shows], either I'm in rehearsal, so I can see a preview of hers, or vice versa. Definitely we're always at each other's opening nights, whether we're in another show or not. We try and get that in our contracts. When I had an opening night in Curtains, she got a night off from Spamalot to be there for me. But one great thing with this show, we don't have to come home and relive what happened in our day. When she was doing Kiss Me, Kate and I was doing Monty, we'd come home and I'd say, "John Conlee did this tonight. It was fantastic!" And she'd say, "Oh, Brian Stokes Mitchell did this…" you know, we'd relive our whole evening and it was kind of exhausting. With this show we go, "Oh. You were there, so I don't have to tell you anything." [Laughs.] "Pass the red wine please."
PS Classics recordings featuring Jason Danieley ("Opposite You" with Marin Mazzie, and "Jason Danieley and the Frontier Heroes") are available for sale at PlaybillStore.com.
[Next to Normal is at The Booth Theatre, 222 W. 45th Street. Go to www.nexttonormal.com for details.]
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Inspirational, Muppetational
If you were like me as a kid, "The Muppet Show" was a big influence on your appreciation of musical theatre. The pseudo-theatrical elements including the heckling from the audience by Statler and Waldorf and the backstage dressing-room dramas Kermit was always trying to manage, combined with the show's creative musical numbers to make each episode a standalone entertainment. On Aug. 8, we lost the show's real-life bandleader, Jack Parnell to cancer at the age of 87. The British jazz drummer led the great grab-bag of music on the show for the five-year run. Parnell likely honed his sense of eclecticism overseeing music for "Sunday Night at the London Palladium," which ran on British TV in the '50s and '60s. Parnell also played in Ted Heath's jazz band, and produced TV variety specials for Barbra Streisand and Tom Jones. It would be hard to quantify how much music Parnell turned the world onto, but watch any "Muppet Show" DVD and be astounded by the breadth and quality in each episode.
(Tom Nondorf can be reached at tnondorf@playbill.com.)
