Daniel Wise (playwright)
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Daniel Jeffrey Wise (born April 5, 1969, in Chicago) is an American playwright, producer and author.
Wise has had international productions in Japan, Russia, China, South Korea, Taiwan, Singapore, Britain, South Africa, as well as New York.
As president of Creative Productions International, he brought Broadway productions to Russia (42nd Street, Moscow 2001-2002); produced the first Broadway musical in China in a joint production with the China Ministry of Culture (Rent, 2005-2007 featuring the Broadway cast with Karen Mok); the Blues Brothers International Tour; and several international jazz, music and theatre festivals, including the international tour of 50 Years of Rock 'N Roll, featuring Chuck Berry.
As artistic director of the Philharmonia Europa, he brought Eastern European musicians together with an American cast for a two-year sold-out American tour of Troika/Columbia Artists Management's The Music of Andrew Lloyd Webber, staring Michael Bolton (1997-1999). He produced The Gathering on Broadway, a play about a Holocaust survivor's personal struggle in coming to terms with the next generation of Jews and Germans, staring Hal Linden; and a new musical comedy based on Anton Chekhov's The Seagull for the 2005 New York Theater Festival (with the Russian composer Alexander Zurabin, and American director Lewis J. Stadlin); as well as a production of the Hubei Peking Opera's The Monkey King, at the Lincoln Center February 2005. Wise has collaborated with Joseph Stein, Sheldon Harnick, Marvin Hamlisch, Stephen Schwartz and David Shire, and has written and directed several plays including Shlomo, The House of Love and Prayer, a new musical about the life of the Jewish revivalist composer and Troubadour Shlomo Carlebach.
Wise grew up in a strictly Orthodox Jewish home and was a yeshiva student in Brooklyn. By the age of nine, he was writing short stories, made an 8 mm home movie and wrote a one-act play for his local community. During his teens, he studied the violin with Vladimir Zyskind at the Manhattan School of Music after a brief term at Juilliard, where he continued studies in dramatic writing and Shakespeare with professor Deloss Brown. He began writing freelance journalism for newspapers and comedy shorts for television under the name Jeffrey Daniels, contributing material to Saturday Night Live and the Late Show with David Letterman. Before he was twenty, he wrote/directed his first three plays; David Abrahams, Dybuk of Kovnah, and Revenge of a Partison – all for the Summer-Woodstock Theater Fest; the former two received the festival's Best New Play for two consecutive years. He went on to study Talmudic jurisprudence at the Rabbinical College of Canada, where he was ordained by the Chief Rabbinate of Montreal at the age of 19. Introducing Wise at a theater event, comedian Billy Crystal commented: "he was so good at being a rabbi, he went into theater".
