Pure Gold
Director Daniel Goldstein is a busy man. On this day, he has been shuttling between casting sessions for Lower Ninth, a new play about two men on a roof in the hours after Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans; meetings about his Broadway revival of Godspell; and design meetings for the Huntington's production of Sinan Ünel's The Cry of the Reed. As Goldstein thinks about the broad range of plays on his roster, he notes, "if you listen to only rock and roll and never listen to any Mozart, I think you'd get really bored." Goldstein laughs and says, "or at least I would."
Huntington audiences know Goldstein's work from his much-loved production of William Finn's Falsettos and his lavish production of Christopher Hampton's Les Liaisons Dangereuses. He says, "I love doing a play where there are only three characters and one set and finding the balance of it. And I love doing a musical with twenty people and a million scene changes, and finding the music in that."
|
| The cast of the Huntington's production of Falsettos; photo: T. Charles Erickson
|
The Cry of the Reed marks Goldstein's first pairing with author Ünel. "Sinan is able to do what great political theatre should do; to turn historical and political dilemmas into dramatic equations."
Not only is Goldstein a star director; he's also a Huntington-commissioned writer. He and OBIE Award-winning composer Michael Friedman are hard at work on an original musical. Between directing gigs, commissions, and Breaking Ground Festival readings, Goldstein has found an artistic home-away-from-home in Boston. "The Huntington's a theatre that's not afraid to take risks on artists they believe in," he states. "And I think the only way young talent is going to get nurtured in this country is for more theatres to behave that way."
— Justin Waldman