Interview Stage Directions: TUTS' Dan Knechtges On the Decision That Led to His Big Broadway Break As part of Playbill’s new column with directors exploring the decisions that led to their successes and setbacks, the Spelling Bee choreographer shares his path to helming shows and now Houston's Theatre Under the Stars.

By Mervyn Rothstein

February 21, 2018

Why he became a director:
“I started directing through choreography. I had choreographed all my high school musicals and dabbled in directing. When I went to college it was for acting, not dance. I got interested in directing because I liked the intellectual aspect, the creative idea of collaborating with actors and playwrights and designers. I felt that this was much more the way I preferred to express myself creatively. I like the control aspect of it—that you’re able to organize everybody into one artistic outlook.”

How he uses his experience as a choreographer in directing:
“I’m stealing somebody else’s quote, but they say that the choreographer in a musical has all the responsibilities a director has but none of the power. I completely agree with that. I think it’s so similar with what you have to accomplish. I approach choreography as ideas, not steps. I think steps are the very last thing that comes. It’s all about the ideas and how you manifest them in three dimensions.

These days, as opposed to the Golden Age of musicals, everybody does everything in a musical; each performer has to sing, dance and act. A director, especially, has to have great insight on how to make everything seamless. The best compliment I always got when I choreographed for people I really respected, like [directors] James Lapine or Chris Ashley or Kevin Moriarty [artistic director of Dallas Theatre Center, which won last year’s Regional Theatre Tony Award], who’s going to be directing Oklahoma! for us, was when they said the choreography and the direction seemed seamless. Often people want to showboat and say, look at me, look at my work. It’s hard for all of us, myself included, to give yourself over to others’ creative visions. But you must do that to make a piece seem cohesive.”

His directing principles:
“The first and most basic thing is you have to serve the playwright’s vision. As a director, I have to serve the vision of Joe DiPietro, who wrote Memphis with David Bryan, rather than what my idea of what the story is. For me, it’s always going back to: Why did the playwright write this play, why did they choose this story?”

An actor in Knechtges’ rehearsal room – an example of how he directs:
“I try to do it Socratically. I know what I want, but I try to circle around it a little bit to see if the actors can find it for themselves. For me, it’s always better when people think it’s their own idea rather than coming from me. It’s manipulative, I suppose, in a way, but to me it’s better that people find it themselves and share it rather than me finding it and they trying to fulfill what I’m imposing on the play.

“I also think every actor is different, so I try to use a bit of psychology to try to figure out what makes each person tick. I’m not a dictator in a way that I’ve heard some other directors behave, in that they treat everybody the same. I don’t do that. Sometimes a joke or being funny and offhand with an actor gets you farther than being serious, and sometimes vice versa. Sometimes an actor can’t take a joke or understand the humor of life or reality and they need somebody to be a taskmaster. Some actors need certain types of Method coaching, and others just need technical things—turn here, on this line, say the joke this way. You can’t treat all people the same; you have to treat them as individuals. You have to go in with an open mind and you have to try to be all things to all people. Which is exhausting, thinking how every person in that room works differently, but it can produce pretty great work.”

A mistake he made that he learned from:
“When you lose the trust of the acting company, you have to work so hard to regain it. So anything you do to jeopardize that trust is bad. Several times I have lost my temper in frustration, or I’ve said something off color. In some instances I’ve never regained that trust. In other instances, when that has happened the thing that I’ve learned is it’s always better to fall on your own sword rather than someone else’s. You say mea culpa, mea culpa. You admit to your failures. That’s good leadership.”

A decision he made that paid off:
“I’ve had a pretty lucky sense of when an opportunity presents itself to say yes to it, even if you’re afraid. Because nine times out of ten it’s going to pay off. That was the case with The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee. I didn’t direct Spelling Bee; I was the choreographer. I did the very first workshop of it for almost no money. I think I got travel expenditures to go up to Barrington [Stage Company in Massachusetts]. And after a lot of inner debate when they said they couldn’t pay, I still said yes because the people were really exciting and the idea was exciting. It was a year-and-a-half later that I was opening my first Broadway show.”