BRADENTON — For Dan Landon, this is the ultimate double feature.
After more than half a lifetime in theater, Landon has written a memoir about his career as an actor, playwright and theater manager. It’s being released June 13, the same day his play, “Happy Dale” premieres at The Sarasota Players.
Landon hopes theater-lovers’ keep copies of “From the Back of the House: Memoir of a Broadway Theatre Manager” (Ibis Books, 2024) on their nightstands. Kindle versions can be pre-ordered online.
“Broadway, a definition more than a word. A place that thousands upon thousands of young actors dream about. Older actors fondly remember their days on Broadway, if they were good enough and, this is important, lucky enough to have been walking the boards in one show or 10. For those of us who worked on or around the glittering lights of Times Square, as I did for 37 years, the neighborhood was like a studio lot. I would run into five people I had worked with on various shows in the distance of two blocks. The people of the theater are usually kind as they ask about the show that you are working on and how it is doing.” — An excerpt from Dan Landon’s book, “From the Back of the House: Memoir of a Broadway Theatre Manager.”
“Happy Dale” runs through June 23. Venice Theatre artistic director Benny Sato Ambush saw the play at a reading, offered Landon some tips and told the Daily Sun, “I found the play very funny with characters that retirees would recognize and love.”
Landon, a native of Queens, New York, who grew up on Long Island, retired from a career in which he worked on more than 9,000 performances of 50 shows. He and Lyle, his wife of 42 years, moved to Bradenton two years ago for two reasons: to be closer to her Miami-based family and to be a part of the Southwest Florida theater scene.
“We wanted to be in a place where our plays could get produced,” Lyle said. “There are a large number of community theaters here that do have new play festivals. That’s very important because there is no point in going some other place and watching things if you don’t have a chance to write and to have it produced.”
(Lyle’s Sarasota playwriting credits include a play, “Six Feet Apart.” It was a finalist at Theatre Odyssey’s Ten Minute Play Festival in 2022 and was performed at the Cook Theatre at the Asolo Repertory Theatre.)
The Landons joined Sarasota Area Playwrights Society where playwrights can preview plays in front of knowledgeable peers, Lyle said. They also are members of The Dramatists Guild of America, the national trade association of playwrights, composers, lyricists, and librettists.
“There are a number of Dramatists Guild members here and it’s a wonderful community,” Lyle said of Sarasota.
THE BEGINNING
Landon was involved in theater in high school and moved to Manhattan to pursue a career as an actor. He acted off Broadway in “The Rimers of Eldrich,” playing Driver Junior, a lead role which was cast by playwright Lanford Wilson. Landon and co-star Amy Wright got good reviews in The New York Times.
But acting was hard work, and “work does not fall off trees,” he said.
His has a favorite way to explain the challenge.
“I was a terrible waiter, so I was bound to starve.
“It was my personality. The phone couldn’t ring soon enough after a big audition. I was a neurotic actor, which is redundant to say.”
In 1983, at age 30, Landon wrote a play called “Punchy,” about an aging boxer which was shown at the Westside Theatre in New York. It starred Dan Lauria, the father in “The Wonder Years”, and Craig Sheffer (“A River Runs Through It”).
“Craig was an interesting guy,” Landon said. “He would do two or three movies, take the money and then go off to Australia for a couple of years, which was unheard of in Hollywood. You don’t do that. You stay there. You make movies. You make the big movie that puts you on another level. But Craig never seemed to care about that. He cared about living his life.”
“Punchy” ran two months and closed.
“But it was amazing that I got it on,” Landon said. The director was Peter Pope, who had just directed “Torch Song Trilogy”, which won a Tony Award on Broadway.
BACK OF THE HOUSE
Landon found that he enjoyed writing so he took a position in the back of the house at the American Place Theatre, where he worked on shows with actors such as Morgan Freeman, Mary Alice and Sigourney Weaver.
Being in management gave Landon time to write. He enjoyed that discipline which was very different from acting. Landon proudly recalls that his father, “a newspaper man” for the Long Island Press who covered the woeful New York Mets in 1962-63, was a playwright for a short time. (Landon remains a lifetime Mets fan.)
Landon’s book is filled with anecdotes about accomplished celebrities and professionals with whom he worked, from actors Alec Baldwin, Dame Judy Dench and Dame Maggie Smith to playwrights Tennessee Williams, August Wilson and David Mamet.
Landon had an interesting encounter with actor Alec Baldwin, which involved cold water, Katharine Hepburn and The David Letterman Show. (More on that story in the book.)
“Happy Dale” is Landon’s comedy about retired English teacher Ben Lieberman, a 70ish man who has been very disgruntled since the death of his wife two years prior.
“He’s constantly getting in trouble with people,” Landon said of his antagonizing protagonist. “Verbal fights. A recent incident lands him in front of a judge. The judge sentences him to Happy Dale”, where his son promises to get him therapy to make him a better friend to others.
Landon, who cherishes the many memories he shared in his book, might have done well to suggest that Lieberman, who reveres his earlier life, write a memoir.
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