Daniel hopes to ‘rain’ supreme in sold-out Donmar production
Jewish Telegraph, November 2024
DANIEL Krikler spent the summer appearing in the outdoor production of Fiddler on the Roof, but he is now thankful to be playing Fedya under the roof in the musical Natasha, Pierre & The Great Comet of 1812.
Based on a 70-page segment of Leo Tolstoy’s 1869 novel War and Peace, Natasha, Pierre & The Great Comet of 1812 will run at London’s Donmar Warehouse from December 9 until February 8 — although all performances are already sold out.
And unlike with the Regent’s Park Open Air Theatre production of Fiddler, he won’t have to contend with rain during performances.
Birmingham-born Daniel plays Fedya Dolokhov in the show.
“My character is really fun. He’s not the villain by any stretch of the imagination, but he’s part of the villain team, and he’s pretty far to the side of being a bad guy, and that’s been fun to play.
“And because it’s so heightened and big, you can see how far you can push that and how far you go before you have to rein some of that stuff in. So that drew me to this character.”
He added: “What hopefully makes it work is it’s pretty eccentric and idiosyncratic.
“It feels like very much the mind and working of one man, Dave Malloy, who wrote it. It doesn’t feel like it’s been made by committee or by workshop after workshop; it feels like this is his child.
“It’s an opera really, the way that we’re approaching it or that we’ve been told to approach it.
“I’ve never done an opera, so I don’t have that experience. But I think it’s more normal there for the story to be not secondary, but almost it’s really to do with some of the more heightened aspects. And the music is a character in itself.”
Daniel said for the music, “think of Les Mis with a drum synth. It’s got a lot of electric music to it as well. I think it’s very exciting, very dynamic.
“And it’s posh people doing naughty things. People have an obsession with Bridgerton and even Made in Chelsea, that sort of thing.”
Reading War and Peace can be quite an undertaking, but the 34-year-old says you don’t need much knowledge of Tolstoy’s masterpiece to understand the musical.
“In the opening song we say ‘look it up in your programme’,” he laughed. “You need to have a little look over the plot as you go. Everyone’s got nine different names.
“There’s a self awareness and a tongue-in-cheek quality to it as well. It’s a very specific part of the narrative that the play tells.”
Daniel also pointed out that the setting of their production is more contemporary — “it’s not period costume and period dress. We’re kind of making it in our own slightly more modern way.
“I’ve been using Baz Luhrmann’s Romeo and Juliet as a good reference point.”
Natasha, Pierre & The Great Comet of 1812 ran on Broadway in 2016 and received 12 Tony Award nominations — winning two.
“It started as a small fringe show off-Broadway that just snowballed,” Daniel said.
“I really wanted to work with director Tim Sheader, but I’d never had the opportunity before.”
Daniel said he only listened to the Broadway recording of the show once.
“It’s a clean slate in many ways. It’s a new piece to us, although we’re not changing the material too much, but there’s a few tweaks here and there.
“The cast is amazing and the whole production team has just been incredible. And the set is very exciting.
“We go into tech next week, so that’s seeing everyone in their costumes, and seeing the set for the first time is always one of my favourite parts of the whole process.”
Daniel had a three-week break between Fiddler finishing and rehearsals for this musical.
“Tim was artistic director of Regent’s Park Open Air Theatre, so he did come and watch Fiddler, so that maybe played a part in me landing the role of Fedya,” he said.
Daniel is full of praise for Fiddler director Jordan Fein.
“I hope it sends him on to big things,” he said. “Most of the big ideas were his.”
But as mentioned earlier, rain did play a role in the outdoor production.
“Dancing in the rain on that stage was difficult,” he said. “And aside from my part as Perchik, I ended up being dance captain. So it was partly my job to call when the stage got too slippery for us and say we need to pause for them to dry the stage.
“So that was challenging because I was trying to focus on my acting and singing, but it was so beautiful there as well.”
He laughed that he didn’t like the matinees as he could see the audience clearly in the light.
“In the dark, you think everyone’s hanging off every word,” he told me. “And then in daylight, you realise people are looking at the sky or chatting or falling asleep. So my ego couldn’t quite take it.”
Before Fiddler, Daniel had taken on the role of Jewish boxer Max Vandenburg during the Holocaust in The Book Thief — a role that felt personal.
He told me that his grandparents had escaped the Nazis on the Kindertransport, but they lost their parents in the camps.
“It was a very mixed and conflicting experience. I had guilt about doing this piece of entertainment and pretending to be a Jewish man during that time,” he explained.
“My nan who’s now in her 90s, came to see it and that was really powerful for me.
“Max was the only Jewish character, so I ended up kind of representing all of Judaism in that show and that process. But then, obviously, Fiddler was the total reverse, where everyone was Jewish.
“And that was interesting for me. I grew up in the Midlands, where we were always kind of the only Jews in village.
“In Fiddler I was slightly anxious of being with an entire group of Jewish actors and creators, pretty much. And I didn’t know how I’d be with that, because the only time I’m with lots of Jewish people is at family dos.
“And it was really beautiful, actually, really lovely. And I’ve always been someone who believes you don’t need Jewish actors to play Jewish roles. And I still stand by that to a degree.
“But just having Jewish people talking about their various Shabbat traditions or how we all do it differently, it was really wonderful and made me proud in a way that I don’t often feel with my Judaism.
“But I also really don’t want to be just a Jewish actor who plays Jewish roles. It’s part of who you are, but it’s not your entire identity and not your entire ability as an actor.”
Daniel always had his heart set on a career in acting.
He describes himself as “headstrong; maybe arrogant is a better word”.
He recalls how his parents, Susie and Steve, wanted him to do his A-levels
“I was like, ‘no, why? I won’t need A-levels. I’m going to do a BTEC’, which I then dropped out of. But I was like, ‘I don’t care what you say, I’m doing what I want to do’.
“But they were understanding. They could have made me, I guess, and they didn’t try to. My dad said he would have loved to be an actor, in a way he’s living vicariously through his kid.”
Daniel — who recently moved to Essex so he and his wife Libby would be closer to family — had always loved dance so he initially went on a dance-based course.
“I did a few years with that, and then realised I wanted to do more acting or at least be able to switch between acting and musicals and movement and whatever I wanted,” he said.
“I didn’t like to be pigeonholed so I did a Master’s at Central School of Speech and Drama. So I went from GCSEs and then nothing else in between and then got my Master’s.”
Daniel’s first professional show was Loserville at Leeds Playhouse.
Since then he has built up an impressive body of work including Jersey Boys, Mamma Mia, Pippin, The Motive and the Cue, and The Secret Life of Bees, among many others.
It was actually through theatre that he met his wife.
“We met when I first trained,” he said, “and she’s been predominantly a dancer in a load of shows, and now she’s moved on to being an assistant and associate choreographer.”
Both being involved in the arts meant that “one of us was always on tour,” Daniel told me. “It’s nice to miss each other and when we do see each other, we have really good quality time.
“But it’s probably got harder as we’ve got a bit older as we’d love to have a family.”
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