DF&Co Archive
Who's Hungry?
Santa Monica, 2012
collaboration with Dan Hurlin
Produced and written by Dan Froot; Designed and directed by Dan Hurlin; Music and Sound Design by Amy Denio. Created in collaboration with performers: Sheetal Gandhi, Rachael Lincoln, Darius Mannino, and Zachariah Tolchinsky. Musicians: Daniel Corral, Mike Flanagan, Amy Denio
“This project is a valuable rebuke to the expanding escapism of contemporary theater.”
WHO'S HUNGRY? - Best staged production of 2013
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"To see the figure of Cindy [in Who's Hungry] walking with the help of her three puppeteers, to see a toy car, powered by a flimsy remote control, heading to ground zero is to experience the fragility of the human condition.”
“Is Who's Hungry entertainment? The best kind, the kind that makes you think and feel and maybe even change things.”
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Who's Hungry?
West Hollywood, 2008
collaboration with Dan Hurlin
"The Who’s Hungry plays have the capacity to ask provocative and profound questions, to alter our perceptions as they satisfy our cerebral and physical appetites. They turn bread or wine or breakfast into a tangible metaphor for the life that’s being lived just outside the auditorium.”
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Shlammer
2005
Written and choreographed by Dan Froot; Directed and designed by Dan Hurlin; Music composed by Chip Epsten; Lighting design by Chlöe Z. Brown; featuring: Dan Froot Paul Zimet Joshua Marmer; Chip Epsten (violin) Andy Ford (euphonium) Lenny DeLuxe (accordion)
“What makes Shlammer so theatrically satisfying is the way Mr. Froot turns sociological and psychological theories into entertainment that’s simultaneously rollicking and stimulating.”
“[A] brilliantly sustained performance.”
“Shlammer is a rich strudel layering issues of Jewish identity in America, male violence, and coming-of-age. The array of jokes and lightening shifts of character and tone are brilliant.”
“In Shlammer, Dan Froot danced, sang, juggled, and all-around amazed and delighted audiences with this sly inquiry into what makes a man a man and a performance a performance. It was a hyperanimated tour de force.”
“A riotous, Yiddish-flavored revue [that] delights the eyes, ears, intellect, and funny bone with its array of imaginative bits. Dan Froot simply has to appear onstage, smile, and say “hello,” and everyone in the audience is immediately a fan.”
Live Sax Acts
Collaboration with David Dorfman (1998)
“In a disarmingly cheery and inventively rhythmic deconstruction of male aggression, multidisciplinary performers Dan Froot and David Dorfman turn whole libraries of behavioral science into the satiric Live Sax Acts. Live Sax Acts remains deft, funny and devastatingly on target from first to last.”
“Brilliant, Chaplinesque physical timing and fast-talking drollery that perfectly evokes the bonds and barriers between men.”
“Committed and demanding, nerve-wracking and funny, Live Sax Acts is about friendship, boundaries, conflict, violence, resolution and, ultimately, love. As in life, truces are hard-won and delivered with intense energy. One could do worse than to turn to these artists for solutions to the problem of how to build peace in thus violent, fractured society.”
“Mr. Dorfman and Mr. Froot are the ultimate male bondees, and they are gifted performers who know how to celebrate and tease that closeness. Live Sax Acts is essentially a complex, deliciously literate and wicked look at two friends and the larger world that surrounds them.”
...and more!
“Impish, erudite, sensitive, and sidesplittingly funny, Dan Froot is much more than just a dancer-choreographer. He began as a jazz saxophonist-composer and has created award-winning experimental theatre works that combine music, movement, and text into brainy, laugh-a-minute explorations of profound personal issues.”
“Froot is an evocative storyteller with a crazy, irrepressible imagination and the simplest and most unassuming of performance styles. As a result, his subtle and unexpected shifts between comedy and tragedy can be harrowing. Without sentimentality, Froot manages to suggest the naivete of the hip, the pain of long repression and the terror of feeling alone. Full-throttle laughter turns to dazed silence as Froot spins his audience with him into a dark vacuum. It is quite an achievement.”
“No one probes the intimate relationship between a sax player and his horn quite as boldly as Dan Froot. His texts and onstage persona slip from the comedic to the poignant, his wry sincerity allowing the dark elements to sneak up on you. We read him as both daring and vulnerable.”
“Lighthearted and singular. Dan Froot takes the stage with a saxophone in a performance that is sax comedy, sax rap and sax dance. The hilarious piece is a wonderful exploration of sound tempered by a fertile imagination, a childlike sense of wonder and great technical virtuosity.”
“Froot is a beguiling performer, shamelessly mingling virtuosity, emotional coloring, willfulness and playfulness.”
“Dan Froot is both imaginative and unclassifiable...a dancer, storyteller and actor who could be puckish one moment and poignant the next.”