Renaissance Man of S.D. Theater : Ex-Scientist Comes to Acting by Way of Music

Local theatergoers may be tempted to believe that Mark Danisovszky is at least twins. Over the past year, the versatile 29-year-old musician has performed in no fewer than six stage productions, each time in a different musical guise.

In the San Diego Repertory Theatre’s “The Cradle Will Rock,” he impersonated the musical’s politically conscious composer, Marc Blitzstein--not only acting but accompanying the rest of the cast on the set-dominating upright piano.

In the three-man pit orchestra of William Finn’s “In Trousers” at the Bowery, he played synthesizer, having arranged his own part from the full instrumental score. And, for this season’s version of the Rep’s “A Christmas Carol,” Danisovszky learned three new instruments--the accordion, the bandoneon and the harmonium--to perform in the quartet of on-stage musicians.

As someone who nearly completed his doctoral in biochemistry at Northwestern University before returning to his classical piano studies, Danisovszky is inured to adjusting to radical changes with equanimity.

“I was a teaching fellow at Northwestern and had a promising career in chemistry,” he said. “When I went back to my undergraduate school in Ohio to major in music, I hid out from the chemistry teachers.”

Although Danisovszky acknowledged that he left the chemistry labs because of music’s siren call (“While I was working on my Ph.D., I suddenly found myself spending five hours a day practicing in the music building”), he has his philosophical reasons for leaving science.

“Our society is over-technologied. Look what we’ve done to the ozone layer, and now we’re paying for it. The arts refine what material culture, which includes science, creates. That’s why I had to become a musician.”

His role in the overtly political, pro-labor theater piece “The Cradle Will Rock” embodied this conviction.

“I could play the Liszt B Minor Sonata until I was blue in the face and never be able to communicate how I felt through my art about those issues. Doing ‘Cradle’ was perfect--it was my life story. My father was a steel worker, and I had been involved in union activities organizing people.”

Danisovszky grew up in Toledo, Ohio, where his father worked in the mills. He described that industrial city as a literal counterpart to the mythical Steel Town, U.S.A., in which

Blitzstein placed his “Cradle.”

“In our neighborhood, there would be explosions,” Danisovszky recalled, “and I would make it to the steel mill before the firemen did, only to see friends of my father blown up. That was still going on in the 1960s and ‘70s. I suppose ‘Cradle’ would have gone over a million times stronger in Chicago or Detroit or Pittsburgh than it did here in San Diego. It didn’t seem relevant in San Diego because everyone here is getting paid off by the defense industry, accepting the government’s checks and all the terms that come with it.”

Danisovszky did not become involved in local theater because of his political convictions, however. He was drafted at the last minute when the pianist for the Rep’s 1987 production of “A Christmas Carol” came down with a severe case of tendinitis.

“I got the music on a Friday and was asked to play for the Tuesday performance. I didn’t breathe for four days because of the pressure that was on me to learn composer Polly Pen’s score. I guess I believe that jobs come to you when you’re ready, although you may have to stay up a week preparing to do it. While it’s a little intimidating to be a beginner, your apprenticeship is much shorter when you’ve agreed to do something professionally.”

Although his collegiate music training kept Danisovszky focused on the classical giants, especially Beethoven and Liszt, there has been little call for his well-practiced sonata repertory in the theater. Rather than resent the more mundane and pragmatic needs that the theater places on musicians, Danisovszky sees the virtue of reaching a wider audience.

Alluding to Mozart’s opera “The Magic Flute,” composed to a vernacular libretto written by an itinerant actor, Danisovszky observed: “Writing ‘The Magic Flute’ was a great lesson to Mozart. When I was struggling as a classical pianist to adapt to making music in the theater, it was my friends the street musicians and folk musicians who helped me make the transition.” Learning to improvise in vernacular styles and to play traditional instruments such as the accordion proved liberating to a pianist chained to making music exclusively from the printed score.

Danisovszky’s upcoming projects include designing a musical score to Peter Scott Beames’ play “The Boy Who Rode Clouds,” and playing accordion and acting as technical coordinator on a recording by a pop klezmer group called the Electro-Carpathians. At the end of the month, he will perform as pianist in the San Diego Rep’s New Year’s Eve gala.

“I told them I wanted to sing, too,” Danisovszky said. But as versatile a musician as he may be, he has not yet received the green light for his vocal debut.