Born in 1964 in New York City, Danny Burstein is well known for his work in musical theater and television. For his recent performance as Luther Billis in Rodgers and Hammerstein’s South Pacific at Lincoln Center he received the Outer Critics Circle Award, a Tony® nomination, and a Drama Desk nomination; he can be heard on the 2008 Broadway cast recording. He also played Aldolpho in the original Broadway production of The Drowsy Chaperone, for which he received a 2006 Tony® nomination.
Burstein was an original company member of Tony Randall’s National Actors Theater, where his credits include Three Men on a Horse (with Jack Klugman and Tony Randall), Saint Joan (with Maryann Plunkett and John Neville), The Seagull (with Jon Voight and Tyne Daly), A Little Hotel on the Side (with Lynn Redgrave), and The Flowering Peach (with Eli Wallach and Anne Jackson). He was also seen on Broadway in A Class Act, Titanic, and Company.
His off-Broadway work includes the world premiere of A.R. Gurney’s Mrs. Farnsworth (opposite Sigourney Weaver and John Lithgow) at the Flea; the world premiere of Psych at Playwrights Horizons; Joe DiPietro and Jimmy Roberts’s I Love You, You’re Perfect, Now Change at the Westside; the revival of Sondheim’s Merrily We Roll Along at the York; David Ives’s All in the Timing at the Houseman; Alan Menken and David Spencer’s Weird Romance (also the 1992 original-cast recording) at the WPA Theatre; Bock and Harnick’s The Rothschilds and the Allan Sherman musical Hello Muddah, Hello Fadduh, both at Circle in the Square; the Ira Gershwin Centennial (taped for PBS) and Noël Coward’s Sail Away (with Elaine Stritch), both performed at Carnegie Hall. In the City Center Encores! series Burstein performed in Cole Porter’s Du Barry Was a Lady (with Robert Morse and Faith Prince), Gene De Paul and Johnny Mercer’s Li’l Abner, and Rodgers and Hart’s The Boys from Syracuse.
In addition, Burstein performed in the world premiere of Barry Manilow’s Harmony (Drama-Logue Award) and Macbeth, both at the La Jolla Playhouse; the world premiere of Henry Kreiger and Bill Russell’s Everything’s Ducky at TheatreWorks; the world premiere of The Mission Home at New Jersey’s Forum Theater; and the world premiere of the play Harold and Maude (with Estelle Parsons) at the Paper Mill Playhouse.
Burstein narrated Mendelssohn’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream for the Alabama Symphony and was featured in the world premiere of Jack Viertel and Walter Edgar Kennon’s Time and Again at the Old Globe in San Diego. Singing engagements have taken him from Good Morning America to Shea Stadium. Television work includes appearances on Absolutely Fabulous, Law & Order, Ed, Hope and Faith, Another World, All My Children, and As the World Turns. He can be heard singing in the Disney animated film Hunchback of Notre Dame: Deux and the Robert Smigel cartoon Torboto for Saturday Night Live. He appears in the feature film Duane Incarnate opposite Kristin Johnston; in Transamerica opposite Felicity Huffman; and in Deception opposite Ewan McGregor.
