Love Story

For the husband-and-wife team of Michael Brindisi and Michelle Barber, all roads lead to Chanhassen Dinner Theatres. Michael has been artistic director there since 1988, but he and Michelle have been associated with the theater, as individuals and as a couple, for more than twenty years. It’s home. It’s even where their love story begins.

“It was 1980,” recalls Michelle, at lunch in Brindisi’s, a pub that’s part of Chanhassen’s three-theater complex. “I was in Annie Get Your Gun, and Michael was downstairs in What the Butler Saw. I thought, ‘Who is that cute boy?’ I noticed that his show got out before mine, so I’d get ready for my next scene early and wait by the stage door to say good night to him. This went on for a couple of weeks, and then one night, he said, ‘You are the most beautiful woman I’ve ever seen.’ ”

“I can’t believe I used that line,” Michael groans.

“He came into Annie shortly after that, and we became good friends,” Michelle says.

From the beginning, their love of theater has been part and parcel of their love for each other. In 1980, the couple left Chanhassen to do summer stock at Paul Bunyan Playhouse in Bemidji. They performed ten shows in ten weeks and returned the following two summers. By the time they married in 1984, they’d done more than twenty shows together.

Continuing their collaboration, the couple moved to Albert Lea and founded the Minnesota Festival Theatre, which they ran for four summers. “We worked closely together,” Michelle says. “He directed [the acting], and I music-directed and sometimes acted. We worked hard—and we learned a lot.” It was tough living on summer-theater incomes, however, and both frequently made the 200-mile roundtrip commute to the Twin Cities for freelance work. In 1987, when Gary Gisselman, then Chanhassen artistic director, offered Michael a role in Fiddler on the Roof, he jumped at the chance.

To date, the couple has worked on more than 100 shows together, including thirty-five at Chanhassen. Recalling their years in Albert Lea, Michael wishes they still worked together as closely as they did then. “Next to having our baby,” Michael says, “that was the most satisfying time.”

“Working together is still great,” Michelle says. “But now, I’m bossier with him.”

“That’s right,” he says, smiling. “She’s always saying, ‘I’m not doing that!’ ”

“I do not! I’m very willing to try your bits. Once.”

Their current Chanhassen collaboration is Cole Porter’s Anything Goes, with Michael as director and Michelle in the lead role of Reno Sweeney, the glamorous nightclub singer. Michael, fifty-six, performed in a production of the show at the Ordway Music Theatre in 2002 and is thrilled to return to it. “I love the style of this show more than any other,” he says. “It’s totally escapist. I come to rehearsal with a bag full of bits and just empty it!” With a glint in his eye, he resembles a big leprechaun, intent on making mischief.

In a sense, Michelle, fifty, has been training for the role of Reno Sweeney for forty years. Starting with commercial work, she’s been singing professionally since her midteens. At eighteen, she joined the renowned musical revue, the Edgewater Eight. “My forte is singing with a full orchestra,” she says, and, in Anything Goes, when she’s alone onstage in a pink satin dress singing “I Get a Kick Out of You,” she looks like a big band singer from the 1940s.

Sitting across the table from her, it’s hard to imagine Michelle as a sophisticated chanteuse. She seems more like a suburban soccer mom. In fact, she was late to the interview because she had to stop by their daughter’s school. But for all her onstage glamour, Michelle refuses to take herself too seriously. She makes a grand star’s entrance in the opening scene of Anything Goes, but not without pulling a silly face to make the audience laugh.

Watching Michael and Michelle in rehearsal, you’d never guess they were married. He is in charge; she is a member of the company. They treat each other like colleagues rather than partners, and when they disagree, they do so professionally. It’s the same kind of rapport Michael has with the rest of the cast. Many of the actors have been with him for more than a decade, and they have melded into a company.

“His bottom line is to be kind to each other,” Michelle says. “We’ve grown to treasure each other’s talents.”

Michelle plays no role in picking the shows or in casting. “That’s the hardest part—staying out of it,” she says. “We don’t talk about work at home. I don’t know who is cast before anybody else knows. I have to audition for each show, just like everyone else. In fact, I have to work harder at auditions, because I’m his wife.”

In 1988, Michelle had a rude awakening when Michael directed Private Lives, his first show as Chanhassen artistic director. “We’d done it together twice before, so I assumed I was going to play the lead,” she says. “But he didn’t cast me. I realized our partnership didn’t mean our working together with me playing the leads, but our working together where I fit in.” A recent Chanhassen production of My Fair Lady—in which she played one of Professor Higgins’s servants—ranks among her favorite theater experiences. “We did the scene shifts, and we were there to support the Professor,” she says. “It was such a good, good feeling as an actor.”

David Anthony Brinkley, a company member for nearly eleven years, remembers a show when Michelle didn’t get a role he felt she should have gotten. “She was the understudy,” he says. “But Michael knows what he’s doing.”

According to Janet Hayes Trow, a thirteen-year company member who’s been Michelle’s understudy and, on occasion, lost roles to her, “Michelle earns the roles she gets. There’s not a role for her in every show, so then she’s in the chorus. She walks the line between being the boss’s wife and a company member with incredible ease.”

Michelle admits there are times when it’s hard being married to the boss. “I never complain about him,” she says. “That’s hard on [the rest of the company]. So when I sense tension, I leave the room. They need an opportunity to rag on their boss. Everybody does.”

Rehearsal lasts only a few weeks. For the rest of the months-long run of shows, Michael and Michelle operate as a typical married couple. They eat dinner nearly every night with their daughter, Caitlin. Michael usually cooks the weeknight meals, leaving Michelle to handle more elaborate meals on weekends or when they entertain. After dinner on most evenings, Michael returns to the theater with Michelle. Even though he’s been there all day, he likes overseeing the opening of the shows, and, he says, “Since her show is only two and a half hours long, I end up with only an hour and a half to wait for her to get home.”

Michael and Michelle spend much of their time together with Caitlin, who’s now sixteen. “She wants a car,” Michael says. “She’s a great kid, but she wants to do everything. She tells us, ‘You’re so overprotective!’ We just don’t want her to get hurt.”

“They are overprotective,” insists Caitlin, who also performs at Chanhassen. “I’m always, like, ‘I’m sixteen!’ I have to remind them practically every day. But I am an only child. They’re going through this for the first time.”

Michael refutes the old adage that nice guys finish last. In an era when most for-profit dinner theaters have closed their doors, he’s made Chanhassen both an artistic and a financial success. “Part of my success is the success of all the actors,” he says. “I create an atmosphere where they can feel free to do their best work. They trust me.”

“I’ve never had as much joy working with a director as I’ve had with Michael,” says Brinkley. “I’ve turned down other work to stay at Chan, and I’m not the only one.”

Ambition is something Michael and Michelle share. For his part, Michael, who’s staged twelve shows in the last twenty months, continues to expand his reputation. In addition to working at Chanhassen, he directed A Grand Night for Singing at the Ordway in September 2003 and Hair at the Pantages Theatre in June 2004.

Many thought Michelle was giving up her career when she married Michael. His dream was to follow his career aspirations in New York, so Michelle left her position as host of Nitetime’s Variety, KTCA’s live weekly variety show that was about to go national, and moved with him to New York. Even now, she doesn’t regret hitching her star to his. “I loved Michael more than the job,” she says. “I don’t care if I’m ever famous, as long as I’m learning something new. Michael forces me to learn. Besides, look at the career I’ve had. I work steadily, plus I have a good pension. There’s something to be said for being a working actor.”

Michelle says her focus is shifting as she gets older. For the last ten years, she’s directed a kids’ summer theater-camp at Chanhassen, with more than 600 participants a summer. “Training kids is becoming more important to me than the eight shows a week,” she says. “God knows, there’s no money for arts in the schools, which makes me crazy. I feel like I’m making a difference. That is everybody’s job. To make a difference in the world.”

It’s hard to imagine two more different people. Michelle is outgoing and vivacious, while Michael is serious and retiring. In conversation, they play off each other like the seasoned performers they are. But often, Michael recedes into the background, allowing his star to take center stage.

“You would never picture the two of us together,” Michelle says. “We each have our own deals. We stay together because we share the same passion. In the nuts and bolts, we’re there for each other. We can tell each other a complete paragraph with a single look.”

When asked, they struggled to name things they didn’t like about each other.    

“There’s my clothes all over the floor,” she says.

“Nah. I’ve gotten used to that,” he says.

When it’s suggested that their relationship is too good to be true, Michael laughs. “It’s kind of a dream thing, isn’t it? Chanhassen. Our whole life. I had a cousin who came to visit, and in the middle of dinner before the show, she said, ‘You live in a dream world!’ I couldn’t disagree.”

Shortly thereafter, the stage manager called the two of them back to rehearsal. And the dream continues.

William Randall Beard is the opera columnist for Mpls.St.Paul Magazine.