Nice and Busy
Director Peter Rothstein is riding an extrodinary wave of success, and his career is just beginning to take off.
by William Randall Beard for Mpls.St. Paul Magazine
November 2007
The busiest man in local theater is getting busier. This summer, director Peter Rothstein remounted High School Musical at Children’s Theatre Company (he’d staged the original production in January) and made his Guthrie Theater main-stage debut directing Private Lives. The rehearsal periods overlapped, and for a week he had to travel back and forth between the two theaters four times a day. For Rothstein, this was not unusual. It was just the culmination of an eight-month run of good fortune that had him opening as many as three shows every month.
“I keep a ridiculous schedule, at least twelve hours a day,” Rothstein says. “But for almost a year, there have been only three or four weekends when I haven’t had a show running. That’s fun. Thousands of people see my work—that’s mind boggling.”
“He is in constant motion,” says Denise Prosek, cofounder with Rothstein of Theater Latté Da and its music director. “He thrives on creativity.”
If anything, Rothstein’s schedule has only intensified this autumn. Before the end of the year, he will open Latté Da’s La Bohème, CTC’s A Year with Frog and Toad, Latté Da’s holiday favorite A Christmas Carole Petersen, and All is Calm: The Christmas Truce of 1914, a collaboration of Latté Da, Cantus, and Minnesota Public Radio.
How does he maintain such a frenetic pace? “I don’t separate my personal and professional lives,” says Rothstein. “Work is who I am, so I’m always working.”
Rothstein, forty-one, is one of those contagiously energetic people who are propelled by passion for their work. With his cherubic face and sparkling smile, he is completely guileless, and his wide-eyed exuberance when talking about the thrill of working at the Guthrie or Children’s Theatre seems absolutely genuine. Though known for creating cutting-edge musical theater, he is still able to brim with enthusiasm about something as unabashedly commercial as High School Musical. “This show makes musical theater cool for a whole new generation of kids!” he says, almost gushing.
“He is such a kid,” says Todd Petersen, creator and performer of A Christmas Carole Petersen. “He’s a great audience member. I love to perform for Peter. He has such a wonderful laugh.”
Despite the tremendous creative pressure he is under, Rothstein professes not to be bothered by stress, even at the most hectic times. “I am pretty emotionally even,” he says. “For instance, I have never lost my temper at a rehearsal. I am demanding, but patient.”
That attitude has made him almost universally loved in the theater community. “He is a terrific person,” says CTC artistic director Peter Brosius, echoing the sentiments of just about everyone who has worked with him. “We had a great time together, and he worked so well with our staff and all the young actors.”
Guthrie artistic director Joe Dowling joins that chorus. “[On Private Lives] he worked so well with the designer. They created a very special world of Amanda’s Paris apartment. But where he really showed his talent was in the casting of Tracey Mahoney and Chris Nelson. He gives local people opportunity.”
“He’s such a positive person,” says frequent collaborator, actor-singer Jody Briskey. “He has such a joy about him. Everybody wants to work with him. It’s not always financially such a great move, but there are other benefits. He gives you the right tools to do your work and he makes you feel good about what you do. He makes you feel safe.”
Peter Rothstein grew up in Grand Rapids, the youngest of eleven children. “Hence, my ‘I want it all’ attitude,” he says. “[A large family] is also part of my success as a director, because I’ve learned to pay attention to a lot of different psychologies in the room.”
His was a strong Irish–Catholic family and religion remains a large part of his life. “To this day, family celebrations, even birthdays, often involve a Mass. We had a family creed from Micah: ‘Act justly, love tenderly, walk humbly with your God.’ Simple, but not easy,” he says.
He attended St. John’s University, where his faith only deepened. “I figured out how life and work can coexist,” he says. “I learned about perspective.” He is still quite connected to his alma mater, having been invited back to teach and to direct the world premiere of a Stephen Paulus opera on campus.
Currently, he is an active member of St. Joan of Arc Catholic Church in south Minneapolis. “Being at church once a week connects me to a broader world and prevents me from taking myself too seriously,” he says. “It’s easy for an artist to feel self-important. This grounds me.”
Rothstein remains a devoted son and is close to his family. After completing an internship at the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C., in 1989 and earning a master’s degree at the University of Wisconsin—Madison in 1992, he contemplated relocating to Chicago. But his father became ill, and Rothstein returned to Minnesota. (His father died four months later.) His mother still lives in Grand Rapids, and despite being eighty-four, she never misses an opening night.
Rothstein’s ascent as an actor and director into the first rank of Twin Cities theaters comes after fifteen years of experience. He established himself as an actor at theaters such as The Jungle, Park Square, and Illusion Theater. Michael Robins, executive producing director of Illusion, asked what Rothstein wanted to do as a director, and he had no answer. “This was a pivotal moment,” Rothstein says. “It was like a slap across the head and shifted my focus back to directing and to finding my own voice.”
According to Robins, “Peter thought of himself as an interpreter. At Illusion, he came to realize that he could generate his own ideas and create new material. He learned to live and thrive in that.”
Rothstein became an artistic associate at Illusion and went on to direct at many Twin Cities theaters. He also spent five seasons working for the Minnesota Opera, assistant directing main-stage productions. He has remounted the popular Turandot production all over the country.
The process of finding his voice led to Theater Latté Da, the theater company he runs in addition to all his freelance work. From humble beginnings at the Bryant–Lake Bowl, Theater Latté Da graduated to the Loring Playhouse, where it has just begun its tenth season of classic musicals, opera, and more experimental works.
As a director, Rothstein believes in the need for a strong central authority, but also recognizes the value of collaboration. He organized Theater Latté Da to tap into his fellow artists’ collective intelligence. “He definitely has his ideas, his own vision,” says Latté Da codirector Denise Prosek. “But he figures things out by talking to people. He is willing to take ideas from everywhere. That doesn’t change his vision, but expands it and makes it better.”
“I went to grad school in the era of deconstruction, where productions took plays apart and commented on them,” Rothstein says. “But I consider my work ‘reconstruction.’ I let the characters determine the theatrical language. For instance, the starving artists in La Bohème would not be able to employ the services of a symphony orchestra. They would need to make do with street instruments, as they do in our production.”
“He’s one of [our] smartest directors,” says Todd Petersen. “He has an incredible depth of knowledge. But what I like most is that his brain is connected to his heart.” CTC’s Peter Brosius concurs. “Peter is inventive and original. His work with actors is clear and clean and engaged. He has a deep understanding of music and the way it plays into theater. But he is always able to find the heart of the piece, which isn’t an insubstantial achievement.”
Though most of Rothstein’s work has been local, he is beginning to garner national attention as well. He was recently one of seven awarded participation in Theater Communications Group and The National Endowment for the Arts, enabling him to work with theaters around the country that are doing what Latté Da wants to do: develop more new multidisciplinary works. “I want Latté Da to become part of the national dialogue on the creation of new work,” he says. “I sometimes get frustrated living in Minnesota that things can become insular. I long for a broader dialogue with people who do what I do.”
At the same time, Minnesota remains Rothstein’s home base. “I can’t see myself leaving the Twin Cities,” he says. “I can’t see myself leaving my condo! I’d love to work other places, but I am committed to this community that has been so good to me. Besides, I have seven siblings here. It would be difficult to leave.” Nevertheless, he continues to expand his horizons, even locally.
This season, Theater Latté Da is abandoning its comfortable digs at the Loring Playhouse in search of larger audiences. La Bohème will be remounted at the Southern Theatre and A Christmas Carole Petersen will move into the McKnight Theatre at the Ordway. “Both pieces will be well served by the larger spaces,” he says. The intimacy of the Bohème production will remain a value, he insists, but “it will sound better in the larger acoustic. And A Christmas Carole Petersen is a comedy. The larger audience means more laughs!”
Rothstein continues his commitment to new work with All is Calm, a recreation of the true story of a spontaneous Christmas truce between troops in the trenches during World War I. The piece will premiere as a live broadcast on Minnesota Public Radio December 21, so Rothstein’s directorial duties include figuring out “how the piece is built, the audio world, how text and music interact.”
“Peter has a very bright future,” says the Guthrie’s Joe Dowling, who intends to hire him to work on future Guthrie productions and thinks Rothstein may have an even more luminous future. “I could see him as the director of a major national company,” he says. “He has that capacity.”
Despite the accolades and the success he is currently enjoying, Rothstein is humble about his accomplishments. “I am very lucky and I work very hard,” he says. “I was not born with an extraordinary amount of talent, but I was given passion. That’s what carries me on to the next level. It’s passion, not talent.”
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