“I have no talent whatsoever for the stage.”
That said, you can put Dori Berinstein down for one shortcoming. Bronze it if you’re the sort who dwells on faults, because you won’t find another.
Berinstein is Los Angeles-born; Smith, Harvard and Yale-educated; producer of Broadway hits; and producer-director of “Show Business, The Road to Braodway,” a documentary that peels the greasepaint off four Broadway shows ”“ “Wicked,” “Taboo,” “Avenue Q” and “Caroline, Or Change” ”“ engagingly, but without a dram of sap. The film is obviously the work of a theater person ”“ the access she had is literally inside the kilt ”“ but she unflinchingly portrays a world that batters as easily as it loves.
The film’s greatest strength is Berinstein’s honest telling of stories worth telling. She is smart enough to know what to show for maximum impact and that’s saying something in the designed-for-impact theater world. A person suspects she left three or four documentaries on the cutting room floor.
The San Francisco Chronicle said Berinstein’s cinematic take on Broadway “gets it: the terror, the insularity and the exhilaration.”
The L.A. Times called it “very insider-y, though not in a way that breaks new ground,” which makes you want to smack those critics, a catty lot with whom Berinstein is even-handed to the point of generosity in her movie.
“I’m very proud of it,” she says of “Show Business,” now winding down its U.S. run on Hawaiian screens and soon to premier in London. “I loved every second of the making of that film.”
Berinstein is also determined to bring the spark of theater to a new generation through Camp Broadway, which she founded. If you watched the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade this year, it was led by 800 Camp Broadway students who have benefited from voice, dance and acting lessons from Broadway pros.
“The idea is not to turn kids into divas,” she says of the nationwide Camp Broadway program that has even moved onto Royal Caribbean cruise ships. “It’s much more about helping them discover their passion for the arts. Our goal is for the arts to always be a part of their lives.”
Berinstein has two partners as co-producers of “Legally Blonde,” her current Broadway hit: Hal Luftig and Fox Theatricals. She credits the idea for turning the Reese Witherspoon movie into a musical to Luftig, but says, “As the mom of a 13-year-old daughter, I’m so proud to have something out there that challenges the audience to be true to yourself and to be as smart as you can be.”
As big a hit as the back-in-business “Legally Blonde” is (it was shuttered by the stagehand strike), her favorite Broadway effort was “Fool Moon,” starring Bill Irwin and David Shiner, which garnered Tony, Drama Desk and Outer Critics Circle awards. “It will always be closest to my heart,” she says.
Of stage and screen, Berinstein says, “I love moving between those two worlds. How you tell a story on stage is so different than how you tell it on screen.”
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In all, she has produced more than 10 shows, including “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest” with Gary Sinise; “The Crucible” with Liam Neeson and Laura Linney; and “Thoroughly Modern Millie,” which snagged Broadway’s top prize in 2002, the Tony for best musical among its six Tonys.
She is gracious in sharing credit. “To me, Broadway actors are athletes,” she says. “I’m in awe of performers who can give opening-night performances eight times a week. To sustain that very high level of professionalism and dedication is really quite remarkable.”
Berinstein lives in a big, modern house with her husband, Mitchell Cannold, and their two children, Sammi, 13, and Noah, 10. The four family members are represented by gigantic scallions beside the living room fireplace, the offshoot of yet another Berinstein creative production, a book called “Play With Your Food” by Joost Elffers.
The house is a stunner of the sort you see featured in high-end magazines. “It’s definitely a passion of Mitchell’s,” she says of the house. “He’s the architectural visionary; I’m the beneficiary of his good taste.”
She is punctual for an a.m. interview despite just returning the previous night from Los Angeles, where her family visited her mother, Gladys Berinstein, for a protracted Thanksgiving holiday. She offers coffee, but has no milk, an upshot of the trip. Will ice cream do? Mitchell just had it that way, she says. No surprise, given Berenstein’s proclivity for home runs, the coffee is a winner to the point of marketability.
Berinstein is embracing the quirky for her next two films. She and astronaut Sally Ride are in the “final minutes” of finishing “Some Assembly Required,” about a national toy competition; and she has begun work on “Gotta Dance,” about the Netsationals, women between 59 and 83 who dance during New Jersey Nets games. “Who says you can’t shake up an entire arena of screaming fans with your cool moves when you’re 83 years old?” she says. “They’re funny and inspirational. They challenge you to think about aging in a very different way.”
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