Michael Brindisi, artistic director of Chanhassen Dinner Theatres, dies: ‘A total shock’

Minnesota theater icon Michael Brindisi, a Broadway actor-turned-director-turned-theater owner, died Wednesday at his home in Chanhassen after a brief illness.

Brindisi served as artistic director and co-owner of Chanhassen Dinner Theatres, the nation’s largest theater of its kind and a company he helped save by joining a group that purchased it in 2010.

“Michael has been under the weather for the last couple of days, but this is a total shock,” said theater spokesperson Kris Howland.

Brindisi, 76, was finishing rehearsals this week of a new revival of “Grease,” which is slated to open Friday.

The show had deep meaning for him.

In 1977, he went on a 56-week national tour with “Grease” as an understudy for four parts. That engagement would lead to his Broadway debut in “Once in a Lifetime,” where he acted with John Lithgow and Treat Williams and shared a dressing room with legendary director Jerry Zaks.

“Grease” will open at CDT as planned Friday, Howland said.

“He would have not had it any other way. Michael was our inspiration, our mentor, our role model, our everything.”

The elder of two children born to barber Tony and pastry seller Rita Brindisi, Brindisi was born in 1948 and grew up in a close-knit Italian neighborhood in Philadelphia. He was in 10th grade when a teacher took him to his first Broadway show — “Golden Boy,” starring Sammy Davis, Jr.

He was smitten with that he saw.

“All that power, all the energy, everything — I wanted part of that,” he told the Star Tribune in 2019.

But his parents wanted him to go to college, so he enrolled at Philadelphia’s Temple University. But he never went to class, acting in plays instead. He flunked out.

It was his second attempt at college that brought him to Lea College in Albert Lea, Minn. He succeeded there by putting on popular theatrical revues that bridged the town-and-gown gap. The school covered his tuition for his work.

After college, Brindisi won a spot in the troupe of sketch comedy impresario Dudley Riggs, playing an accordion. That performance caught the eye of Gary Gisselman, who was casting his production of Thornton Wilder’s “The Matchmaker” at Chanhassen.

Gisselman created a role for Brindisi as an accordion player, and the two became lifelong friends.

“Michael has a great love of people, and that shows up in everything he does as an actor, a director, a manager,” Gisselman said.

But Brindisi would leave Minnesota to perform around the nation, returning to Chanhassen frequently throughout the 1970s and ’80s.

He became Chanhassen’s resident artistic director in 1988, and in 2010, was part of the group that purchased the company.

“Gary and I loved what Michael achieved onstage but more importantly with the theater,” said Margo Gisselman, wife of Gary and also Brindisi’s colleague at Chanhassen for more than 25 years. “The different facets of the theater are all full-time jobs — the productions have to be good, the food has to be excellent, the place has to look great and the employees have to be happy. And Michael excelled at all of them.”

Brindisi was the patriarch of gifted theatrical family. His wife, Michelle Barber, is an esteemed actor. The pair met at Chanhassen when they were in different plays. He was doing “What The Butler Saw,” and she was in “Annie Get Your Gun.”

Their union produced Cat Brindisi-Darrow, an actor and director who’s now associate artistic director of the Asolo Repertory Theatre in Sarasota, Fla. Brindisi-Darrow is married to actor, playwright and composer David Darrow.

On Wednesday, Barber was on a flight from Sydney, Australia, where she was visiting family, back to Minnesota.

“It’s heartbreaking and I’m in shock,” she said.

Brindisi had a gimpy walk, a vestige of a 2013 operation to relieve the pinching pressure of vertebrae on his spinal column because of a condition called cervical stenosis.

But he otherwise was in fine fettle, recently traveling to Iowa, Florida and Pennsylvania to stage productions of “Mamma Mia!” and “Jersey Boys.”

Asked once why he was still running full throttle at an age when many are thinking of lounging in the sun, he said, laughing, “I can’t help myself.”

“He always said that he would work until the very end, that’s what would make him happy,” said Brindisi-Darrow. “The fact that he died peacefully in his sleep and there wasn’t a struggle is a kind of gift.”

Besides Barber and Brindisi-Darrow, survivors include a grandson and numerous relatives.

Services are being planned.