Daniel Efrat

Daniel Efrat ( he, דניאל אפרת; born 4 August 1982) is an Israeli actor, theatre director, and translator. He trained at Beit Zvi, where he first began translating (English into Hebrew), before joining the Beit Lessin Theater youth company. He has also acted in film and television. He has won various awards in Israel for his translation and direction, as well as acting awards.

Early life and education

Daniel Efrat was born in Tel Aviv, Israel, on 4 August 1982, to musician and scholar Daphna Efrat née Tamir. As a child, his father's musician friends would stay at their house, but Efrat said that he was not very excited to see them and that he preferred getting to explore recording studios. He grew up with a relatively liberal family, though he first read '' Spring Awakening'' at home when he was fourteen and identified with its themes of stifled adolescence. He has reflected that "there was no real musical theater in Israel when ewas growing up", so instead he dreamed about it.

Efrat left home when he was seventeen because he was scared of coming out to his parents, saying he left because he "was angry at them for the reaction eexpected"; he told them he was gay shortly after he left and they were understanding: "in the first conversation with my mother... this issue came up, I told her, and she told dad, and the next morning I got a call from him uring whichhe told me how much he loved me."

Around the same time he was sent a conscription order for the Israel Defense Forces (IDF), but was not signed up, saying: "I did not ask to be released. I was released. I got there, they saw what was sitting in front of them and decided". He suggested in an interview with ''Makor Rishon'' that it was related to his sexuality. He had also not wanted to enlist personally, and his parents reacted badly to this; his father had been in the elite Shayetet 13.

He attended the Tel Aviv School of Arts, Thelma Yellin School of Arts and Beit Zvi School for the Performing Arts, where he earned an MA and received awards for outstanding first-year student and outstanding graduating student. He also received the outstanding graduate award from Thelma Yellin. Efrat graduated from Beit Zvi in 2003. He began translating while at Beit Zvi, saying that he really wanted to perform '' The Rocky Horror Show'' for his senior project in 2002, but no Hebrew translation existed for it, so he did it himself. When instructors heard he had translated a musical, they encouraged him to do some more. His father's band, HaClique, had debuted following a 1980 screening of '' The Rocky Horror Picture Show'' at the in Tel Aviv.

Career

Efrat first acted as a child, in the 1991 American television movie ''Iran: Days of Crisis'' directed by Kevin Connor, credited as Daniel Ephrat. On television he appeared in ''Hamachon''. His first major film role was in Nadav Levitan's 1998 ''Aviv'' (''Real Father''). He went on to act in several other Levitan films. He then played lead role Menni in the Yair Hochner film ''Yeladim Tovim'' (''Good Boys''), a film about rent boys. He won the Best Actor award at the 2006 Tampa International Gay and Lesbian Film Festival for the film.

He stayed in the theatre and began translating, adapting, and directing. In 2008, the youth theatre group at the Beit Lessin Theater was formed, and Efrat joined. This year he performed in and wrote ''Broadway Corner Freshman'', a comedy revue musical featuring songs and condensed plots of popular Israeli musicals. It was praised as a "loving and nostalgic tribute". At Beit Lessin, he performed in a variety of musicals, including ''Hair'' as Woof, ''Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat'' as Joseph and Benjamin, '' Blood Brothers'' as Eddie and Sammy, and '' Cabaret'' as the Emcee.

In 2010, as part of Beit Lessin's youth theatre group, he won the Rabinowitz Charitable Foundation's Ada Ben Nachum Award for his translation of '' Spring Awakening'', starring Ninet Tayeb, which he also performed in and produced. The citation, which also mentioned his 2009 translation of ''A Midsummer Night's Dream'', said that he "successfully faced the special challenges posed by the original text: a dialogue that is a mixture of period language, stylistic poetic language and contemporary dialect". Though the play version of ''Spring Awakening'' had been performed before in Israel, Efrat's was the first production of the musical. In 2013, Efrat translated ''The Rocky Horror Show'' for its commercial Israeli debut, featuring Lake Rodberg and third-year students of the Yoram Lowenstein acting studio, in Tel Aviv.

He directed the 2012–2013 revival of 's '' Mami''; critical of occupation of Gaza and the West Bank, and of the IDF, the theatre invited soldiers to watch the show for free. Hava Yarom for ''Martha Yodaat'' theatre review magazine wrote that Efrat "is an extraordinary artist, who certainly knows how to swing his baton on plays and especially on musicals... and has certainly left his mark on the field of translation" but felt that his attempts to make the musical his own added too much decoration, with "multicoloured vocal richness"; new characters; and more elaborate costumes, choreography, and set designs, distracting from the material. Yarom particularly felt that the staging of the rape scene took away from the Mami performance, though considered that the adaptation as a whole was the negative, saying Efrat's boldness should be praised. Ovad Efrat, his father, was the musical director and arranger.

In 2015, his direction of ' at the Haifa Theatre won the four major awards of the Israeli Theater Academy Awards. It was then staged in North America. Efrat had first directed the original musical in 2013; musician approached director Efrat and artistic director with his Jerusalem Academy of Music and Dance dissertation music, hoping to create a musical. They took the result to the Bat Yam Musical Festival, where it won the grand prize, including a development grant, before working on it more for the commercial debut at Haifa. Efrat also translated ''Animal Farm'' for its premiere as a musical adaptation in 2015.

In 2017, he translated '' Hairspray'' into Hebrew for its Israeli debut. A review in BroadwayWorld said that "the songs were still extremely fun and flowing and Efrat can clearly write beautiful songs, but one of the major things that made ''Hairspray'' such a great musical is Scott Wittman and Marc Shaiman's lyrics and without them it's like a production of ''Hairspray'' without tall hair wigs." For the Israeli debut of ''School of Rock'' in 2019, Efrat translated Andrew Lloyd Webber's songs, saying that though he'd never met Lloyd Webber, he reached out to get approval for each of the song translations and compositions and was never turned down.

Other translations include songs in films and movie musicals, including '' Tangled'', ''Rio'' and the '' Ice Age'' films. Efrat has said that though he acts, he prefers being known for his work behind the scenes, even though translating is "not a sexy craft", and that he is addicted to both performing and creative work. With Eli Bijawi and Roy Chen, he makes up the young generation of Israeli translation playwriting.

He has also written pop songs, including "Dai La" with Marta Gómez for Roni Dalumi's 2010 debut album.

References

External links

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{{DEFAULTSORT:Efrat, Daniel
1982 births
Living people
English–Hebrew translators
Israeli male dramatists and playwrights
Film people from Tel Aviv
Gay dramatists and playwrights
Israeli theatre directors
Israeli translators
Jewish translators
Israeli gay actors
Israeli gay writers
Gay Jews
Israeli gay musicians
LGBT theatre directors
Israeli LGBT dramatists and playwrights
Male actors from Tel Aviv
Thelma Yellin High School of Arts alumni
Translators of William Shakespeare
Writers from Tel Aviv