For Stan, musical theatre was his first love. He wrote the score for the musical adaptation of Joe Stein’s play, Enter Laughing, which was loosely based on the early life of Carl Reiner. The resulting musical, So Long, 174th Street, opened on Broadway in 1976 with Robert Morse, Kaye Ballard, and George S. Irving. It received mixed reviews and closed after a short run. In 2008, the musical was revived as Enter Laughing, the Musical. It played to sold out audiences at the York Theatre in New York City, then at Sag Harbor’s Bay Street Theatre, and subsequently at the Annenberg Theatre in Los Angeles. The York is planning to produce it again in May, 2019, to celebrate the theatre’s 50th anniversary.
Stan also wrote a musical version of Bernard Slade’s play Same Time, Next Year. Same Time, Next Year, the Musical debuted at the National Theatre in Budapest on New Year’s Eve, 1999, to a gala audience, and a successful run followed. More recently, it had a two week staged reading in New York.
Lillian Daniels
Vaudeville Performers
Albert Daniels
EARLY LIFE
Stan was born and raised in Toronto, Canada, by parents, Lillian and Albert Daniels, who had performed in the waning years of vaudeville. Stan’s parents owned and operated a movie theatre over which the family lived. From the age of two, Stan would toddle downstairs on his own to watch the films that were being shown, and thus began his lifelong love of movies.
He studied classical piano at seven, and started composing songs when he was a teenager. At sixteen, he was commissioned to write the opening production number for the Canadian National Exhibition, an annual event in Toronto.
Later, while he was studying philosophy at the University of Toronto, he continued to compose songs and also became very active in the theatre department. It was during this time that he met his future wife, Alene Kamins, and after Stan graduated, they were married. Stan continued to study philosophy at the University of Toronto and received his Masters degree. He and his wife moved to England where Stan went to Oxford University on a Canadian fellowship to work on his doctorate on Language and Meaning. While at Oxford he wrote and directed the musical revue Better Never which played at the Edinburgh Festival. The cast included Alan Bennett (The History Boys) and Dudley Moore at the piano. It was at this point that Stan decided to give up philosophy and pursue a writing career.
Back in Toronto, he wrote sketches for Wayne and Schuster and composed two musicals for the CBC. He also wrote and performed satirical political sketches for This Hour Has Seven Days, a weekly news program on the CBC, all the while continuing to compose songs. One day, while he was in New York, sitting in the outer office of his mentor, Frank Loesser, he was approached by Greg Garrison, the producer of the Dean Martin Show. Greg told him, “You look like a writer. Do you want to come to Hollywood?” Stan laughed. Three months later, Stan was sitting in the same office, when Greg came in and said “Well are you coming or not?” Shortly after Stan and his family moved to California, and Stan wrote for five seasons of the Dean Martin Show.
ABOUT STAN
Stan was credited with introducing a particular type of joke that’s come to be known as “the Stan Daniels turn.” When a character says something and then unintentionally and unconsciously contradicts himself a moment later, the humor results from the character’s lack of awareness of the contradiction.
Stan loved words, word games, and crossword puzzles. He slept with his Thesaurus and a Rhyming Dictionary beside him on his night stand.
