Danny as Herr Zeller at far right, in tuxedo. In this scene, he and Admiral von Schreiber have come to tell the heroic Captain von Trapp and his friend Max Detweiler that the captain must report to the Nazi naval base in a few days.
🎵 Acting in musicals and singing with vigor! Learning his dialogue and blocking with rigor! Helping our customers whenever his phone rings… 🎵🎶
…these are a few of Danny Slattery’s favorite things. Last weekend, the senior customer assistance rep’s North Shore Bank colleagues got to see him tread the boards at long last, as the villainous Herr Hans Zeller in the Forte Theatre Company’s production of The Sound of Music.
“Danny is always entertaining his co-workers in the Call Center, so it was exciting to finally see him perform onstage,” said customer assistance specialist Carrie Feiker. “He did a fantastic job!”
Though this was the first time his fellow employees got to witness it, Danny has been involved in theater since middle school and graduated from Carroll University in Waukesha in 2013 with a bachelor’s degree in theater. At this point, he’s appeared in more productions than he can remember, including favorites like High School Musical, Rent, Spring Awakening, Shrek, and Annie.
Danny in costume after a show with a fellow cast member who played a guest brought to a party by Herr Zeller.
His first show, when he was 11 or 12, was a West Allis Players production of Our Town, which a neighbor was involved in.
“They needed a young boy to play Joe Crowell Jr. and then his brother Si,” he says. “They cast me as both roles, which was my start in theater.”
When he started at North Shore Bank in 2020, Danny was also working part time at Milwaukee’s Skylight Music Theatre and touring Wisconsin and Illinois in a production of the immersive-theater experience Tony n’ Tina’s Wedding.
The Sound of Music — which ran the first two weekends of October, putting on six shows total, at the Saber Center for the Performing Arts in Franklin — was his first full show since the last Tony n’ Tina’s performance in 2019. That show hasn’t run since the COVID-19 pandemic began. Danny notes that the last few years have been hard on the performing arts.
“I’ve only performed in small or virtual cabarets the past two years, because of the pandemic,” he says. “We had extensive COVID protocols during Sound of Music rehearsals and shows — wearing masks, being tested, etc. — which made me a lot more comfortable being around a bigger cast and making sure our show would go on. But it’s tricky, and the arts as a whole have suffered immensely these past few years. I’m hoping it gets easier to navigate as time passes.”
A more fun challenge was taking on the role of Herr Zeller. The mayor of Salzburg, Zeller eagerly supports the Nazis’ annexation of Austria but ultimately fails to prevent the singing von Trapp family from fleeing the fascist regime.
“Getting to step into the mind of someone so psychologically and emotionally manipulated was such a challenge,” Danny says. “I was intimidated at first, because Herr Zeller is the audience’s first introduction to the danger facing the von Trapp family. The takeover of Austria by Germany is such an intense subject. Having to bring all of that into a performance and making the threat real to both the cast and audience was draining.”
Rehearsals for The Sound of Music began at the end of August, and all told, he estimates he spent about 60 hours preparing for opening night. It surely paid off — Milwaukee’s Shepherd Express gave the production a glowing review, which his co-workers concurred with.
Carrie, Lori, Danny, and Ashley after the final Sound of Music show on Sunday, October 17. Deposit operations supervisor Kristin Hoch came too, as well as Carrie’s daughter and Ashley’s mother.
“Carrie and I helped Danny practice his lines, so we knew what character he was going to play, but seeing him onstage in his element blew us away!” senior customer assistance rep Ashley Peck says. “I cannot wait to see him in his next theater adventure!”
“Danny’s performance was so mesmerizing, I forgot I was watching the person who sits behind me every day at work,” says senior customer assistance rep Lori Zaleski. “He truly is a talented actor.”
Danny says his theater skills have their place at work, as well.
“Before getting involved with theater, I was an extremely shy kid. Ask anyone in the Call Center now, and they can tell you that’s no longer the case!” he says. “Performing definitely helps with answering calls, because if you’re not speaking confidently to customers, they can tend to take over the call. With the weird and wacky scenarios that are presented to us every day, it’s really helpful that I’m able to improvise and navigate the calls more effectively by tapping into the theater skill set.”
The Sound of Music cast gathers to take a bow at the end of the show.
He’d like to expand that skill set in the future, perhaps by directing a show, which he hasn’t done since college, or performing on camera. There are a lot of other roles he’d like to play too, such as Quasimodo in The Hunchback of Notre Dame.
Whatever he does, it’s sure to be interesting.
“I love that theater is constantly changing and evolving. You never see the same production twice. There is always a new way to tell the story or approach the characters,” Danny says. “It’s always exciting to me to start a new project and see what is created from it.”