Daniel Singer, who combined and reimagined more than three dozen of Shakespeare’s plays as a zany 97-minute romp that has been performed worldwide and later, as a Disney Imagineer, built models for theme park rides like Roger Rabbit’s Car Toon Spin, died on Sept. 22 in Los Angeles. He was 66.
Cal Smith, his husband, said that Mr. Singer’s death, in a hospital, had been caused by complications of cancer surgery.
Mr. Singer’s Shakespeare shrinkage began in 1981 with a half-hour version of “Hamlet.” It premiered at the Renaissance Pleasure Faire (now the Original Renaissance Pleasure Faire) in Novato, Calif., and was the first sendup for the Reduced Shakespeare Company. The troupe subsequently produced condensed versions of “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” and “Romeo and Juliet.”
“One weekend, we went to Catalina Island and did ‘Romeo and Juliet’ on the beach, and then passed the hat,” Mr. Singer told American Theater magazine in 2014. Another time, a couple asked them to perform “Romeo and Juliet” at their wedding, he said, “which we thought was pretty crazy — but we did it.”
As the troupe’s performances improved, a friend asked, “Why don’t you write another 40 minutes and do every Shakespeare play?” Jess Winfield, a founding member of the company, recalled in an interview for this obituary.
Mr. Singer, Mr. Winfield and Adam Long, another founder, accepted the challenge: Mr. Singer took the histories; Mr. Winfield, the tragedies; and Mr. Long, the comedies. Each play got two minutes’ time. But when they read the result aloud, it bored them.
“So we made it more a show about three guys attempting to do the complete works because that is what we were trying to do,” Mr. Singer told American Theater.
The first act of “The Complete Works of William Shakespeare (Abridged)” includes “Othello” as a one-minute rap; all the histories as a televised football game, with a crown as the football; “Titus Andronicus” as a TV cooking show; and “Troilus and Cressida” as interpretive dance. The second act is all “Hamlet.”
In 1987, the show premiered at the Paramount Ranch in Agoura, Calif. It also played to sold-out houses at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe, the Scottish performing arts festival, and later toured college towns and comedy festivals. In 1990, it was staged at the Lilian Baylis Theater (now Studio), a small Off West End theater in London. Six years later, the show started a nine-year run of performances on the West End. It has also had three Off Broadway runs.
In a review of the 1991 Off Broadway production for The New York Times, Mel Gussow wrote that the three actors (which included Mr. Long, but not Mr. Singer) “juggle Shakespeare’s plays as if they were hot coals,” adding, “Hold on to one too long and it might singe a fardel.”
To all who knew him, Mr. Singer was called Rover since 1997 when the Fools Guild, a performers’ social club in Los Angeles, named him its King of Fools. He gave himself an even grander title, King Rover Canine the First.
Daniel Alan Singer was born on Oct. 8, 1959, in Palo Alto, Calif., and grew up in Santa Rosa, Calif. His father, Mervyn, owned a feed store before becoming an investment counselor. His mother, Wilma Mae (Bloom) Singer, known as Z’eva, was a speech therapist and neurofeedback counselor.
He grew up loving puppets, Disney movies and books by Charles Lutwidge Dodgson, who, as Lewis Carroll, wrote “Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland” and “Through the Looking-Glass.”
Mr. Singer’s need to escape life in rural California led him to paint his name on a suitcase “in which I stored magic tricks and a ventriloquist dummy as if I were about to embark on a vaudeville tour,” he told Voyage LA magazine in 2024.
In 1979, he left, not for a vaudeville tour, but for England, where he attended the Guildford School of Acting for a year. After his return to California, he was hired as a director at the Living History Center, which produced the Renaissance Faire, where he first brought his abridged Shakespeare to life with Mr. Winfield and Mr. Long.
In 1988, he was hired as a model maker at Walt Disney Imagineering, fulfilling a childhood dream that began when he watched Mr. Disney on TV touring the workshop where new Disneyland attractions were conceived.
Over a dozen years at Disney as a model maker and production designer, Mr. Singer worked on two Splash Mountains and two Mickey’s Toontowns, “for which I carved staggering amounts of polyurethane-foam trees, rocks and hills,” he told Voyage LA. His other projects included the Indiana Jones Adventure at Disneyland and It’s a Small World at Disneyland Paris.
“His models were gorgeous,” Don Carson, a former Imagineer, said in an interview. “Sometimes models can be impressionistic, but his weren’t. What you saw small was what you’d see big.”
Mr. Singer left Disney in 2000 to pursue freelance projects. He wrote “A Perfect Likeness,” a play that imagines Mr. Carroll inviting Charles Dickens to his home in Oxford, England, to pose for a photographic portrait. The play had its world premiere in 2013 in Winston-Salem, N.C.
“It was a fascinating idea to create a fictional meeting between two people who never met but should have,” said Charlie Lovett, a Carroll scholar who is a member of the Lewis Carroll Society of North America.
Mr. Singer also wrote “Louisa@Fruitlands: The True Story of Louisa May Alcott’s ‘Transcendental Wild Oats’” (2026), about the author’s time as a child when she lived with her parents in a utopian community. Last July, between hospital stays, he attended the play’s premiere in Willits, Calif. In a text to Mr. Winfield, he wrote, that “Louisa” is “probably the best play that’s come out of me,” and added, “Very happy playwright.”
In addition to Mr. Smith, his husband, Mr. Singer is survived by his sister, Valerie Singer, and his stepmother, Marian Singer.
During the Covid-19 pandemic, Mr. Singer collaborated with Mr. Carson on a digital recreation of the original Alice in Wonderland ride at Disneyland that debuted in 1958. Kathryn Beaumont, the British actress who voiced Alice for both the 1951 film “Alice in Wonderland” and the original ride, returned to the role for the occasion. The four-minute video is a virtual tour of the ride, from the Upside Down Room to the Mad Hatter’s Tea Party and beyond.
“When we agreed to collaborate, we didn’t have a lot of historical information about the ride apart from some vintage plan drawings and some historic photos,” said Mr. Carson, who shows the recreation to college students, most of whom are studying theme park design, and to people working at companies like Disney and Universal. “Daniel redrew all of the set elevations from childhood memory. We later were given the original show set drawings, and, amazingly, Daniel’s memory of the ride was nearly exactly the same.”
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