Daniel Efrat (Hebrew: דניאל אפרת; born 4 August 1982) is an Israeli actor, theatre director, and translator.
[4] 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.
[4][5] His father's band, HaClique, had debuted following a 1980 screening of The Rocky Horror Picture Show at the Cinema Paris [he] in Tel Aviv.
[10][5] Efrat first acted as a child, in the 1991 American television movie Iran: Days of Crisis directed by Kevin Connor, credited as Daniel Ephrat.
[8][7] 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.
[5] 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.
[17][6] He directed the 2012–2013 revival of Hillel Mittelpunkt [he]'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.
[18] 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.
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.