Dan Reitz

Dan Reitz is a Buffalo-based musician, improviser, educator, and composer who served as musical director for Baby Wants Candy for eight years, co-founded Buffalo Improv House, and built a career that spans musical improv performance in New York City, composition for Serial and This American Life, and teaching at institutions including Princeton University, Sarah Lawrence College, and SUNY University at Buffalo. A Grammy All-American High School Jazz Ensemble trombonist from Williamsville, New York, Reitz co-founded the improvisational comedy troupe Zamboni Revolution at Syracuse University before establishing himself in New York's musical improv community and subsequently returning to Western New York to found the region's first full-time improv and comedy training center.

Career

Dan Reitz grew up in Williamsville, New York, in Erie County east of Buffalo. As a student at Williamsville East High School, he performed with the Grammy All-American High School Jazz Ensemble, won the Outstanding Trombone Solo award at the Lincoln Center Essentially Ellington Festival, and received multiple national composition awards. These early recognitions established him as a serious musician before he arrived at college.

Reitz attended Syracuse University, where he earned a Bachelor of Music in Music Composition cum laude. While at Syracuse he co-founded Zamboni Revolution, the university's improvisational comedy troupe, alongside cartoonist Nick Gurewitch, who would later create the Perry Bible Fellowship comic strip. The ensemble represented Reitz's entry into improvisational comedy and shaped the direction his career would take alongside his musical training.

He subsequently completed an EdM in Music Education at SUNY University at Buffalo and taught in Buffalo Public Schools for approximately eight years before his career shifted toward the intersection of musical performance, improv comedy, and higher education.

In New York City, Reitz joined the musical improv community at the Magnet Theater, Upright Citizens Brigade Theater, Peoples Improv Theater, Brooklyn Comedy Collective, and Caveat NYC. He served as the musical director and primary pianist for Baby Wants Candy, the long-running musical improv comedy troupe, for eight years, covering all shows east of Chicago. His other musical improv credits include musical direction for Your Love, Our Musical, Shamilton, and VERN, and performance credits in Blank! The Musical, Off Book, North Coast, Premiere: The Improvised Musical, and Musical Megawatt. He appeared with the Magnet Musical Improv All-Stars Spectacular.

As a composer, Reitz produced music for the podcasts Serial, Crimetown, This American Life, and Off Book, as well as for Netflix Animation, international advertising campaigns, and the feature film Leo, an animated musical from Happy Madison Productions directed by Robert Smigel.

Reitz taught musical improv at Sarah Lawrence College before the pandemic and served on the faculty at the Magnet Theater. His higher education teaching credits include Princeton University, the New York Film Academy, and SUNY University at Buffalo, where he joined the music faculty. He has also taught at the American High School Musical Theatre Festival, the Collegiate School, and Bank Street School for Children.

International performing and teaching engagements include the Edinburgh Festival Fringe and Improv Iceland. After more than twenty years based primarily in New York City, Reitz returned to Buffalo and founded Buffalo Improv House at 255 Great Arrow Avenue, Suite 207, in the Pierce Arrow Complex, establishing Western New York's first full-time improv, sketch, and alternative comedy theater and training facility.

Historical Context

Dan Reitz's career documents the development of musical improv as a specialized performance discipline within the New York City comedy ecosystem during the 2000s and 2010s, and the subsequent movement of that expertise back to a regional city to build institutional infrastructure from the ground up.

Baby Wants Candy, for which Reitz served as musical director for eight years, represented one of the most prominent ongoing musical improv productions in American comedy during that period, performing in New York and Chicago and carrying the format to international festival audiences. Reitz's tenure as the production's primary pianist east of Chicago placed him at the center of the American musical improv scene during the years when that format was solidifying its identity as a distinct branch of improvisational comedy.

His composition work for Serial during that podcast's first seasons placed his music in front of an audience that, by 2015, numbered in the tens of millions per episode and had reoriented the commercial podcast landscape. Composing for Serial, Crimetown, and This American Life simultaneously extended his range beyond comedy into the broader audio production industry.

The founding of Buffalo Improv House represented an infrastructural contribution to a region that had previously lacked a dedicated improv institution. By establishing a full-time theater and training center in Buffalo, Reitz made ongoing improv training accessible to Western New York residents without requiring travel to New York City or Chicago, a gap that had previously existed in a metro area of approximately one million people.

Legacy

Dan Reitz's contribution to musical improv in New York City during the 2000s and 2010s is documented through his eight-year tenure as musical director of Baby Wants Candy and his faculty and performance roles at the Magnet Theater, UCB, Peoples Improv Theater, and allied venues. As a practitioner who combined trained musicianship, academic music education credentials, and improv performance experience, Reitz occupied a distinct position in the New York musical improv community as both a performer and a pedagogue.

His composition credits for Serial and This American Life reached audiences far beyond the improv community and established his work in the broader public culture of American audio journalism and storytelling during a pivotal period in the podcast industry's development.

Buffalo Improv House stands as his most durable institutional contribution: an ongoing center for improv, sketch, and alternative comedy performance and training in a region that previously had no dedicated home for the form. The institution sustains ongoing classes, shows, and community development in Western New York and reflects the broader national pattern in which practitioners trained in New York and Chicago have carried institutional improv culture to cities and regions historically underserved by the major training centers.

Early Life and Training

Dan Reitz grew up in Williamsville, New York, in Erie County east of Buffalo. He attended Williamsville East High School, where he performed in the Grammy All-American High School Jazz Ensemble on trombone, won the Outstanding Trombone Solo award at the Lincoln Center Essentially Ellington Festival, and received several national composition awards. He earned a Bachelor of Music in Music Composition cum laude from Syracuse University, where he co-founded the improvisational comedy troupe Zamboni Revolution, and subsequently completed a Master of Education in Music Education at SUNY University at Buffalo.