Mel Shapiro, the director who excelled at directing John Guare, dies at the age of 89

An award-winning collaboration with playwright John Guare, whose acclaimed musical version of Shakespeare's comedy The Two Gentlemen of Verona and the off-Broadway premiere of The House of Blue Leaves Theater director Mel Shapiro passed away on December 12th. 23 years old, at home in Los Angeles. He was 89 years old.

Her son Josh said the cause was lung cancer.

In a career that began in the 1960s, Mr. Shapiro directed plays and musicals in New York City and throughout the United States, worked in elite regional theaters, and taught acting and directing at major universities.

In 1969, when Mr. Guare was looking for a director for “Blue Leaves,'' he turned to John Rahr, a former literary manager at the Guthrie Theater in Minneapolis and later a theater critic for The New Yorker. He recommended Mr. Shapiro, who had been production director at Guthrie.

Mr. Guare recalled in an interview that Mr. Lah said, “The two of you were made to work together.'' The two met when Mr. Shapiro directed Vaclav Havel's play “The Difficulty of Conversation” at Lincoln Center. “I loved the play, I met Mel, I loved Mel,” Guare said.

“The House of Blue Leaves'' is a dark comedy about a zookeeper who lives with his mentally ill wife in Queens and aspires to a songwriting career in Hollywood, set in the East Village in early 1971. It opened at the Truck and Warehouse Theater.

Reviewing the play in the New York Times, Clive Barnes called it “crazy, funny, and at times very funny” and praised Mr. Shapiro's “light, crisp direction.” It won the Obie Award and the Drama Critics Circle Award for Best American Play.

Shortly after, Joseph Papp, director of the New York Shakespeare Festival and founder of the Public Theater, asked Shapiro to direct “The Two Gentlemen of Verona” in Central Park in the summer of 1971. did.

“I read the play back that night and thought, 'Oh my God, what a dog,'” Mr. Shapiro told the Minneapolis Star Tribune in 1974. The troubled Shakespeare comedy didn't work when it moved from the Delacorte Theater in the park to the public's mobile unit. The mobile unit carried performances around the city, and audience members sometimes threw chairs at the actors. And rocks.

Mr. Shapiro asked composer Galt McDermott, best known for “Hair,'' to write the rock score, and Mr. Guare to write the lyrics. “When I told Pap what I had done, he said, 'We're really doing a musical!'” Shapiro said.

The gamble paid off. “The Two Gentlemen of Verona” (the musical's title was rendered without the “the”) won the Obie Award for Best Direction and the Drama Critics Circle Award for Best Musical. After moving to Broadway in late 1971, the production won the Tony Award for Best Musical (that competition included Stephen Sondheim's Follies) and Best Book of a Musical. Mr. Shapiro and Mr. Guare compiled Shakespeare's five acts into 90 works. minute show. Mr. Shapiro was also nominated for Best Director.

Melvin Irwin Shapiro was born on December 16, 1935 in Brooklyn. His father, Benjamin, abandoned him when he was young, and he was raised by his mother, Lee (Lazarus) Shapiro, who ran the family home, and his stepfather, Jimmy Curran, a truck driver.

Mel's love affair with Broadway began in high school, when she and her friends took the subway from Brooklyn to see a show in Manhattan. But an urgent need to get away from his dysfunctional family and a desire to attend college, funded by the GI Bill, led him to join the Army near the end of the Korean War. He studied Korean at the Army Language School in Monterey, California, and served as an interpreter in Japan for two years.

In his spare time, Mr. Shapiro joined a group of American, British, and Australian diplomats who formed an amateur theater. He first worked as a props manager on Noel Coward's Blithe Spirit, then as an assistant director before making his directorial debut with The Diary of Anne Frank.

“I had no idea how they did it, how they organized it,” he told online interviewer Brian Snyder in 2021. “He was a little kid telling everyone what to do on stage.”

After serving in the Army, Mr. Shapiro attended the Carnegie Institute of Technology (now Carnegie Mellon University) in Pittsburgh, where he earned a bachelor's degree and a master of fine arts degree in 1961.

After directing plays at the University of Washington in Seattle, the Pittsburgh Playhouse, and elsewhere, in 1963 he was hired by regional theater pioneer Arena Stage in Washington, where he directed plays such as Eugene O'Neill's A Long Day's Journey Into Night and George Bernard. I directed it. plays such as Shaw's “Heartbreak House.''

He began teaching acting at New York University in 1966 while serving as resident director of the Stanford Repertory Theater in California. He is known as the founder of the New York University School of the Arts (now Tisch School of the Arts).

Barbara Cason, the actress for whom Mr. Shapiro directed the Stanford production of Thornton Wilder's “The Skin of Our Teeth,'' told the Palo Alto Times in 1965: Then he goes back and refines it and works on the details. ”

He left the Stamford Theater in 1967 and worked for two years at the Guthrie Theater, where he also stayed for about two years.

In New York City in the 1970s, Mr. Shapiro directed three more of Mr. Guare's plays, “Boss and Neglect'' on Broadway and “Rich and Famous'' and “Marco Polo Sings Solo'' off-Broadway. A Broadway revival of Anthony Newley and Leslie Bricusse's “Stop the World – I Want to Get Off'' starring Sammy Davis Jr.

“Mel had a real talent for winning actors' trust,” Guare said. “He was a tough but kind man. His kindness didn't overwhelm the actors, and when he found the right actor, they just wanted to please him.”

Disillusioned with commercial theater, Mr. Shapiro returned to Carnegie Mellon University in 1980 as director of the drama school. He remained there for 10 years, after which he was hired as the director of graduate acting in the Department of Drama at the University of California, Los Angeles. He retired in 2011.

Actor Paul Scheffler, one of Mr. Shapiro's students at Carnegie Mellon University, wrote on Facebook after Mr. Shapiro's death: He was going to throw you into the deep end of the pool, so to speak, and see how you would fare and what you would learn. It wasn't until later that I learned that he loved it when people pushed back. ”

In addition to his son Josh, Mr. Shapiro is survived by his wife, Jeanne (Painter) Shapiro, a former fundraiser for Pittsburgh public television station WQED; Another son, Ben. and grandchildren.

Mr. Shapiro is the author of two textbooks, “An Actor Performs” (1997) and “The Director's Companion” (1998), and the play “The Lay of the He is the author of “Land”. In 1990, he won the National Arts Club's Josef Kesselring Prize for emerging playwrights.

Actress and director Lee Grant, who directed “The Lay of the Land'' at the Pittsburgh Public Theater in 1991, was preparing to make a documentary about divorce when she received Shapiro's script. said.

“I was looking for a play that explored this kind of obsession,” she told the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. the love of your life. ”