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Mel Shapiro, an award-winning theater director whose collaborations with the playwright John Guare included their critically acclaimed musical model of Shakespeare’s comedy “The Two Gentlemen of Verona” and the Off Broadway premiere of “The House of Blue Leaves,” died on Dec. 23 at his dwelling in Los Angeles. He was 89.
His son Josh stated the trigger was lung most cancers.
In a profession that started within the Sixties, Mr. Shapiro directed performs and musicals in New York City and across the nation, labored at elite regional theaters, and taught performing and directing at main universities.
In 1969, when Mr. Guare was looking for a director for “Blue Leaves,” he spoke to John Lahr, a former literary manager on the Guthrie Theater in Minneapolis and later a theater critic for The New Yorker. He really helpful Mr. Shapiro, who had been a producing director on the Guthrie.
Mr. Lahr, Mr. Guare recalled in an interview, stated, “The two of you had been made to work collectively.” They met when Mr. Shapiro directed Vaclav Havel’s play “The Increased Difficulty of Conversation” at Lincoln Center. “I cherished the play, met Mel and cherished Mel,” Mr. Guare stated.
“The House of Blue Leaves” — a darkish comedy a few zookeeper, dwelling together with his mentally unwell spouse in Queens, who aspires to a songwriting profession in Hollywood — opened in early 1971 on the Truck and Warehouse Theater within the East Village.
Reviewing it in The New York Times, Clive Barnes referred to as the play “mad, humorous, at instances very humorous,” and praised Mr. Shapiro’s “fliply crisp staging.” It gained the Obie and Drama Critics’ Circle Awards for greatest American play.
Soon after, Joseph Papp, director of the New York Shakespeare Festival and founding father of the Public Theater, requested Mr. Shapiro to direct “The Two Gentlemen of Verona” in Central Park in the summertime of 1971.
“I reread the play that evening and stated, ‘Oh, my God, that is such a canine,’” Mr. Shapiro informed The Star Tribune of Minneapolis in 1974. He informed Mr. Papp that “Two Gentlemen,” an early, problematic Shakespeare comedy, wouldn’t work when it transferred from the Delacorte Theater within the park to the Public’s cellular unit, which introduced productions across the metropolis and the place audiences typically pelted actors with chairs and rocks.
Mr. Shapiro requested Galt MacDermot, the composer greatest recognized for “Hair,” to put in writing a rock rating and Mr. Guare to put in writing lyrics. “I informed Papp what I’d performed and he stated, ‘You actually are doing a musical!’” Mr. Shapiro stated.
The gamble labored. “Two Gentlemen of Verona” (the musical rendered the title with out the “The”) gained the Obie Award for greatest route and the Drama Critics’ Circle Award for greatest musical. After it moved to Broadway in late 1971, it earned Tony Awards for greatest musical (its competitors included Stephen Sondheim’s “Follies”) and greatest e book of a musical, which Mr. Shapiro and Mr. Guare formed from Shakespeare’s 5 acts right into a 90-minute present. Mr. Shapiro was additionally nominated for greatest director.
Melvin Irwin Shapiro was born on Dec. 16, 1935, in Brooklyn. His father, Benjamin, deserted him at a younger age, and he was raised by his mom, Lee (Lazarus) Shapiro, who ran the house, and his stepfather, Jimmy Curran, a truck driver.
Mel’s love affair with Broadway started in highschool, when he and a few buddies would take the subway from Brooklyn into Manhattan to see exhibits. But his pressing want to depart his dysfunctional household — and the hope of attending school paid for by the G.I. Bill — led him to affix the Army close to the top of the Korean War. He realized to talk Korean on the Army Language School in Monterey, Calif., and served as a translator in Japan for 2 years.
In his spare time, Mr. Shapiro joined a gaggle of American, British and Australian diplomats who had shaped an newbie theater. He was first a prop manager, for Noël Coward’s “Blithe Spirit,” after which an assistant director, earlier than making his directorial debut with “The Diary of Anne Frank.”
“I had no concept how I did it or organized it,” he informed the net interviewer Brian Snyder in 2021. “A younger child telling all people what to do onstage.”
After his Army service, Mr. Shapiro enrolled on the Carnegie Institute of Technology (now Carnegie Mellon University) in Pittsburgh and obtained bachelor and grasp of wonderful arts levels from its School of Drama in 1961.
After directing performs on the University of Washington in Seattle, the Pittsburgh Playhouse and elsewhere, he was employed in 1963 at Arena Stage in Washington, a pioneering regional theater, the place he directed Eugene O’Neill’s “Long Day’s Journey into Night” and George Bernard Shaw’s “Heartbreak House,” amongst different performs.
He started educating performing at New York University in 1966 — he’s credited as a founding father of its School of the Arts (now the Tisch School of the Arts) — whereas he was a resident director of the Stanford Repertory Theater in California.
The actress Barbara Cason, whom Mr. Shapiro directed in a Stanford Rep manufacturing of Thornton Wilder’s “The Skin of Our Teeth,” informed The Palo Alto Times in 1965: “He paints in daring, broad strokes whereas shaping the play in early rehearsals. Then he goes again and refines, engaged on particulars.”
He left the Stanford theater in 1967 for a two-year stint on the Guthrie, the place he additionally stayed for about two years.
In New York City within the Seventies, Mr. Shapiro directed three extra performs by Mr. Guare — “Bosoms and Neglect,” on Broadway, and “Rich and Famous” and “Marco Polo Sings a Solo,” off Broadway — in addition to a Broadway revival of Anthony Newley and Leslie Bricusse’s “Stop the World — I Want to Get Off,” starring Sammy Davis Jr.
“Mel had an actual present for profitable the actors’ belief,” Mr. Guare stated. “He was a troublesome however light man; that gentleness didn’t overpower actors, and when he discovered the suitable actors, they only wished to please him.”
Disillusioned with business theater, Mr. Shapiro returned to Carnegie Mellon in 1980 as head of the college of drama. He remained there for a decade earlier than he was employed as the pinnacle of graduate performing within the theater division on the University of California, Los Angeles. He retired in 2011.
Paul Schoeffler, an actor who was considered one of Mr. Shapiro’s college students at Carnegie Mellon, wrote on Facebook after his dying: “He challenged all of us. He would throw you into the deep finish of the pool, because it had been, to see how you’d fare and what you’d study. It was solely later that I found that he cherished it when individuals pushed again.”
In addition to his son Josh, Mr. Shapiro is survived by his spouse, Jeanne (Paynter) Shapiro, a former fund-raiser for the Pittsburgh public tv station WQED; one other son, Ben; and a grandson.
Mr. Shapiro was the writer of two textbooks, “An Actor Performs” (1997) and “The Director’s Companion” (1998), and a play, “The Lay of the Land,” a comedy a few couple preventing to save lots of their marriage, which gained the National Arts Club’s Joseph Kesselring Prize for rising playwrights in 1990.
The actress and director Lee Grant, who in 1991 directed a manufacturing of “The Lay of the Land” on the Pittsburgh Public Theater, stated that she had been making ready to make a documentary about divorce when she obtained Mr. Shapiro’s script.
“I’ve been on the lookout for a play that explores this sort of obsession,” she informed The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, which she described as “that fascination we have now with individuals we couldn’t dwell with out however now can’t dwell with, the love of your life.”
