Versatile Adam Shapiro plays many roles during cruise ship gig

Fourth in a series

By Donald H. Harrison

ABOARD MS ROTTERDAM—In the National Yiddish Theatre in New York, he starred in the title role in the musical based on Isaac Bashevis Singer’s  Gimpel Tam (Gimpel the Fool). In a touring national children’s theatre production, he played Mudge, a big, joyful, sloppy dog  based on the Cynthia Rylant’s

 

 

Passengers found Shapiro singing and dancing in Broadway revues and other featured productions in the Showroom at Sea (for which he and troupe members rehearsed for two months in Los Angeles before joining the ship).  However, passengers were also  likely to see Shapiro in less formal events including a solo Cabaret show (at right)  in which he sang humorous, self-deprecatory songs (including one about being in love with the man in the mirror); a water volleyball game pitting crew members against passengers; and a cook-off contest (at left)  in which his salsa was judged the absolute worst, but his culinary style the funniest.

Shapiro also emceed a passenger talent contest in which contestants had to shake a tambourine or strike a cowbell first to be called upon to supply the lyrics of popular songs, and he even could be found, ever cheerful, wearing plastic gloves helping to serve passengers at the Lido buffet when extra manpower was needed.

When no guest rabbi or cantor is aboard, Shapiro serves as leader of the Friday night Erev Shabbat services, also dispensing the wine and challah at the oneg Shabbat.  Because the ship was taking precautions against gastro-intestinal sicknesses (GIS), Shapiro wore plastic gloves while serving the wine and bread, and, he noted sadly, “we normally serve gefilte fish, but right now that’s out of the question.”

Of course, the 60 or so passengers who crowded the Shabbat services played a little “Jewish geography” and it was learned that Shapiro grew up in Indianapolis, where his pre-bar mitzvah rabbi at the Indianapolis Hebrew Congregation was Jonathan Stein, who prior to Shapiro’s simcha moved to San Diego to become the senior rabbi at Congregation Beth Israel.   Eventually, Stein relocated again, to Shaaray Tefila in Manhattan, and when Shapiro, the son and grandson of doctors, set out to New York City to pursue his acting career, Stein represented the familiarity and reassurance of home.

One day at sea, I chatted with Shapiro who told me that he caught the acting bug in kindergarten in Indianapolis when he performed in a class production of Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs.  After that he was typically the first to sign up for plays at his temple and at school, and his parents obliged his interest by sending him for two summers to the Interlochen Arts Academy in Northern Michigan, where he focused on acting and dance.

Once in youth theatre he played Motel the Tailor in Fiddler on the Roof, but after Interlochen, wonder of wonders, miracle of miracles, he was selected for the lead role of Tevye.  “There’s a reason why every character actor worth his salt wants to play Tevye,” he said.  “It is because it is one of the best written roles for a man ever.”   Tevye is “so wonderfully multifaceted, and he is the type of character who can change on a dime.  In one scene you are joking and you are happy—deidle, deedel, deidle, dum – and then all of a sudden you’re told that your daughter is going to marry out of the faith, and she’s dead to you…”

He studied acting and dance at Ball State University, at one point writing a term paper on choreographer Jerome Robbins, whose many credits included Fiddler.  “The starting point in his career was the National Yiddish Theatre and in some of the books are photos of National Yiddish Theatre productions and you can just see in them where his inspiration came for staging Fiddler on the Roof  — especially the dream sequence.  Although Shapiro had anticipated acting in numerous college plays, his big break came when he auditioned for a community theatre production in Muncie directed by one of the faculty members, Michael O’Hara.   The professor cast him as the general in the Noel Coward farce, Look After Lulu, and became a mentor.

“In show business, for you to be a  success, you have to know yourself inside and out,” Shapiro says. “You have to be brutally honest with yourself and you have to figure out what you can offer that would be considered unique,”

So what is his verdict about himself?

He responded that another professor at Ball State called him in, and referring to his heavy-set physique, told him: “If you want to do more traditional theatre roles, chorus roles, or what have you, you can either start working out and lose a lot of weight and really, really increase your dance classes, and become a chorus boy, or you can embrace your body type and gear your performance to the type of roles you are right to play.”

At first, Shapiro took umbrage at the advice the faculty member was giving him. “That’s so unfair,” he remembered thinking.  “I want to do everything.”   However, he reflected, the professor “was absolutely right.  What I decided to do was essentially one up him—I was going to concentrate on the roles I was right to play, but also keep up on my dance training.  So I became the character actor who could do funny bits and the funny songs, but who could also do a tap dance on stage and not miss a step.”

Those two talents proved helpful in New York where he found that other “big men” who tried out for parts could act, and do shtick, but often couldn’t dance.”

Asked who his “big man” role models are, Shapiro responded that “Jackie Gleason was the grandpappy of all big character actors on television, but I look to Zero Mostel, who was incredible both for his musical theatre work and for his film work.  He was the original Max Bialystok (in The Producers).”  Shapiro added that as a child one of his favorite television shows was I Love Lucy and “I loved William Frawley who played Fred Mertz.   There are those guys who are bigger and clearly unashamed of it, who just walk in and are comfortable in their bodies and let er’ rip.”

Those whom Shapiro refers to as “larger actors” face different problems than other actors trying to break into Broadway.  While other actors worry about becoming too old for parts they’d like to play, heavy people often here “you’re great, we love you, but you are too young.’”  Roles for heavier people, tend to be written for middle age persons or older, he explained.  So while other actors fear getting old, heavy set actors fret that they look too young.

Enterprising and willing to go anywhere to act, Shapiro took a job in Pinocchio playing  Geppetto for a touring national children’s theatre company, and when he came back to New York in 2005 saw an ad for a paid workshop in Jewsical, the Chosen Musical, a collection of shtick and satire written by Joel Paley and Marvin Laird.  He got the part of Mendy Bloom, the president of Temple Ben Shtiller, and “it was the first time I ever was involved with a new project.  It was crazy originating a role with nothing to model myself after, just having to create a character.”

The Mendy character was “sort of a macher, he knew everything about everybody,” Shapiro recalled.  “I started thinking of men I knew in my life that reminded me of that sort – very confident, assertive, slightly-know-it-all.   I actually modeled Mendy after my grandfather; I kept asking myself ‘what would my grandfather do?’  He was the kind of person who always stood very straight, and kept his face very controlled and his speech very controlled.  When people asked him a question, there’d be a head nod, and a silence as if he were thinking whether he agreed with the person or not.  And he had perfect posture—something I don’t have, except when a show is on.”

The staged reading went well in New York City, and Shapiro traveled with a production of Jewsical to South Florida, where it was well received, and then to Denver, where it was not.  “I can’t say that the appeal was universal,” Shapiro reflected.  “You didn’t need to be Jewish but you needed to understand Jewish humor. … People in New York, Florida, the Catskills, Chicago, LA got it, but it was a how that needed its demographic.  Denver did not have that….”

Then came auditions for the  Henry and Mudge touring production “about a boy and his lovable, slobbering dog, Mudge… I told them I could play a big lovable slobbering dog, and they apparently agreed and gave me a six month contract playing Mudge.”  The job also came with a coveted Actor’s Equity card, “so I jumped, no, I sat up and begged and wagged my tail, and spent six months touring the northeast and Midwest doing

 

 

There have been disappointments along the way.  Shapiro was called back six times during the audition process for one current Broadway show, but the part went to someone else.  “You try not to get your hopes up, but at the same time when you get six callbacks, your hopes are high, your hopes are up, and when it didn’t happen it was hard, very hard.  My manager was trying to be such a parent—and I needed emotional support to get through that one.   But that’s the business.  It is going to happen.  I am almost glad that it happened to me so early in my career, because now I know how it feels.”

Bouncing back, Shapiro decided to audition for the National Yiddish Theatre – an act some might consider chutzpah because he doesn’t speak Yiddish.  But, even so, the people there liked him enough to arrange for a language coach to teach him the general meaning of his lines, and to help him understand on which words to put the emphasis.  “The assistant director and I would hole up in a room for two hours at a time and he would work with me and make recordings for me.”  Gimpel Tam received favorable reviews in the New York press, and Shapiro still kvells over having his picture in the New York Times along with some kind words from a critic.

Shapiro’s manager told him of the opening on the Rotterdam.  “It was a new Showroom at Sea concept,” Shapiro recalled.  “Instead of the typical four-singer, ten-dancer cast, they wanted a cast of six singers and two dancers, with all the singers having their own specialty styles.  One of those was a ‘musical comedy male’ who must be comfortable doing comedic material – ‘think Nathan Lane, Zero Mostel or Martin Short’ and I said, ‘oh wow, that does kind of sound like me.’”

Although he auditioned enthusiastically, he harbored some doubts.  Would it be good for his career to be so far from New York for so long.  “So I talked to my agent and he said ‘listen, we are still fighting the battle of your age; people are still saying you are too young, so I think right now this would be an incredible opportunity.  You will be singing for a solid year, so your voice will be in incredible shape when you come back and you will travel places you never thought of going’ which has been so true…”

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Next: Cruise ship humor

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Harrison is editor of San Diego Jewish World