At Joe’s Pizza on Carmine Avenue, Marc Shaiman, the celebrated composer and lyricist, dropped his slice on the ground. “Ugh, it’s the Shaiman vortex,” he mentioned. “Every little thing I come close to breaks.”
Shaiman, sixty-six and a self-described Eeyore, with a scruff of white beard, was feeling fragile. He’d spent the previous week holed up in his Chelsea residence, obsessively rerecording a Barbra Streisand anecdote for the audiobook of his new memoir, “By no means Thoughts the Pleased: Showbiz Tales from a Sore Winner.” It had been a tricky yr, with a barrage of losses—most not too long ago, his golden retriever, Chops, had died all of a sudden on the upstate home he shares along with his military-veteran husband, an occasion so disturbing that Shaiman has imagined tearing up the ground the place it occurred. Throughout a classroom go to at N.Y.U.’s drama faculty, the scholars’ angelic harmonies, plus a request for a deep lower of his—“Drifting,” a ballad of insecurity impressed by his collaborator and ex, Scott Wittman—acquired Shaiman so choked up that he apprehensive he’d scared the younger artists.
However strolling over to Marie’s Disaster Café, the venerable show-tune sing-along joint, he perked up. He gazed over on the marquee of the IFC Heart, previously the Waverly Theatre, and mentioned, “Me and Sal had been hams.” On a snowy evening in 1976, the teen-age Shaiman and his pal Sal Piro had impulsively joined the road for a screening of “The Rocky Horror Image Present.” They got here again the following evening, then almost each weekend for months, tossing out zingers and constructing a shared queer ritual from scratch. Shaiman’s contributions included a reference to an previous Shake ’n Bake TV advert: “And we helped!”
“It was the perfect time of my life,” Shaiman mentioned, with a smile. “You’re fearless whenever you’re younger.” On the downtown venue Membership 57, he and Wittman had staged camp productions, like “The Sound of Muzak,” starring Holly Woodlawn (“When the canine bites / When my pee stings”). Then Shaiman rocketed to success—touring along with his hero Bette Midler, within the seventies, taking part in piano on “Saturday Night time Stay,” within the eighties, and scoring a panoply of film hits, many in collaboration with Rob Reiner. Shaiman co-wrote the music and lyrics for the primary “South Park” film (a fart faucet dance was his thought); within the two-thousands, he co-created a collection of main musicals (“Hairspray,” “Smash”). There have been pot years and coke years, good instances and bum instances—or, in his phrases, “for each plotz, a zetz.”
On the bar at Marie’s, Shaiman ran right into a casting director he’d final seen at a memorial service for the conductor Glen Roven. Within the late eighties, Roven had been forged with Shaiman within the movie “Broadcast Information,” for a well-known scene by which the 2 of them pitch a network-news theme music. (“Large end!”)
Cartoon by Ellis Rosen
“He and I had been the identical particular person, just about,” Shaiman mentioned, sipping a Weight loss plan Coke—two quick, homosexual Jewish boys, teen tyros chasing the last word excessive: excellent composition. The casting director informed Shaiman that Roven had been “in awe” of his expertise.
“We had been insanely jealous of one another!” Shaiman mentioned, with amusing.
When the bar crowd launched into the rating of “Les Misérables,” Shaiman introduced, “That’s when the bitterness started!” He’d rankled on the rise of the British “spectacle” musical, again within the eighties. He nonetheless remembers each bump within the street, enumerating previous Twitter wars, critics who’d referred to as his songs “unmemorable,” and short-lived labors of affection just like the musical adaptation of “Catch Me If You Can,” which hang-out him, even now. He’s had Broadway blockbusters and 7 Oscar nominations; he’s thrilled that his trans-positive musical adaptation of “Some Like It Sizzling” has been embraced on tour, even in crimson states. However taking dangers doesn’t get simpler. “My pores and skin has gotten thinner as a substitute of thicker,” he mentioned.
Throughout a break, the home pianist invited Shaiman to the keyboard, the place he unspooled his origin story for the group: he’d wandered into Marie’s at sixteen, and, in a Hollywood miracle, the proprietor clocked his piano abilities and tipped him off to a job on the Duplex, down the road, plus a gig taking part in piano at Marie’s. (Shaiman had lied about his age.) He stop Marie’s a couple of months later, shortly after a New 12 months’s social gathering the place the employees hung him off the balcony in a diaper. By then, he was staying in Wittman’s place on Seventy-ninth Avenue, conveniently located throughout the corridor from one among Midler’s backup singers, identified collectively because the Harlettes.
Shaiman stood as much as hammer out a rollicking model of “Good Morning Baltimore,” then collapsed again onto the piano bench. “I’m exhausted,” he joked, and requested if there have been any requests.
“ ‘They Simply Preserve Shifting the Line’?” a sweet-faced brunette referred to as out.
He seemed apprehensive. “Do you know that one?” he requested the group.
Not everybody did, however individuals learn the lyrics off of their telephones. In a wobbly voice, the brunette started the quantity, from “Smash,” getting bolder by the climax. “So I made associates with rejection / I’ve straightened up my backbone!” Then the group chimed in, belting out Shaiman’s excellent ode to by no means feeling such as you’ve nailed it. ♦
