If you were to look up the word ubiquitous in the dictionary, it wouldn’t be surprising to see Marc Shaiman’s picture next to it. While his name may bear a whiff of familiarity to it, the work of this award-winning composer/lyricist/pianist, includes Broadway (“Hairspray,” “Charlie and the Chocolate Factory,” “Smash”), television (“Comic Relief,” “Only Murders in the Building”) and film (“When Harry Met Sally…,” “Sister Act,” “Mary Poppins Returns”).
It’s been a wild ride for the musical theater prodigy who recounts all this and more in his new memoir ‘Never Mind the Happy: Showbiz Stories From a Sore Winner.”
As part of his book tour, Shaiman is having special musical guests/friends appear at different dates, including Christine Ebersol, Bette Midler, and Michael Bublé. For the septuagenarian author/performer’s May 9 appearance at Cinema Arts Centre, his special guest will be Northport native and Broadway grand dame Patti LuPone.
Currently working with LuPone on an upcoming project, attendees can expect to hear the duo debut a new song at this event.
“One song I know Patti LuPone is going to sing is from a new show me and [my collaborator Scott [Wittman] are putting together for her and Bridget Everett, who is a great performer,” Shaiman said. “It’s called ‘If Tears Were Only Calories, Think How Thin I’d Be.’ This is the first time Patti will sing it in public. I’m also going to ask her to sing something else. It doesn’t have to be something I wrote. As I say in the book,
I enjoy accompanying people on songs I didn’t write.”
‘Never Mind the Happy’ is chock full of stories of a young Shaiman growing up in New Jersey, having the original soundtrack to ‘Mary Poppins” stoke his interest in piano (“I even knew as a four-year-old, there was something about those instruments and the way they were playing. I didn’t know what they were called, what they were doing, how you play them or anything at all. I just knew I liked the way it felt to listen to this.”).
At the ripe age of 13, he was playing musical accompaniment to ‘Funny Girl’ at the local adult community theater.
By the time he was 16, he got his GED having started working in New York theaters. At home, he was plastering his bedroom with posters of Midler while worshipping his idol from afar. It wasn’t long before he wound up in her orbit, eventually becoming her musical director and co-producer of many of her recordings.
Most interesting was that long before Shaiman connected with the Divine Miss M, fate provided a bit of foreshadowing when she first came on the radar of the self-described “little pimple on legs.”
“I write in the book that I don’t remember seeing it, but I know I went to see ‘Fiddler on the Roof’ with my family,” Shaiman recalled. “I had the program and I was obsessed with this one woman in all the pictures of that production of “Fiddler on the Roof” that I
saw. I was seven or eight and it was Bette Midler playing Tzeitel. Even then, I was just drawn to her face, personality and the emotion in her face. I consider her a remarkably talented woman who is the greatest live performer of our generation and someone who’s like a sister to me.”
Among the Grammy, Tony and Academy Award nods and wins he’s had, the experience Shaiman had working with Trey Parker and Matt Stone on the 1999 animated film “South Park: Bigger, Longer & Uncut” stands out for him.
While his “Blame Canada” lost the Oscar for Best Original Song to Phil Collins’ “You’ll Be My Heart” from “Tarzan,” Shaiman has warm memories from the whole “South Park” rollercoaster ride.
“I’ll never forget the premier where the reaction was so tumultuous,” Shaiman said. It was a big Hollywood premiere full of Matt and Trey’s friends along with people prone to want to love a South Park movie. There all this screaming, loving and stamping of feet
and I said, ‘I’ll never watch this movie again. I don’t ever want to experience it again unless it’s this.’ I honestly did not ever watch the movie again until the 20th anniversary [of its release] when I was invited out to Brooklyn to see it. I thought it won’t be like Grauman’s Chinese Theatre, but it was time for me to watch this movie again. It was enjoyable.”
With plans to play the part of a pianist in an unnamed project in addition to working on the music for Crystal’s upcoming Broadway one-man show in the fall, Shaiman isn’t having the retirement he quite envisioned. If busy is good, then saying yes on a regular basis
basis is something that has not only served him well, but a piece of advice he’s been known to share.
“I know you shouldn’t say yes to everything, but you just never know who is going to be there or who is going to hear you,” he said. “When I was 16-years-old and went with my friends to catch up, we happened to be in front of Marie’s Crisis Café piano bar. If I hadn’t gone to the piano and played it, the bartender wouldn’t have stopped and said, ‘Hey kid, you’re good.’ I ended up with two jobs in one day that led me to Bette Midler.”
Marc Shaiman will be appearing with Patti LuPone on May 9 at Cinema Arts Centre at 423 Park Ave. in Huntington. For more information, visit www.cinemaartscentre.org or call 631-423-7610.
