Mel Shapiro, an award-winning theater director whose collaborations with the playwright John Guare included their critically acclaimed musical version 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 home in Los Angeles. He was 89.
His 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 around the country, worked at elite regional theaters, and taught acting and directing at major universities.
In 1969, when Mr. Guare was seeking a director for “Blue Leaves,” he spoke to John Lahr, 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 a producing director at the Guthrie.
Mr. Lahr, Mr. Guare recalled in an interview, said, “The two of you were made to work together.” They met when Mr. Shapiro directed Vaclav Havel’s play “The Increased Difficulty of Conversation” at Lincoln Center. “I loved the play, met Mel and loved Mel,” Mr. Guare said.
“The House of Blue Leaves” — a dark comedy about a zookeeper, living with his mentally ill wife in Queens, who aspires to a songwriting career in Hollywood — opened in early 1971 at the Truck and Warehouse Theater in the East Village.
Reviewing it in The New York Times, Clive Barnes called the play “mad, funny, at times very funny,” and praised Mr. Shapiro’s “fliply crisp staging.” It won the Obie and Drama Critics’ Circle Awards for best American play.
Soon after, Joseph Papp, director of the New York Shakespeare Festival and founder of the Public Theater, asked Mr. Shapiro to direct “The Two Gentlemen of Verona” in Central Park in the summer of 1971.
“I reread the play that night and said, ‘Oh, my God, this is such a dog,’” Mr. Shapiro told The Star Tribune of Minneapolis in 1974. He told Mr. Papp that “Two Gentlemen,” an early, problematic Shakespeare comedy, would not work when it transferred from the Delacorte Theater in the park to the Public’s mobile unit, which brought productions around the city and where audiences sometimes pelted actors with chairs and rocks.
Mr. Shapiro asked Galt MacDermot, the composer best known for “Hair,” to write a rock score and Mr. Guare to write lyrics. “I told Papp what I’d done and he said, ‘You really are doing a musical!’” Mr. Shapiro said.
The gamble worked. “Two Gentlemen of Verona” (the musical rendered the title without the “The”) won the Obie Award for best direction and the Drama Critics’ Circle Award for best musical. After it moved to Broadway in late 1971, it earned Tony Awards for best musical (its competition included Stephen Sondheim’s “Follies”) and best book of a musical, which Mr. Shapiro and Mr. Guare shaped from Shakespeare’s five acts into a 90-minute show. Mr. Shapiro was also nominated for best director.
Melvin Irwin Shapiro was born on Dec. 16, 1935, in Brooklyn. His father, Benjamin, abandoned him at a young age, and he was raised by his mother, Lee (Lazarus) Shapiro, who ran the home, and his stepfather, Jimmy Curran, a truck driver.
Mel’s love affair with Broadway began in high school, when he and some friends would take the subway from Brooklyn into Manhattan to see shows. But his urgent need to leave his dysfunctional family — and the hope of attending college paid for by the G.I. Bill — led him to join the Army near the end of the Korean War. He learned to speak Korean at the Army Language School in Monterey, Calif., and served as a translator in Japan for two years.
In his spare time, Mr. Shapiro joined a group of American, British and Australian diplomats who had formed an amateur theater. He was first a prop manager, for Noël Coward’s “Blithe Spirit,” and then an assistant director, before making his directorial debut with “The Diary of Anne Frank.”
“I had no idea how I did it or organized it,” he told the online interviewer Brian Snyder in 2021. “A young kid telling everybody what to do onstage.”
After his Army service, Mr. Shapiro enrolled at the Carnegie Institute of Technology (now Carnegie Mellon University) in Pittsburgh and received bachelor and master of fine arts degrees from its School of Drama in 1961.
After directing plays at the University of Washington in Seattle, the Pittsburgh Playhouse and elsewhere, he was hired in 1963 at Arena Stage in Washington, a pioneering regional theater, where he directed Eugene O’Neill’s “Long Day’s Journey into Night” and George Bernard Shaw’s “Heartbreak House,” among other plays.
He began teaching acting at New York University in 1966 — he is credited as a founder of its School of the Arts (now the Tisch School of the Arts) — while he was a resident director of the Stanford Repertory Theater in California.
The actress Barbara Cason, whom Mr. Shapiro directed in a Stanford Rep production of Thornton Wilder’s “The Skin of Our Teeth,” told The Palo Alto Times in 1965: “He paints in bold, broad strokes while shaping the play in early rehearsals. Then he goes back and refines, working on details.”
He left the Stanford theater in 1967 for a two-year stint at the Guthrie, where he also stayed for about two years.
In New York City in the 1970s, Mr. Shapiro directed three more plays by Mr. Guare — “Bosoms and Neglect,” on Broadway, and “Rich and Famous” and “Marco Polo Sings a Solo,” off Broadway — as well as 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 gift for winning the actors’ trust,” Mr. Guare said. “He was a tough but gentle guy; that gentleness didn’t overpower actors, and when he found the right actors, they just wanted to please him.”
Disillusioned with commercial theater, Mr. Shapiro returned to Carnegie Mellon in 1980 as head of the school of drama. He remained there for a decade before he was hired as the head of graduate acting in the theater department at the University of California, Los Angeles. He retired in 2011.
Paul Schoeffler, an actor who was one of Mr. Shapiro’s students at Carnegie Mellon, wrote on Facebook after his death: “He challenged all of us. He would throw you into the deep end of the pool, as it were, to see how you would fare and what you would learn. It was only later that I discovered that he loved it when people pushed back.”
In addition to his son Josh, Mr. Shapiro is survived by his wife, Jeanne (Paynter) Shapiro, a former fund-raiser for the Pittsburgh public television station WQED; another son, Ben; and a grandson.
Mr. Shapiro was the author of two textbooks, “An Actor Performs” (1997) and “The Director’s Companion” (1998), and a play, “The Lay of the Land,” a comedy about a couple fighting to save their marriage, which won the National Arts Club’s Joseph Kesselring Prize for emerging playwrights in 1990.
The actress and director Lee Grant, who in 1991 directed a production of “The Lay of the Land” at the Pittsburgh Public Theater, said that she had been preparing to make a documentary about divorce when she received Mr. Shapiro’s script.
“I’ve been looking for a play that explores this kind of obsession,” she told The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, which she described as “that fascination we have with people we couldn’t live without but now can’t live with, the love of your life.”