Mel Shapiro: Celebrated Director and Champion of John Guare’s Art Passes Away at 89

Mel Shapiro, a celebrated theater director whose partnerships with the playwright John Guare featured their lauded musical adaptation of Shakespeare’s comedy “The Two Gentlemen of Verona” and the Off-Broadway debut of “The House of Blue Leaves,” passed away on Dec. 23 at his residence in Los Angeles. He was 89.

His son Josh indicated that the cause was lung cancer.

Beginning his career in the 1960s, Mr. Shapiro led plays and musicals in New York City and various locations across the nation, collaborated with prestigious regional theaters, and instructed acting and directing at prominent universities.

In 1969, when Mr. Guare sought a director for “Blue Leaves,” he consulted John Lahr, a former literary director at the Guthrie Theater in Minneapolis who later became a theater critic for The New Yorker. He suggested Mr. Shapiro, who had served as a producing director at the Guthrie.

Mr. Lahr, as Mr. Guare recounted in an interview, remarked, “The two of you were destined to collaborate.” Their introduction occurred when Mr. Shapiro directed Vaclav Havel’s play “The Increased Difficulty of Conversation” at Lincoln Center. “I adored the play, met Mel and admired Mel,” Mr. Guare shared.

“The House of Blue Leaves” — a dark comedy regarding a zookeeper, cohabiting with his mentally challenged spouse in Queens, who dreams of a songwriting career in Hollywood — debuted in early 1971 at the Truck and Warehouse Theater in the East Village.

In a review for The New York Times, Clive Barnes described the play as “mad, amusing, occasionally very amusing,” and commended Mr. Shapiro’s “lightly sharp staging.” It received the Obie and Drama Critics’ Circle Awards for outstanding American play.

Shortly thereafter, Joseph Papp, the director of the New York Shakespeare Festival and founder of the Public Theater, requested Mr. Shapiro to helm “The Two Gentlemen of Verona” in Central Park during the summer of 1971.

“I revisited the play that evening and exclaimed, ‘Oh, my God, this is such a train wreck,’” Mr. Shapiro conveyed to The Star Tribune of Minneapolis in 1974. He informed Mr. Papp that “Two Gentlemen,” an early, troublesome Shakespeare comedy, would falter when transitioning from the Delacorte Theater in the park to the Public’s mobile unit, which brought performances throughout the city where audiences occasionally bombarded actors with chairs and stones.

Mr. Shapiro sought out Galt MacDermot, the composer most recognized for “Hair,” to develop a rock score, and invited Mr. Guare to pen lyrics. “I informed Papp of my actions and he responded, ‘You truly are creating a musical!’” Mr. Shapiro recounted.

The risk paid off. “Two Gentlemen of Verona” (the musical version omitting the “The”) garnered the Obie Award for best direction and the Drama Critics’ Circle Award for best musical. After its Broadway transfer in late 1971, it won Tony Awards for best musical (it faced competition from Stephen Sondheim’s “Follies”) and best book of a musical, which Mr. Shapiro and Mr. Guare adapted from Shakespeare’s five acts into a concise 90-minute performance. Mr. Shapiro was also nominated for best director.

Melvin Irwin Shapiro was born on Dec. 16, 1935, in Brooklyn. His father, Benjamin, deserted him at a young age, and he was raised by his mother, Lee (Lazarus) Shapiro, who managed the household, and his stepfather, Jimmy Curran, a truck driver.

Mel’s fascination with Broadway ignited during high school, when he and some companions would take the subway from Brooklyn to Manhattan to watch performances. However, his pressing desire to escape his dysfunctional family — along with the ambition of attending college funded by the G.I. Bill — compelled him to enlist in the Army towards the end of the Korean War. He acquired the Korean language skills at the Army Language School in Monterey, Calif., and served as a translator in Japan for two years.

During his free time, Mr. Shapiro joined a collective of American, British, and Australian diplomats who established an amateur theater. He initially served as a prop manager for Noël Coward’s “Blithe Spirit,” and subsequently as an assistant director, before making his directorial debut with “The Diary of Anne Frank.”

“I had no understanding of how I accomplished it or organized it,” he told the online interviewer Brian Snyder in 2021. “A young kid instructing everyone on what to do onstage.”

Following his military service, Mr. Shapiro registered at the Carnegie Institute of Technology (now known as Carnegie Mellon University) in Pittsburgh and obtained bachelor’s and master’s degrees in fine arts from its School of Drama in 1961.

After directing productions at the University of Washington in Seattle, the Pittsburgh Playhouse, and other venues, he was employed in 1963 at Arena Stage in Washington, a trailblazing regional theater, where he directed Eugene O’Neill’s “Long Day’s Journey into Night” and George Bernard Shaw’s “Heartbreak House,” among other works.

He commenced teaching acting at New York University in 1966 — he is acknowledged as a co-founder of its School of the Arts (currently the Tisch School of the Arts) — while simultaneously serving as a resident director of the Stanford Repertory Theater in California.

The actress Barbara Cason, whom Mr. Shapiro directed in a Stanford Rep staging of Thornton Wilder’s “The Skin of Our Teeth,” remarked to The Palo Alto Times in 1965: “He crafts in bold, broad strokes while shaping the play in initial rehearsals. Then he revisits and fine-tunes, focusing on details.”

He departed from the Stanford theater in 1967 for a two-year engagement at the Guthrie, where he remained for around two years.