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 Isaw. 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.”

Source: LI Press