WHAT ABOUT BOB
Meet the guy who leaps, flips, climbs and giggles as B’way’s hottest Sponge
The star of “SpongeBob SquarePants” knows his sponges, in the kitchen and onstage. Just so happens that offstage, he swears by Scrub Daddy. And before Nickelodeon flips out over that unauthorized endorsement, please note that it’s Ethan Slater — Broadway’s SpongeBob — who’s doing the endorsing.
“Scrub Daddy was on ‘Shark Tank,’” he tells The Post about his favorite kitchen tool. “It’s a smiley-face sponge that’s easy to hold, and you can really scrub your pans after you’ve scorched them. It’s fantastic!”
“Fantastic” is pretty much what theatergoers and critics are calling the star of “SpongeBob SquarePants: The Musical.” Just 25 years old and “a tick under 5 foot 7,” Slater is a whirlwind as the amiable sea creature who lives in a pineapple under the sea. In a red tie, yellow shirt and plaid pants, he not only can sing upside down, but can hit a high A while doing a split and belting out David Bowie’s “No Control.”
As far as director Tina Landau’s concerned, there’d be no show without him.
“From the first go-round, it became clear that he was our SpongeBob,” Landau says. “We needed someone sunny and slightly off-kilter, and Ethan’s a sort of idiosyncratic optimist with his own particular charming lovely quirks . . . Some people can go cross-eyed, but Ethan can move one eye at a time.
“And he does eight shows a week,” she says. “It’s remarkable that the guy’s still standing!”
Sitting quietly between shows the other day, Slater describes the long road to Bikini Bottom. It was a trek that started six years ago, when he, a ginger-haired doctor’s son from Washington, DC, was a sophomore at Vassar College.
He’d just auditioned for a summer theater production of “Romeo and Juliet” when the casting director told him there was another, untitled project that Slater might be good for. Amazingly, he was offered both. Soon, the 19-year-old had a dilemma few actors have faced before or since: Should he play Benvolio . . . or SpongeBob? “It was a shockingly difficult decision,” says Slater, who, deprived of cable TV as a child, watched “SpongeBob” at his friends’ homes and loved it. But then again, he loved Shakespeare, too. A professor, whom he trusted, assured him that the Bard would always be there — but that he’d always regret passing up the chance to work with Landau, a playwright and director whose work Slater had long admired. So began years of workshops, which conveniently fell during Vassar’s winter and summer breaks. “I missed a total of two days of classes over a couple of years,” Slater says, happily. Not only did he graduate, but he actually had a job afterward: one that had him training with acrobats, contortionists, dancers, a choreographer and a singing coach. (“His skill set expanded exponentially,” Landau says.) His career as a high-school wrestler came in handy, too. “It taught me a lot of discipline and body awareness,” Slater says. “I’m used to working hard and making sacrifices.” That last one has entailed not only giving up alcohol (“That wasn’t a hard one to cut out,” says the teetotaler), but also dairy, bread and tomatoes. “So my favorite food, pizza, is gone,” says Slater, who spends his free time cooking and baking with anti-inflammatory foods such as almond flour and quinoa in his Bedford-Stuyvesant kitchen. “But it’s worth it,” he says. “You have to treat yourself well to make it work, and a lot of people are helping me — physically and emotionally.” One of them is his fiancée, a graduate student in psychology whom he’s known since middle school, but whose name he’d rather not see published. Certainly, she considers him sponge-worthy? He blushes, and his face nearly matches his hair. (We’ll take that as a yes.) Which brings us to yellow, SpongeBob’s color. Isn’t Slater a little sick of it by now? “Yellow’s never been a good color for me,” he concedes, “but it’s actually grown on me. I like it more than I used to!”