Old schoolmates splash their way into Broadway
Who could have foreseen back in 2009, when they were co-starring as Leo and Max in their high school production of “The Producers” at Georgetown Day School, that Ethan Slater and Noah Robbins would both rocket onto Broadway?
It’s wild, really. Two former schoolmates in their 20s, on independent theatrical paths that did not include stops at acting conservatories, landed lead Broadway roles on their first serious attempts — and then received glowing reviews for their efforts, the kind that answer a young actor’s prayers. Robbins, 27, from Potomac, Maryland, got there first, in a Broadway revival of Neil Simon’s “Brighton Beach Memoirs” that led to multiple plays offBroadway and appearances on television series such as “Masters of Sex” and on “Grease Live!”
Slater, 26, who grew up in Silver Spring, Maryland, and Washington, D.C., took a little longer, but when he arrived on Broadway in November, he made an almost instant splash, as the title character in the new “SpongeBob SquarePants, The Broadway Musical.”
“It’s too much to process,” Slater says.
“It’s crazy,” declares Robbins.
Adds Laura Rosberg, the drama teacher at Georgetown Day who directed them in “The Producers” and other plays and musicals says: “There are kids you know who just sparkle. And they just sparkled.”
On the occasion of Slater’s breakthrough — a deft, acrobatic and thoroughly affectionate imagining of what a popular cartoon character would be like in human form — I wanted to get Robbins and Slater back together, to chat about the parallel paths their lives are taking, as well as about the highly regarded theater program at the private school in D.C. that set this all in motion. I invited Rosberg to reunite with her students, too: She and Slater met for the conversation in the lounge of a hotel in Lower Manhattan, and Robbins joined via Skype from Los Angeles, where he was screen-testing for a role in a movie.
High school drama clubs can foster bonds that go deep and last a long time. Anyone who participated in high school theater knows the rapturous adrenaline rush of those performance nights before friends and family — and the precipitous drop into melancholy after the final curtain, when the backdrops painted by students in art classes are being struck and you have to adjust again to everyday study-period and lunchroom reality.
So the gathering of Slater, Robbins and Rosberg created a particularly joyful atmosphere, with lots of reminiscences of a production that — with apologies to Nathan Lane, Matthew Broderick and the rest of the original, multiple Tony-winning Broadway version — was probably, no doubt, well of course, the best “Producers” anyone anywhere has ever done.
“I don’t think it’s a coincidence that Noah and I could star in a Broadway show,” Slater says, paying tribute to the start he got with Rosberg, whom he described as a mentor who took her productions and the commitment she expected from students highly seriously. “I have said this to all my friends,” he continues. “She trusted each of us with a lot of responsibility.”
Such pronouncements only confirm for Robbins the pivotal moment it was for him, playing, as a mere teenager, a sleazy producer of advancing years who swindles old ladies out of their nest eggs. “The more time that goes by, the more certain I am that ‘The Producers’ was an unbelievable experience,” the actor declares. “I was so proud of that show.” So proud, he adds, that he still lists it as a credit on his professional resume.
Mutual respect
Slater and Robbins both live in New York now and have stayed in touch; Robbins was Slater’s guest at the early December opening night of “SpongeBob” — Rosberg attended a few weeks later — but they have yet to work together professionally. They’re both compact of stature but of different builds; Slater is muscular, where Robbins is wiry. Though they are different physical types, they did bump into each other in a casting office one day: They were auditioning, they discovered, for the same role. It was in a horror movie. Neither of them got it.
But hey, you’ll hear no depressing war stories from these two. Robbins was cast as Eugene Jerome, the adolescent lead in “Brighton Beach Memoirs” about a month before graduating from Georgetown Day, a classic case of being singled out by a producer and a director at an early audition. Several callbacks later, he was a Broadway leading man, and though the revival was lamentably short-lived, an impressive career was launched.
The Columbia University-educated Robbins found additional dramatic work that got him noticed: One of his bestreceived recent stage performances was as Hally, the entitled young white South African in the Manhattan-based Signature Theatre’s 2016 revival of Athol Fugard’s apartheid play, “Master Harold ... and the Boys.”
Slater, meanwhile, has been the resilient central character from Bikini Bottom for the five years or so that the “SpongeBob” musical, based on the popular Nickelodeon cartoon series, has been in development. While attending Vassar College, Slater, whose father and stepmother work respectively for the Food and Drug Administration and the National Institutes of Health — his mother, a lawyer, died some years ago— was apprenticing in a Shakespeare program. As a result, he was asked to audition for director Tina Landau, who was then in the early stages of assembling the musical for its workshops and readings.
From the start, something about the athletic Slater seemed SpongeBob-worthy. Or SquarePantsy. “We cast him because he seemed to have the right combination of optimism and positive energy and sort of an organic, off-kilter humor,” Landau recalls in a telephone interview. “He had this obvious physical flexibility and ease, too. So we cast him on a hunch, and from the second we were working, there was no going back.”
In a musical comedy peppered with new pop songs by more than a dozen well-known artists, Slater plays SpongeBob with no mandate to replicate slavishly the cartoon character’s geometric look or nasal vocalizations; silent film clown Buster Keaton, he says, was an inspiration. And yet, everyone tells him he is SpongeBob SquarePants incarnate.
Landau reports that a group of kids who were fans of the cartoon were brought in to see a workshop, and the creative team nervously waited to see whether the lessthan-literal interpretation would fly. They needn’t have worried. Landau says: “My favorite comment was when they said they finally got to see what SpongeBob looks like ‘in real life.’”
Robbins says he was blown away by Slater’s performance, in which he’s called on over the course of 2 hours to perform the some of the death-defying skills you might expect to encounter at an Olympic event.
“What Ethan is doing right now is so beyond,” Robbins says as Slater gazed at him on the computer screen, smiling sheepishly. “To be the lead of a show that you are carrying in some fundamental way ...”
Slater returned the compliment, and then some. “I would credit my thinking that I could probably do this to Noah,” he says. “Noah is the best actor I’ve ever met.”
Rosberg listened to her former students, her own pride evident. Turning talented pupils into stars was never the point, she stresses. But it sure can be fun when it happens.
“I got all teary eyed,” she says of watching Slater on the Palace Theatre stage. “And I was totally objective about it.”