‘Mormon’ star in S.F.
Bay Area native Spangler to sing rarities, tell stories for 1 night
Since I’ve Been Gone: 8 p.m. Thursday, Dec. 28. $22.50$50. Feinstein’s at the Nikko, 222 Mason St., S.F. www.feinsteinsatthenikko.com Nick Spangler brings his one-man show, “Since I’ve Been Gone,” to Feinstein’s.
his Area mother Growing time stages. put singing up, him When Nick in and a he Spangler production dancing was 5, his on spent of Bay “The Wizard of Oz” at the Los Altos Youth Theater. “I specifically remember taking my very first curtain call, and it was awesome,” he says. “I was just like, ‘OK, this is it. This is what I want to do.’ I did not stop from then on out.” By the time Spangler left his South Bay hometown to study musical theater as an undergrad at New York University and returned to perform again in San Francisco nearly 15 years later, he had performed in one of Broadway’s biggest musicals ever — “The Book of Mormon” — and added “star of a television
show” to his resume.
In fact, Spangler’s theater credits might be trumped only by his title as Season 13 winner, alongside his sister, Emily “Starr” Spangler, of “The Amazing Race” in 2008.
Those experiences outside the Bay Area are the subject of Spangler’s one-night, one-man show “Since I’ve Been Gone,” billed as an evening of song and storytelling scheduled for Thursday, Dec. 28, at Feinstein’s at the Nikko in San Francisco.
However, the 32-yearold Los Altos native’s true ceremonious return performance was at the SHN Orpheum Theatre when the Broadway musical “An American in Paris,” in which Spangler plays one of the leads, Henri Baurel, came to town this past fall at the tail end of a year of national touring.
“Since I’ve Been Gone” came together as a direct result of the musical’s San Francisco run.
Spangler was asked to put together his own show after the “Paris” cast performed a benefit concert organized by SHN as part of the theater company’s partnership with Feinstein’s at the Nikko and Broadway Cares, a nonprofit that raises money from the larger American theater community to fight AIDS. Spangler was inspired to create a chronological update on his life after reminiscing with old friends throughout his return home for “An American in Paris.”
“While we did the show here for a month, every single performance, I would walk out the stage door, and a new person would be like, ‘Nick! Oh, my God, I haven’t seen you in 20 years or 15 years,’ ” Spangler says. “Or, like, ‘Hey, remember I played your dad when you were in ‘The Music Man’ at 9 years old?’ ”
In “Since I’ve Been Gone,” Spangler chronicles his theater journey from the college years to his time on Broadway, which, aside from “The Book of Mormon,” has included roles in “It Shoulda Been You” and “Rodgers and Hammerstein’s Cinderella.” But his first big break came in a multiyear run offBroadway in “The Fantasticks.”
At the end of the show’s first run, Spangler and his sister traveled five continents and 30,000 miles before taking home $1 million in “The Amazing Race,” only for Spangler to return and immediately jump back into another mounting of “The Fantasticks.”
“On Sunday nights, I would be performing at the Snapple Theater in Times Square, and we would have a little TV backstage, and at 8 o’clock, ‘The Amazing Race’ would air. At intermission, we’d be crowded around this little TV watching it,” he says.
After “The Fantasticks” came roles in musicals that never found their way onto the stage or experienced short-lived runs, featuring music that might have never seen the light of day — if not for Spangler’s reviving them for “Since I’ve Been Gone.”
“I started looking at all the music I had with me on the road and I thought, ‘Man, I could do a really cool show with a lot of musical theater songs that nobody on this coast has even heard of,’ ” Spangler says. Some of the songs, which include a few duets with his other sister, Joyah Spangler, will be heard for the first and perhaps only time onstage.
While considered a Broadway veteran, Spangler admits that the intimate, one-night show might be more nerveracking than any other show.
“People always say, ‘Do you get nervous when you’re performing for 2,000 people? Do you get stage fright?’ ” Spangler says. “It could be 10,000 people or a million people, I don’t care — it’s when there’s one person that I actually do know in the audience, that’s when I get worried.”
And with this show, he suspects some 90 percent of the audience will consist of people he knows personally.
“So it’s that double edge,” Spangler says. “It’s sure to be a warm and welcoming crowd, but at the same time, for me internally, I’ll be agonizing over every note.”
“I started looking at all the music I had with me on the road and I thought, ‘Man, I could do a really cool show with a lot of musical theater songs that nobody on this coast has even heard of.’ ” Nick Spangler, on “Since I’ve Been Gone”