From ‘SpongeBob’ to ‘Little Shop’

Will all those actors who’ve struggled to find success please take one step forward?

Not so fast, Ethan Slater.

Mr. Slater, 34, now starring in “The Little Shop of Horrors,” has had the kind of career most actors dream of as they wait tables. In a recent Zoom interview he explained how that happened:

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“To be totally honest, I think I was in the right place at the right time. I was looking for opportunities to work as an apprentice in summer theater. I happened to apply to a program where you need to audition.

“They liked my audition, and so they had me come in to audition for the main stage production of ‘Romeo and Juliet.’ It was for the part of Romeo’s friend, Benvolio. I was 19 years old, and it would have been the biggest professional job I ever had.

“But it just so happened that the casting director was working with a colleague who was casting ‘SpongeBob SquarePants,’” a Broadway musical. “They’d been looking for a SpongeBob for months and months, as I understand it, and they couldn’t find anyone.

“So the casting director told her colleague, ‘Hey, I just found this kid. He’s 19 years old and the right shape.  You should give him a shot.’ So I auditioned for SpongeBob. I worked really hard on the audition. Everything just seemed aligned. I was a wrestler in high school so I knew how to move my body. I’d been studying theater at Vassar.”

As further proof that his casting was beshert, he’d been studying a book in one of his classes on actor’s viewpoint — a tome written by award-winning director Tina Landau,  who’d been working on the project for five years.

Yet it was still in the tinkering stage. There was no finished script, no music, and it was still called the untitled Tina Landau project. It took several years and a series of workshops, but in 1986, after a successful out-of-town run in Chicago, “SpongeBob” opened on Broadway, to positive reviews. The show collectively and Mr. Slater individually received dozens of honors and awards.

Since then, it seems, Mr. Slater has gone from one success to another, including another Broadway show (“Spamalot”), much regional theater, TV, and films (more on the last later).

Mr. Slater contends that sometimes life looks more glamorous than it really is. “From the outside it might look like one thing after another, but most of my days are spent writing and auditioning and doing things that are laying the groundwork for the next job.

“I think the thing that’s really helped me in my theater career — starting at the beginning with “SpongeBob” — is how much I love collaborating with people. I really enjoy the process of helping other people bring their vision to life, and having other people help me bring mine.

“That’s helped me work with some great people  and then I get to work with them again. I’m very grateful for what my career has been so far.”

What attracted him to “Little Shop”?  “A number of things,” he told me.  “First of all, it has a great reputation on its own.  Everybody knows that this” — the West Side Theater on 43rd Street— “is a great theater to work. The people are wonderful,  the experience is great, and the show itself is one of the greatest shows ever written.

“Alan Menken and Howard Ashman wrote a brilliant show that’s fun to do and fun to sing. And I also think that part of that is also the fan base.  You have amazing audiences filling the house every day.”

Mr. Slater stars as Seymour, the orphan who works in a failing florist shop and discovers a small plant that initially feeds on human blood. But as it grows, so does its appetite, until eventually it wants entire bodies.

It’s all in good fun of course, much to the delight of the audiences that have propelled this production to the head of the Shop of Horrors line.  Later this month, it will surpass the record of 2,210 performances of the original 1982 production.

“It’s pretty amazing,” Mr. Slater says about the fan reaction.  Thirty minutes after the show I attended, there were still 50 or more people waiting for Mr. Slater to make an appearance, take selfies, and sign autographs. Even my granddaughter got excited when she heard I was interviewing him.

And that has largely to do with “The Wiz” movies I alluded to before. During the production, he and its star, Ariana Grande, began a relationship.  If you don’t know who Ariana Grande is, ask the youngest person in your household.

It became the talk of the gossip world, which is why I didn’t want to ask him about it.  But I felt I had to, hoping all the time that he’d say he didn’t want to talk about it so I could move on. My journalistic responsibilities fulfilled without the need for me to jump in the shower.

I sort of backed into it, asking whether public figures give up rights to privacy?  He knew where I was going, and replied:

“It depends on who you ask. Yes and no. There are elements of life that are inherently private. For example, family and friends and other people in your life.  You know, minors have the right to privacy no matter who their parents are.

“Look. It’s a complicated thing. One that I obviously think about for myself quite a lot.”

But, I ask, did it not change your life — public and private?

“I think that’s a good question,” Mr. Slater responded. “An interesting question. I think it changes your life in a lot of ways to have people talk about you who don’t actually know what’s going on in your life, to have your story become  a fiction for someone else to create their own version of who you are and what’s going on in your life.  Ultimately, that can be kind of alienating and make you feel distrusting of the people you meet.

“As it goes on, at the same time, you develop the ability to distance yourself from it and be like, okay, what’s out there is for other people. But the people in my life who know me and who care about me and who I care about know what our lives are actually about.

“The way people talk about you, it’s the same as town gossip.  Sometimes the town gossip doesn’t know what they’re saying; they just talk. I think all this has made it clear where my energy needs to be, which is on the people in my life, my friends, my family and the real relationships, not the other ones.”

At this point, the play’s publicist politely interjects: “Feel free to answer if you want, Ethan, but Curt, do you mind keeping it to ‘Little Shop of Horrors’?”

Fortunately, Mr. Slater feels free to continue the conversation: “Look, to bring it back to the work, some people show up because they’ve seen ‘SpongeBob’ or they’ve seen ‘Wicked’ or other things I’ve done.”

Or, he continues, they’re fans of his co-stars, Betsy Wolfe, or they want to see other cast favorites.  “I think that’s something that happens as your career goes on, whether or not your personal life is in the paper.”

At the same time, he recognizes that being gossip fodder today “is an interesting thing. It gives you different kinds of opportunities, and also gives you a different way to connect to fans. I think that’s something that’s been really kind of amazing.”

Amazing, perhaps, but not likely something he anticipated growing up in the suburbs of Washington, D.C., in a Conservative Jewish household. His father, Jay, now retired, was an MD who worked for the Food and Drug Administration, and his stepmom, Ellen Goldschmidt, works still for the National Institutes of Health.

He went to the Charles E. Smith  Jewish Day School until high school. Then he went to the secular Georgetown Day School, and continued to take classes at Shoresh Hebrew Day School, affiliated with Ohr Kodesh and co-founded by Ethan’s dad. He also was a Ramahnik — his camp was Ramah New England.

When it came to his career, Slater never had a Plan B, though his father “was a little nervous about me pursuing a career in the arts,” he said. So, yes, he took some political science courses at Vassar, on the off chance he’d wind up in law school.  But clearly that never happened.