Steven Shaw

Steven Shaw was born in Brooklyn, New York where he did things that kids from Brooklyn, New York did. Sports were high among those pursuits with girls coming later but topping the list quickly after puberty. At seventeen he was invited to try out for the Detroit Tigers, a perennial last place team in the fifties. At the end of the tryout Show Business seemed the wiser choice. In his early twenties, after a brief stint as an unemployed actor, he took over the running of the New York Shakespeare Festival/Public Theater's prop department and built it into the largest regional theater prop department of its time. He worked on the premiers of, "Hair", John Guare's "Two Gents", "No Place To Be Somebody", "That Championship Season", (The last two Pulitzer Prize winners,) among other contemporary plays and twenty-six of Shakespeare's works. He stayed with Mr. Papp for nine years performing multiple tasks for the Festival as it grew. He conceived and produced, The Five O'Clock Theater. After leaving the Festival he turned to stage managing on Broadway shows. Among their number were, "The Wiz", "Deathtrap", "Sly Fox", "Sunday in the Park with George, (Another Pulitzer winner) and "Death and the Maiden." He has served on the Executive Board of The Stage Managers Association, and the Advisory Board of the Broadway Show League a show business league he played in for 36 years. In 2000 he was honored by being named to the All Century All-Star Team. While stage managing he was able to observe the technique of such directors as, Arthur Penn, Sir Peter Hall, James Lapine and Mike Nichols and study closely the craft of such actors as Robert Preston, Vanessa Redgrave, Glenn Close, Richard Dreyfuss, Gene Hackman and George C. Scott. It was during the run of, "Sly Fox", Larry Gelbart's hilarious take on Ben Jonson's, "Volpone", that George C. Scott optioned a script of Shaw's. The script, "Grimby" went on to have a longer life in a series of options than it probably would have had as a film. In the early eighties he staged the Spanish speaking productions of both, "Deathtrap" and "Amadeus" with Manolo Fabragas in Mexico City. Both productions ran for over eight months in the 1,300 seat Teatro San Rafael. He has lived in Los Angeles since 1992 with his wife, producer Diana Kerew and continues to play softball despite her many objections. Trivia Note: He got his first tennis lesson from Butterfly McQueen. It didn't stick.