Sticking to the words

Accomplished thespian and new immigrant Howard Schechter – who currently performs in a local production of Mel Brooks’s ‘The Producers’ – talks about his life and work.

NOVEMBER 17, 2016 16:22

Updated: NOVEMBER 17, 2016 18:29

Howard Schechter in the local production of Mel Brooks’s musical ‘The Producers.’ (photo credit: ZE LIG) — Howard Schechter in the local production of Mel Brooks’s musical ‘The Producers.’

(photo credit: ZE LIG)

Like many of us who make aliya, Howard Schechter was willing to make a fresh start when he moved here in 2011, including making a living in a new area of professional pursuit.

“I got to the absorption center in Beersheba and I filled out the form,” recalls the 65-year-old American. “I thought I’d do something in business here – I’ve been doing stuff in various areas for a few years, in between other things.”

However, the eagle-eyed Jewish Agency employee down in the Negev had different ideas. “She saw I’d written down actor and she said: ‘You’re an actor! We give grants to artists.’ So I thought, why not?” Schechter is not just any actor. He has accrued a pretty impressive bio over the past four decades or so prior to moving here, the headliner-oriented landmarks of which include appearances in the wildly successful 1990s TV sitcom Seinfeld, and in a range of other prime-time shows, such as Murder She Wrote, Hill Street Blues, Moonlighting and MacGyver.

Now he is starring in a local production of Mel Brooks’s musical The Producers, directed by Yisrael Lutnick and featuring Shai Amoyal and Meital Segal.

The production has been doing the rounds of the country’s arts and culture facilities for a few weeks now. The next couple of weeks will see Schechter bring the show to Modi’in, Jerusalem and Netanya. More shows are planned for early 2017.

Schechter comes over as a genial character who has taken his fair share of knocks in life. He also displays a wacky sense of humor, which certainly sits well with the ethos of The Producers.

Brooks adapted the multi-Tony Award winning musical, which debuted on Broadway in 2001, from his 1968 movie of the same name.

The plot is nothing short of absurd.

The main characters are a couple of theater producers, one of whom – Max Bialystock – has known much better times, and the other a less-than-salubrious accountant by the name of Leo Bloom. When the latter comes across an irregularity in Bialystock’s books, after some toing and froing, he hits on a novel dollar-spinning idea. Bloom proposes that the two put on the worst musical the world has ever known, naturally after raising substantial funds, spend as little as possible of the latter, close the production pronto, pocket the unused moneys and skip the country.

So, what’s a nice Jewish boy doing in a profession like acting? Didn’t his parents want him to have a stereotypically safe profession, say, an attorney? “Actually, my mother wanted me to be a lawyer,” Schechter chuckles. “My mother wanted me to make a living.

I wanted to make a life,” he notes succinctly.

But there was more parental disapproval. “The first time my father came to see me in Hamlet in New York, he said to me, ‘There are more people on stage than there are in the audience.

How are you going to make a living?’” Truth be told, his parents unwittingly set him on his way to treading the boards.

“When I was five years old my parents took me to a resort in the Catskill Mountains,” Schechter recalls. “They used to put me on picnic tables in the places where the kids slept, because there was a camp, too, and I would recite all the things I had memorized, you know, The Three Bears, Goldilocks.”

That was that for young Schechter. He subsequently studied drama at Northeastern University, in Boston, before relocating to the Big Apple to try his luck there.

“When I got to New York I joined a company that was doing Hamlet. Of course, I played Guildenstern, the Jew.

That was at the Classic Theater, which was run by a real iconoclast. I love working with iconoclasts. His name was Herb Barnett. He had this storefront theater on 26th Street, between Fifth and Sixth Avenue. He’d throw a mattress down at the end of the night and sleep there, and he’d clean up at the YMCA on 23rd Street. He’d drive a cab during the day and at night he’d do Othello, Hamlet, King Lear, Death of a Salesman, A View from the Bridge – all the great plays.”

Schechter’s admiration for downand- dirty, knuckle-down characters shines in his eyes.

“I’d just graduated, and I was married and my wife was pregnant, and we decided to come to New York City and pursue our careers.”

That sounds like a brave move, but Schechter doesn’t feel he deserves a pat on the back. “I was just doing what kids from Queens do, just kadima [let’s go], you know. My wife became a scenic artist. She was very talented.”

It must have been tough for two young artists, just starting out in the big city but Schechter has fond memories on the time. “We lived an idyllic life.

She painted scenery and I acted. This is back in 1974 when the economy was a little bit different. Now to live where we lived, on 76th Street between Central Park and Columbus, for our apartment, would probably cost you around six or seven thousand dollars a month. We paid $430,” he says with a laugh.

Sadly, the couple’s idyllic existence was cruelly cut short, and Schechter had a career rethink.

“My wife passed away in 1993, when she was very young, and that’s when I kind of retired from acting for a while.

The vicissitudes of waiting for the phone to ring, and my daughter was already a freshman at the University of Massachusetts. I didn’t want to risk her education. So I kind of put acting on the shelf, and I started to teach.”

Teach what? Acting? – “Anything,” comes the quick-fire response. “I’d teach anything, whatever they’d sit still long enough to learn.

“If they wanted to learn Shakespeare, I’d teach them Shakespeare. If they wanted to learn the theory of relativity, I’d explain it as best I could. I’d tell them if you keep your hand on a hot stove for one minute it feels like an hour. If you talk to a beautiful girl in a bar for an hour it feels like a minute. That’s the theory of relativity.”

WHILE HE made aliya just five years ago, his roots in this part of the world go back at least five generations, he says. One forebear was among the founders of Rosh Pina in the Upper Galilee, and a grandfather was born in Jerusalem in the late 19th century. Another grandfather lived in Hebron and was doing very well for himself, until he ran into a spot of bother with the local Turkish ruler.

“He had to leave in a hurry, and he ended up in the States,” Schechter says. “His life was literally in danger.”

On the thespian side, Schechter is happy talking about his role in Glengarry Glen Ross, a gripping play by David Mamet that won Mamet the Pulitzer Prize.

“I played the role of Ricky Roma. The last time I played that was at the San Diego Repertory. The movie was depressing, but the play is hilarious. The laughter in the audience would start in the front row hit the wall and come back at you like a tsunami. All you had to do really was wear the suit and say the words. The author was inspired by [Nobel Prize-winning English playwright] Harold Pinter. Once you learn how to play the pauses you were all right. They once asked Vladimir Horowitz [the pianist] how he plays all those notes, and he said, it’s not the notes; it’s the pauses.”

Iconic jazz trumpeter Miles Davis had a similar penchant for intervals. “If you did Glengarry Glen Ross right it was like a piece of verbal jazz,” continues Schechter who, by the way, remarried a year ago.

“You know when you have David [Mamet] or Shakespeare or you have [19th-century Swedish playwright August] Strindberg or [Eugene] O’Neill, they give you everything you need.”

The same goes for the man behind The Producers, he says.

“Mel Brooks is a genius. All you need to do is stick to his words. You’ll get the laughs.”

For more information go to www.israel- theatre.com