A Grammy-, Emmy-, and Tony Award-winning composer/lyricist, Marc Shaiman is known for his work as a film scorer, a Broadway songwriter (Hairspray, Some Like It Hot), and a music director and arranger (Bette Midler, Harry Connick, Jr.). After working with Midler and at Saturday Night Live in the 1980s, he revealed a knack for alternately warm and sentimental, tense and rousing, and jazzy and playful orchestral film scores and songs, all with an emotive stamp that is right at home on the Great White Way. Early box office hits like When Harry Met Sally (1989), Misery (1990), and A Few Good Men (1992) -- his first three of many collaborations with director Rob Reiner -- paved the way for decades of crowd-pleasing and award-winning projects from his first Oscar-nominated score, The First Wives Club (1997), to South Park: Bigger, Longer & Uncut (1999), the Tony-winning musical Hairspray (2002) and its 2007 film counterpart, TV's Smash (2012), and the biopic LBJ, his 14th collaboration with Reiner. Shaiman eventually received his fourth and fifth Academy Award nominations for his score and song "The Place Where Lost Things Go" from 2019's Mary Poppins Returns. Featuring effervescent, big band-centric music by Shaiman and frequent writing partner Scott Wittman, the 2022 stage musical version of the classic comedy Some Like It Hot resulted in the composer's third Tony Award nomination. Born in Newark and raised in Scotch Plains, New Jersey, Marc Shaiman left school and got his GED as soon as he could manage -- at 16 -- to start working in New York theater. He soon began earning credits as a music director and arranger in cabaret and on Broadway for the likes of Bette Midler and Peter Allen; one of his earliest high-profile composing credits was writing music for Bette Midler's Mondo Beyondo musical-comedy special in 1982, while he was still in his early twenties. He joined the crew of television's Saturday Night Live in the mid-'80s, where he portrayed Skip St. Thomas, the piano accompanist for the Sweeney Sisters (Nora Dunn and Jan Hooks) and earned his first Emmy nomination, for Outstanding Writing in a Variety of Music Program, in 1987. That led to other work in the music department of live broadcasts, including the Emmy and Grammy Awards as well as late-night TV shows like The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson. He also connected with future collaborators such as Billy Crystal and Martin Short during his time at SNL. Around this time, Shaiman worked behind the scenes in roles like music supervisor for films including Beaches (1988); he was arranger/orchestrator for the Rob Reiner-directed romantic comedy When Harry Met Sally (1989). His arrangement of "It Had to Be You" for Harry Connick, Jr. in the latter film notched Shaiman his first Grammy nomination. His second Grammy nod followed a year later, for his arrangement of "Recipe for Love" from Connick's We Are in Love album. Shaiman's first major film score was for Reiner's adaptation of Stephen King's Misery (1990). After its success, he had a big 1991, which saw the release of Scenes from a Mall (starring Midler), City Slickers (starring Crystal), The Addams Family (his first of several collaborations with filmmaker Barry Sonnenfeld), and For the Boys (also with Midler), which featured a score by Dave Grusin and arrangements and other song contributions by Shaiman. The next year saw scores by Shaiman for Sister Act, Crystal's Mr. Saturday Night, and the Reiner film A Few Good Men. In 1992, he also won the Emmy (as part of a team that included Crystal) for Outstanding Individual Achievement in Writing in a Variety or Music Program for his work at the 63rd Annual Academy Awards. The year 1993 saw the release of the Shaiman-scored movie sequels Addams Family Values and Sister Act 2: Back in the Habit and comedy-dramas such as Hearts and Souls and Sleepless in Seattle. His song "A Wink and a Smile," penned with Ramsay McLean and sung by Connick for Sleepless in Seattle, provided Shaiman's with his first Oscar nomination, for Best Original Song. After 1994 delivered Shaiman comedy projects like City Slickers 2: The Legend of Curly's Gold, Speechless, and North (his fourth movie with Rob Reiner), 1995's The American President yielded Shaiman's second Academy Award nomination and first for score. He earned two more Oscar nominations for score in fast fashion for his work on 1996's The First Wives Club (starring Bette Midler) and for 1998's Patch Adams. An Oscar nomination for Best Original Song followed for "Blame Canada," a song he co-wrote with Trey Parker for the 1999 animated musical South Park: Bigger, Longer & Uncut. The film included 12 original songs by Parker and Shaiman, the latter of whom also composed the score. Shaiman had collaborated on a number of one-person shows, concerts, and revues for Broadway before he debuted his first proper musical, an adaptation of the John Waters cult classic Hairspray. Featuring music by Shaiman and lyrics by Shaiman and Scott Wittman, Hairspray opened on Broadway in August of 2002 and went on to collect 13 Tony nominations, winning eight, including Best Musical and Best Original Score. The cast album, which Shaiman also co-produced, won him, Wittman, and engineer/mixer Pete Karam the Grammy for Best Musical Show Album. Shaiman scored film comedies including Down with Love (2003) and Rumor Has It… (2005) and did original music for a 2005 Broadway revival of The Odd Couple, before the film version of the Hairspray musical starring John Travolta opened in theaters in 2007. Its soundtrack album garnered Shaiman another Grammy nomination. Continuing to work on live television including Tony, Emmy, and Academy Award broadcasts into the next decade, he also contributed songwriting and production to Mariah Carey's Top Five Christmas album Merry Christmas II You, released in 2010. With its stage book provided by Terrence McNally, Shaiman and Wittman turned out another musical, this time an adaptation of the autobiography and companion film Catch Me If You Can (2002), about con artist Frank Abagnale. The Catch Me If You Can musical premiered on Broadway in April 2011 and later received four Tony nominations, including Best Orchestrations for Shaiman and Larry Blank. Shaiman and Wittman then signed on for the first season of the Broadway-devoted TV series Smash. They were nominated for a Grammy in the category of Best Song Written for Visual Media for "Let Me Be Your Star," part of the fictional musical Bombshell, which was written in full by Shaiman and Wittman and released in early 2013 to a Top 50 reception on the Billboard 200. Their musical Charlie and the Chocolate Factory opened on the West End in mid-2013. (Bombshell was staged for a benefit concert in 2015 while a full musical version was held up in development limbo.) Meanwhile, Shaiman continued to compose solo for the big screen, including writing original scores for the Reiner films The Magic of Belle Isle (2012), And So It Goes (2014), and presidential biopic LBJ (2016) before being recognized with a slew of awards for his work on the score and, with Wittman, songs for the 2018 original musical film Mary Poppins Returns, starring Emily Blunt. Among its accolades were Oscar nominations for both the score and the song "The Place Where Lost Things Go" and a Grammy nomination for the soundtrack, which cracked the Top 40 of the Billboard 200. In 2021, Shaiman's 12th Emmy nomination was for Outstanding Original Music and Lyrics for the TV special Soundtrack of Our Lives: A Celebration for the Film & TV Music Community. He later scored the Nicholas Stoller-Billy Eichner rom-com Bros, which saw release in 2022 just months before the December Broadway premiere of another Shaiman-Wittman musical, Some Like It Hot. Based on the 1959 Billy Wilder film classic and set in the jazz age, it featured a lively, swinging score that was ultimately nominated for a Tony, Shaiman's first in the score category since Hairspray. The Shaiman co-produced cast album arrived on Concord Theatricals Recordings in September 2023. ~ Marcy Donelson, Rovi