We are proud to be honoring the legendary, award-winning, songwriting duo Marc Shaiman and Scott Wittman with the Howard Ashman Award at the GMHC Cabaret in February!
Over the last four decades, their string of hits for Broadway, TV, and film has included favorites like Hairspray, Some Like It Hot, and Mary Poppins Returns – winning a plethora of Tony, Grammy, Emmy, and Oscar nominations and awards. Currently, they’re working on the highly anticipated Broadway musical adaptation of Smash, inspired by the television series that garnered them two Emmy nominations.
The duo also has a storied history of fundraising to support the fight to end the AIDS epidemic. In the 1990s, Wittman conceived and directed two sold-out fundraising galas at Carnegie Hall for GMHC, featuring Patti LuPone, Cyndi Lauper, Rufus Wainwright, and The B52’s.
Wittman also directed a special night on Broadway, Doin’ What Comes Naturally: A Tribute to Ethel Merman that showcased the talents of LuPone, along with Madeline Kahn, Bette Midler, and Elaine Stritch. Referring to the government’s failure to address the AIDS crisis at that time, Midler told the enthusiastic crowd that she was “glad to be in New York performing for the Gay Men’s Health Crisis, rather than in Washington, D.C., performing for the Straight Men’s Health Crisis – mental health crisis, that is.”
“It is such a thrill to recognize Marc and Scott this year,” said GMHC’s VP of Public Policy and External Affairs Jason Cianciotto. “To my knowledge, they are the first honorees intimately connected with the history of the early GMHC fundraisers, on and off Broadway, that inspired us to create this event.”
Seeing the posters from those early fundraisers in the hallways of GMHC motivated Cianciotto and his husband, Broadway performer Courter Simmons, to recapture that same magic with the GMHC Cabaret and Howard Ashman Award. Like Wittman and Shaiman, Ashman was a rising star in the New York theater scene in the early years of the epidemic, collaborating with Alan Menken on Little Shop of Horrors before moving to Los Angeles to launch the Disney Renaissance.
“Both Scott and Marc so beautifully embody the spirit of the Howard Ashman Award, supporting the fight to end the HIV epidemic,” Cianciotto said. Shaiman himself is no stranger to the GMHC Cabaret. He composed a special song for the event’s 2023 honoree, André De Shields, serenading him from a piano onstage, and then joined in again last year when GMHC honored Menken.
AIDS Epidemic’s Early Years
The early years of the AIDS epidemic in the 1980s and 1990s were a frightening and painful time for the Broadway community in New York City, the epicenter of the epidemic. “Suddenly, one person I knew after another was being diagnosed, falling ill and dying,” Shaiman remembered. “For the next 15 years and more, my community was buffeted by a constant cycle of fear, death and crushing grief.”
As they attended funeral after funeral, Shaiman and Wittman started keeping a list of the many friends and acquaintances they’d lost, posting it on the wall of Shaiman’s music studio. Over the years, that list swelled to 134 names – including that of Ashman, the celebrated lyricist for beloved Disney classics like The Little Mermaid, who died from AIDS-related complications in 1991.
By coincidence, GMHC staff kept a similar list during that time, Cianciotto said. In a recent office reorganization, the agency’s staff discovered notebooks with handwritten names of the thousands of GMHC clients who had died. “There were three notebooks full,” he said.
Shaiman and Wittman expressed their grief over the many losses from those years in “Where the Lost Things Go,” the Oscar-nominated ballad that Mary Poppins (Emily Blunt) sings in Mary Poppins Returns to comfort the bereaved Banks children after their mother dies. Every stanza is filled with both loss and hope:
Do you ever dream
Or reminisce?
Wondering where to find
What you truly miss
Well maybe all those things
That you love so
Are waiting in the place
Where the lost things go
The Cabaret is an intimate evening of song, laughter, and fellowship, reminiscent of the many evenings Shaiman and Wittman spent in their 20s with friends, gathered around a piano at Greenwich Village bars, before the onset of the AIDS epidemic.
The duo recaptured that joyful camaraderie in the infectiously danceable songs that they created for their hit musical Hairspray, which opened on Broadway in 2002. On opening night, Shaiman addressed the audience, saying that he imagined the theater balcony going all the way up to heaven, so that all the people lost to HIV and AIDS could be a part of the evening. We wholeheartedly share that sentiment for our 10th annual Cabaret and Howard Ashman Award.
UPDATE (2/6/25): We’re thrilled to announce that the GMHC Cabaret & Howard Ashman Award is officially SOLD OUT! While tickets are no longer available, you can still make a donation to celebrate our 2025 award recipients, Marc Shaiman and Scott Wittman. Your gift will honor these remarkable artists and sustain GMHC’s essential work.
