SpongeBob SquarePants No More, Ethan Slater Shares His Songwriter Side with Intimate Solo Show

Ethan Slater, the SpongeBob SquarePants Tony nominee and Broadway.com Audience Choice Award winner, is gearing up to perform at Feinstein's/54 Below on August 1 and 2. The evenings will include covers of songs that introduced him to his love of music, numbers from the musicals he did in high school and some originals. "I write my own music, and I have a lot of different versions of music projects. I have a couple stage musicals and a film screenplay that I've written that has music in it," he said in a recent interview with Paul Wontorek on Broadway.com's #LiveAtFive. "I wanted to do a show where I play my own music. There's this incredible vulnerability in having your music heard."

Slater has certainly been keeping busy: He got married. "On the drive up to the wedding, I got a phone call saying, 'You've got a big audition on Tuesday morning. Can you be there at 8:30AM?' My wife was sitting in the seat next to me, and we were on speaker phone," he recalled. "I was getting ready to say 'no,' and she goes, 'He'll be there!' She's great."

He is developing a musical called Edge of the World with Broadway pal Nick Blaemire, who will join him onstage for the 54 Below performance on August 1. "It's about a young boy raised in near-isolation in rural Alaska. He uses his imagination to cope with his loneliness," he said of the show. He recently joined Tony winner Lena Hall and King Kong's Eric William Morris in a workshop for Reefer Madness. And his EP Wanderer dropped this month.

Slater also was able to play one of his heroes—Broadway legend Joel Grey in his Oscar-winning turn as the Emcee in the film Cabaret—on FX's Emmy-nominated series Fosse/Verdon. "It was so fun. I had a great time. I was in hair and makeup for five or six hours," Slater said. "I met Joel Grey when he came to see SpongeBob. We got to chat. It was a pretty mind-blowing experience. I had his memoir sitting in my dressing room. When I heard that he was coming, I was like, 'Do I hide it?! No, I ask him to sign it.' Now, I've got a signed copy of it."

SpongeBob SquarePants was a rich experience for Slater, who made his Broadway debut in the role. The musical closed at the Palace Theatre last September. "It was an interesting experience for me to close SpongeBob," he explained. "It made me aware of how much the show actually belonged to everybody. Sure, it's the place that we went to work every day, and it meant a huge amount to everyone in the cast. But it meant that much to a lot of people. That became really clear in the passion that we were seeing online and on the street walking through Times Square. People still come up to me and tell me that it closed too early, and I agree."

Watch the full #LiveAtFive video below and be sure to catch Slater at Feinstein's/54 Below on August 1&2.