Ari Shapiro to perform solo cabaret in Modesto this weekend

For a decade, listeners who tuned in to NPR’s flagship program All Things Considered often heard the show concluded with four words:

“Thank you for listening.”

That phrase was commonly spoken by longtime host Ari Shapiro, whose voice became synonymous for many with the afternoon news coverage.

Shapiro signed off for the last time at the end of September, bringing 10 years with All Things Considered and a 25-year career with NPR to an end.

But the veteran journalist has not stayed quiet in the weeks since that final broadcast, turning his attention to performance.

Shapiro has taken the stage before, notably as part of the band Pink Martini. And he is continuing to explore that passion with a new cabaret solo show, fittingly titled “Thank You For Listening.”

The tour’s latest stop is in the Central Valley, performing at the Gallo Center for the Arts in Modesto Sunday, Nov. 9 at 5 p.m.

Shapiro spoke with Insight Host Vicki Gonzalez about the inspirations behind this latest show, his passion for performance, as well as what life after NPR has been like.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Interview highlights

It’s been a little over a month since you signed off from All Things Considered for the last time. What made you decide this was the right time for a new chapter and a change of scenery?

I still love NPR, I still love All Things Considered. I still listen to the programs and still support my local public radio stations, plural. But I always suspected that I would spend about 10 years in the host seat, and as that decade deadline started to approach over the last couple years I thought, "Yeah, this does feel like the right time to try something new." 

I wanted to leave All Things Considered when I wasn't burnt out or irritated or short-tempered, while I still did feel like it was fun, and challenging, and a job that I loved. And a decade just felt like the right amount of time to do it. It’s something that I started thinking about even before this presidential election, before all of the changes that we’ve seen over the last nine months. It had nothing to do with the state of the world, or the state of the news or politics. But it was tough to say goodbye to a place that I've worked my entire adult life, 25 years, and I still have a lot of affection for it. 

Have you even had some time to mentally decompress and reflect on what that period in your life meant to you?

Not yet. I actually went straight from my last day at NPR into a tour with the band Pink Martini… I've been an occasional guest singer with them for about 15 years. And it was so fun to plunge right from one thing into this other thing that's so meaningful to me in such a different way. Then I went from the end of that tour to Denver… and now I'm coming to California to do my solo cabaret show. 

These are all things that I really enjoy doing, that use different muscle groups and challenge me in different ways… that create different kinds of connections with an audience. They're all different forms of storytelling.

Which actually came first for you, performance or journalism?

My career has always been a journalism career, and that is something that I have devoted my life to ever since I finished college. I got an internship with Nina Totenberg, the legendary legal affairs correspondent who is such a titan at NPR. Journalism is really kind of front and center, or always has been, and I’m not leaving journalism behind. I’m certainly not pivoting wholesale from journalism to performing.

But over the last decade plus, those other forms of storytelling have become more and more a part of the portfolio of what I do. I really love being able to share an experience in a room with people who will never be together in exactly the same configuration ever again. Sharing an experience collectively that we all go through beginning to end. That's something that you really only get with live performance, which I've always loved as an audience member, and it's really meaningful to me to be able to create that kind of an experience as a performer too. 

Did that help inform or shape how you approached journalism as well? 

They all speak to each other in different ways. The singing, the journalism, the cabaret show, the band, even writing a memoir. They're each different ways of trying to do the same thing… helping people connect to each other, and understand that the things that distinguish us are far smaller than the things we have in common.

When I am in a war zone… or a refugee crisis or any kind of a breaking news story that might be on the other side of the world, my goal was to help NPR listeners understand that as far away and different as those people may seem, we actually have so much in common and we can relate to their experiences more easily than we might imagine. I'm doing the same thing when I write a book or when I do this solo cabaret show “Thank You For Listening.” I’m telling stories to the audience. I'm really trying to help them relate more not only to me and the stories I'm telling, but also to one another. 

Your cabaret show titled “Thank You For Listening,” a phrase you commonly used as a signoff when on air. Why did you pick that name? 

It actually has so many different meanings for me. There are a couple different throughlines for the show, but one of the throughlines [is] the ways “thank you for listening” is meaningful in my life. So yes, it is something that I would often use to sign off on All Things Considered. It also has been my go-to reply to hate mail; if somebody writes to me I will write back, “thank you for listening. Signed, Ari Shapiro.” It was even the working title for my memoir, The Best Strangers in the World. And ultimately at the end of the day, I think listening is really genuinely sincerely important.

You can see that there are these tongue-in-cheek references. There are these serious references, there are references to journalism and book writing and all of these other things that weave in and out of the show. And over the arc of the performance I hope it really takes listeners somewhere and goes a little bit deeper than they might be expecting… even while making people laugh, tap their feet and perhaps sing along. 

What is it about cabaret that you like so much, and how would you describe your style of performance?

One of the things that I love about cabaret is that it is a wildly flexible genre. You can go from very serious to very funny, very moving to very silly. You can incorporate songs from pop music, American Standards, Broadway, they all kind of fit. What I try to do when I'm performing this show is be my most natural authentic self, which is not exactly the same as who I am on All Things Considered. As a host of an NPR program I was always first and foremost a journalist. Yes it was me, Ari Shapiro, wearing my journalism hat. But I think that when I'm doing this show, I'm able to exercise a fuller, wider range than I necessarily could on All Things Considered. 

Ari Shapiro performs with Pink Martini at Pier 17 in New York, N.Y.Credit: Ryan Muir

One of the elements you worked into this show is hate mail. Why do you like hate mail?

Because it means that people actually are listening. Because it means that people are paying attention. It means that they are having a reaction. And even if it's a negative reaction, it's better than just tuning out and going someplace else. Also, at the end of the day I know that I'm the one with the megaphone. I can speak to a large audience of people who listen to what I have to say and they don't all have to like it. They don't all agree with it, I hope they don't agree with that. I hope people hear things that challenge them, that they disagree with, that they engage with. Hate mail is sort of a part of that engagement.

You weave some stories from “The Best Strangers in the World” into your cabaret show. What led you to write this memoir in the first place?

I, as a journalist, sort of put myself in a little bit of a box… when I'm reporting a story on the radio, it's never supposed to be about me. It's supposed to be about the people I'm reporting on, that's the way journalism works. I haven't bristled against that. But I did start to become curious of what it would look like if I open the box. 

I wound up writing this memoir that is a collection of essays… a memoir told through the stories of others. But rather than just being greatest hits, it's a book about the way the stories I've told have shaped the person I am, and also the way that the person I am shapes the stories I tell. And it’s been really interesting to see what that translates to in a live show like this one because just as telling a story in a book is different from telling it on the radio, telling a story on stage is different from either one of those. I'm kind of taking the same ingredients and making very different recipes out of it, which has been a fun challenge.

At the heart of this is storytelling, whether through song or talking to an audience. What makes a good story for you? 

I think the best story is surprising. I've always said that if I go out to report something as a journalist and I come back with exactly what I expected, then I've done something wrong because I want to learn something new. And if I'm not learning something new as a journalist, then chances are I'm not going to surprise my audience when they're listening to that story. 

I think a good story has characters. It has emotion. It goes someplace that you weren't expecting. This cabaret show is one long story that contains a lot of smaller stories. Over the course of the 90 minutes, I want people to be surprised on a moment by moment level.

I want them to feel emotions and get engaged…, but I also want them to feel like they have taken a journey to a place that perhaps they weren't expecting. 

You can listen to more of Shapiro’s interview here.