La Posada Resident Shirley Arkin: From Broadway Showgirl to Senior Living Showrunner

By Jim Nelson | November 4, 2024

“I’m very fortunate,” acknowledges La Posada resident Shirley Arkin, “but most of all, I’m very fortunate to be living in a senior community. I highly recommend it. I can’t believe people say, ‘I’m not ready for that.’ Are they crazy? It’s been great for me.

“I’ve lived here for 15 years,” she told Senior Living News, “and it has been the most wonderful situation that I can imagine. The company [Kisco Senior Living] has been wonderful to me.”

Arkin, née Forrest, is well known around the Palm Beach Gardens, Florida, senior living community for the elaborate Broadway-quality shows that she has been writing, co-producing, and co-starring in for years. Even before moving into La Posada, Arkin had a history of putting on Broadway-style shows in Miami-area senior communities.

Research has shown that creative endeavors like participating in theater or singing in a group can help improve seniors’ health and wellbeing, and in addition to Arkin’s shows La Posada residents are offered many ways to get creatively active.

“We have lots of activities to engage residents throughout the year, but these shows are more than just entertainment,” Assistant Wellness Director Ryan Gill recently told The Palm Beach Post. “I have watched them reignite the youth in our residents. They bring back old memories and make them excited to form new ones. We are grateful for Shirley’s work here at La Posada.”

Arkin, who was raised in Philadelphia, dreamed of starring in musicals as a teenager, and after she graduated from the University of Pennsylvania, she left home for The Big Apple on an opera scholarship. Her specialty was Wagnerian opera.

To pay her bills in New York Arkin did some “modeling for a while,” but she was in NYC to sing so she went to audition as an opera singer at a large Broadway cabaret in Times Square called The Latin Quarter. Co-founded in 1942 by booking agent and theatrical producer Lou Walters — the father of journalist Barbara Walters — The Latin Quarter booked all the biggest stars, and it became quite the draw in the 1950s.

“I went there to audition. I said, ‘I’m interested in auditioning as an opera singer.’ I was told that opera singers are a dime a dozen, but women that can be showgirls like you are very rare. We will consider you for that.”

She had no idea at the time what a showgirl was, but she went for it and from 1957 to 1959 she was The Latin Quarter’s lead showgirl, which put her on the stage with some very famous people, like Milton Berle, with whom she once performed a comedy sketch.

“The big stars like Frank Sinatra and Jimmy Duranty, Sophie Tucker, those kinds of people,” she said, “they’d play The Latin Quarter, these famous cabarets, because Las Vegas was just beginning.”

Broadway showgirls with an Ivy League degree and an opera scholarship are not a dime a dozen, so Arkin became the toast of Manhattan in the late ’50s.

“I was in Life magazine several times; I was on all kinds of magazine covers. There was a famous columnist by the name of Walter Winchell, and I was in his column almost every day. I have all this stuff in scrapbooks.”

The transplanted Pennsylvanian had risen to prominence in Manhattan, but in 1959 she transplanted herself again.

“The Latin Quarter had another facility in Miami Beach on Palm Island,” Arkin recalls, “and we were told that if we wanted to be in New York, we had to go and try the new show out from December to February.”

Throughout the 1960s Arkin did commercials, appeared on local newscasts in the Miami area, sang in live shows, and helped direct beauty pageants. And then she took a very sharp left turn.

“I had another career at age 45,” Arkin told me of her 18-year stint trading as one of Miami-Dade County’s first female stockbrokers. Eventually she rose to vice president of Prudential-Bache’s Miami securities division. But as they say, you can take the girl out of the stock exchange, but you can’t take the stock exchange out of the girl, so she’s “still trading online even to this day.”

After retiring from trading as a vocation in 1992, Arkin unretired from performing; for nearly two decades she did several shows per week on the Miami-area senior circuit. Among other things, Arkin won a pair of senior beauty pageants (Ms. Florida Senior America in 2000 and Ms. Florida Senior Citizen two years later) and took her shows to places like the Florida State Penitentiary.

And then she and her late husband, Jules, moved into La Posada and she found an entirely new outlet for her musicals.

“When I moved here, I said, ‘I have a little show called The Memories of the Latin Quarter that runs for about an hour and I’ve done it for some of the communities, would you like me to do it here?’ That’s how I got started.”

For the past decade and a half, Shirley Arkin, now 93, the opera singing one-time famous Broadway showgirl and former Ms. Florida Senior America, has created, co-produced, and co-starred in an array of original shows at La Posada. The shows that she’s put on for as many as 100 of her fellow residents and nonresidents alike include Ziegfeld Follies, The King and I, The Genius of Bernstein, West Side Story, and The Genuis of Andrew Lloyd Webber (a montage of The Phantom of the Opera, Cats, and Jesus Christ Superstar).

Arkin and Gill, who has been her handpicked co-producer for years (“without him it would be very difficult because he really has brought in some fabulous young professional singers,” Arkin enthused), spend three to four months to create and perform each show. “We try to do a minimum of two very large shows each year,” she said.

While fellow residents and other local performers are recruited for her shows at La Posada, Arkin pointed out that the performers are chosen for their theatrical skills alone.

“This is not a talent show,” she said. “This is a professional show. I consider myself a professional, so I’m the only resident that sings in the show. We have other things that residents sing, and we have a big chorus.”

Arkin continues to be excited to bring these shows to La Posada, but it doesn’t stop there. She mentioned that she’s getting more requests to bring her shows to other communities.

“It’s been a thrilling thing for me to see how this has grown and grown to the point that, for example, we already took The Genius of Andrew Lloyd Webber to another community, and we are taking this show to a community church in West Palm Beach.” Next season, she told SLN, Les Misérables is on the schedule.

La Posada earned the Best of Palm Beach Award for retirement living four years in a row. Could Arkin’s shows have something to do with that? Perhaps. One thing is for sure: she loves living at La Posada.

“I cannot thank the Kisco community enough for what they’ve done for me and for my husband,” she acknowledged. “They took care of him in their health center for three years. So, I’ve been blessed living here.”