Sunday Showtunes

ONE ACTS, TWO DAYS

On Wednesday my first matinee of the trip was “Martin Short:  Fame Becomes Me,” another 1 hour, 45 minute show with no intermission (just like “The Drowsy Chaperone”).  Another similarity:  it is another show that is seemingly a one-man show but relies on an entire cast to tell it.  To be honest, I wasn’t looking forward to seeing it.   This was the LAST show I slotted in my trip (added just last week!), since it replaced “High Fidelity” which was the third flop slot I had to fill, and it was last on my “to see” list.  This is partly because I have a thing about seeing shows in New York that I could have seen in San Francisco (or in this case, SHOULD have seen since I missed it there), and partly because I have never much cared for Martin Short’s annoying self-important ego-trip “I’m a big star” persona and I figured if I had to watch that on a stage for two hours I’d want to run up and strangle him.    Due to getting tickets at the last minute, I had a seat in the very last row of the mezzanine that was so cramped I couldn’t put my knees forward, so I was uncomfortable.  All in all, I wasn’t expecting much of a good time.  Boy, was I wrong!  The show was delightful from beginning to end, extraordinarily clever and fast-paced, and crisp and sharp as a fresh-cut stick.  Short was great, a real star who can carry the whole show and a fine singer when he needed to be.   And there were so many hilarious jokes, one-liners, two-liners, and three-liners that I wish I could remember more of them to tell you.  Marc Shaiman wrote the music and Scott Witman, the lyrics – the pair that wrote “Hairspray”and “South Park the Musical” – and the songs were great.  I can’t wait to get the cast album so I can relive them.  (Shaiman was one of the actors in the show – he actually had to join Equity to do the show – playing Marty’s piano player – though ironically Shaiman faked a prop piano while the real piano part was played in the pit!)

Short was playing his persona (as opposed to playing himself) – the show is a mostly-fictional story of his life.  He sets the tongue-in-cheek tone right away:   “Thank you for that wonderful ovation,” be began in his opening monologue,  “I can’t begin to tell you how – humble - your applause makes a big star like me feel!  As I was bring driven here tonight from the Bernard B. Jacobs Hotel where the theatre put me up (the joke being that the show was in the Bernard Jacobs theatre which means he was right upstairs),  “the cab driver asked me ‘What’s the name of that film that you made that I HATED?’  And I thought, ‘Oh my God! He knows my work!’  And I felt so pleased.  And then it dawned on me, here’s a man who hates me for my work, but he doesn’t know me well enough to hate me for who I am.  So tonight is going to be much more than a party.  I’m going to tell you my story and not be afraid of some of the pain.  The same way that so many other performers with one-man shows bare their souls and share their innermost secrets with total strangers like yourselves.  A lot of what I’ll be telling you today will be true.  A lot I’ll be making up.  See if you can tell the difference.  It will give you something to do.  And by the end our journey, you will know me well enough to love me…as a person.  Boy, do I envy you.  I’ll be such a great addition to your lives.”  Then he basically starts with his birth and continues to his death - and beyond.  This framework allows Short to do many quick changes into many of his famous characters from SCTV, SNL, etc. (Ed Grimsley, Jackie Rogers, etc) along with many celebrity impressions (Katherine Hepburn, etc).   Basically, it’s Shorts entire career in one Broadway show!

The show is done in monologues and songs and sketches, sort of like a vaudeville.  There is a spoof of “The Wizard of Oz” and a million spoofs of other Broadway shows – Evita, West Side Story, Chicago, Sweet Charity, and more, and one sequence that combines both Hair and Jesus Christ Superstar into ONE show – a tribal love rock musical about the STEPBROTHER of Jesus!  Complete with a faux nude scene that spoofs the infamous “under a tarp” nude scene in Hair.  Everyone is wearing body stockings with genitals drawn on them.  “Keep in mind that some objects may appear larger than they are,” quips Short.

The show was a cross between a typical “one-man” show, “Beach Blanket Babylon,” and “Forbidden Broadway.”  The supporting cast did an amazing array of celebrity impersonations (such as Ellen DeGeneres, Liza, Judy, Joan Rivers, Tommy Tune, Bob Fosse, Meg Ryan, Jody Foster, Renee Zellweger, Andy Warhol, Britney Spears, Kevin Federline, etc. etc) and there is lots of spoofing of current events, which apparently changes to keep current.  In this way the show resembled “Beach Blanket Babylon.”  For example, at one point Britney Spears shows up (with her baby, which she drops), and Joan Rivers screams “Britney! Is that you?  Wait, let me check” – and then peeks underneath her skirt to see her recently-exposed-on-the-internet female parts! 

The big gimmick of the show is that at each performance, Martin turns into Jiminy Glick (his glib talk-show host character) and interviews (for about 10 minutes) a live celebrity who is pulled out of the audience.  (If a real celebrity hasn’t been arranged, or can’t be found when the House Manager checks each night, Short/Glick interviews an audience member instead).  This section is ad-libbed and was hysterical, really calling on Short’s improv and “quick quips” skills.  Today the celebrity was Stone Phillips, who spent most of the interview cracking up.  He had good reason to – it was hysterically funny.  It even appeared to break up some of the other cast members.  Rather an amazing thing was, Short appeared to cut his lip doing a bit, and was bleeding.  Stone was trying to stop the bleeding with a napkin.  “Are you all right?” he asked.  “Either that,” Short said, “or the show ends here!”  Some more ad-libbing while he dabbed at the cut.   “No problem everyone, you just sit there while I coagulate.”  Very clever.  Later in the show Marc Shaiman has a “ditty” that he sings about Short’s life (sort of a recap of the show), and he apparently re-wrote some lyrics backstage because he said something about “Marty bled to death.”  If this truly was done on the fly, I thought that was really interesting.

I could go on and on (and I bet you thought I was going to do just that!) but I think you have the idea of the show.

KSHO broadcasts to the Mid-Willamette Valley in Western Oregon.
Among the communities served are Albany, Corvallis, and Lebanon.