Word: comic
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...doing stuff you weren't supposed to be doing." At Boston's Emerson College, he majored in English and helped found the Emerson Comedy Workshop. After graduating in 1979, he played local clubs while teaching classes at Emerson in comedy and acting. "Leary really inspired me," says actor and comic Anthony Clark, Emerson '86. "You'd see comics doing all the safe stuff -- stewardesses, Gilligan's Island, socks in the drawer -- that's all garbage! Leary was always up front, on the edge, even when the club managers wanted to limit his time 'cause...
...Leary lacks the oratorical grace of Gray (Swimming to Cambodia) or the comic wisdom of monologist Eric Bogosian (Talk Radio), but he's learning. "When Leary first started doing stand-up, like all of us -- he sucked," says comic Eddie Brill, Emerson '80, a friend. That began to change after Leary's father died of a heart attack in 1985. In response to such an event, says Brill, "you can either go into a fetal position or do what Leary did -- just lash out. He became really deep and really funny...
Leary, with his wife Ann and their three-year-old son and one-year-old daughter, is now based in New York City ("This is the most exciting place in the world to live. There are so many ways to die here"). His comic take on MTV Unplugged airs March 13. He's also working on a more personal off-Broadway show: Birth, School, Work, Death. His career seems set to last longer than 15 minutes. Where will he be in 15 years? Directing? Bloated in a Paris hotel room? He considers this and says, "Bloated in a Paris hotel...
...Hill's Phantom of the Opera. First produced in England in 1976, this comic melodrama had a book by Hill and a score by Ian Armit. In 1984 Hill dropped the original music and wrote new lyrics to arias by Gounod, Offenbach, Verdi, Mozart and Donizetti. Lloyd Webber considered producing an embellished version of it, then decided to do his own. Thank heavens. Hill's backstage farce is a kind of Noises Off without the wit, and the cast plays it as hammy gaslight farce -- a penny dreadful that at today's prices plays like a $32.50 dreadful. It alights...
SHOW BUSINESS: A Cutting-Edge Comic...