Word: fame
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...shrieking high notes to 60 albums and several of his own Big Bands, which reinterpreted pop songs (including the Beatles' Hey Jude) and helped revive the genre; in Ventura, Calif. In the late 1970s Ferguson, who credited yoga with his ability to hit double high Cs, found brief mainstream fame with Gonna Fly Now, his Top 40 version of the theme song from Rocky...
Martin Short makes his first appearance onstage at the top of a lavish Hello Dolly staircase - with his head cut off by the top of the proscenium. It's a fitting way to get things started, since Fame Becomes Me, his slick, scattered, very funny new Broadway musical, is all about showbiz ego being cut down to size. Short calls it a one-man show - but five terrific performers are on hand to share the spotlight (and on occasion upstage him). He bills it as the story of his life - troubled childhood, years of hoofing in Broadway chorus lines...
...Fame Becomes Me is, quite obviously, a send-up of that overexposed Broadway form, the autobiographical one-person show. "All I ask is you love me, and like me as well," Short sings in the canny, Marc Shaiman-Scott Wittman opening number. The verdict here: love Marty, like the show as well...
...Fame Becomes Me uses the autobiographical device as an excuse for a demolition of earnest showbiz tell-alls, Broadway-musical clich?s and just about any other media target that it can lay its hands on. Some of it goes by so fast you want to do a quick rewind - Short's buttery impression of Ray Bolger, as an animated fencepost in a spoof of The Wizard of Oz, for example, or the spot-on impressions of Jodie Foster and Ren?e Zellweger announcing the nominees in Marty's Oscar category (he loses, but makes a soused acceptance speech anyway). Some...
...Still, Fame Becomes Me shows what can happen when smart TV gag writing is given some Broadway polish, and a performer who can squeeze every ounce of juice out of a line, and then italicize it with a bodily contortion you don't expect to see in people older than eight. "Just remember," Short says, in one of his mock-sincere moments after returning from rehab, "my rock bottom is still your wildest dreams." I'm not quite sure why the New York critics who lost their heads over Spamalot - a lumpier,and even more self-referential show than this...