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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...
...lavishes extra fascination on Arnold Schwarzenegger: man, meme, Governor, bodybuilder, robot assassin--a man who cannot pronounce the letter r even though there's one in California and three in his name. It still boggles her that a celebrity can trade an actor's fame for a politician's popularity and have it be accepted as legal tender, one for one. Schwarzenegger's sheer blankness interests Wilentz too. "He's a pure narcissist," she writes. "Contentless, and in this way highly appropriate to his times...
...Lindsay, mission work may have also bought her 15 minutes of fame: a reality TV show was being filmed during the cruise. The 12-episode program, Cruise with a Cause, hosted by JCTV's Brandon Crouch and Reba Toney, is a behind-the-scenes look at the mission effort as well as chats with guest artists and passengers. "It was totally cool watching the show being filmed," Lindsay says. "Of course we're all hoping to see ourselves" on television. But forget the typical cat fights, foul language and sexual tension of MTV's reality shows. This program will...