'Fame' becomes Martin Short

NEW YORK -- At an early preview of his new Broadway musical, Fame Becomes Me, Martin Short played himself in an uncharacteristically inebriated state at an awards show. Stumbling onstage, the comic performer muttered a rather odd sexual epithet, one that Mel Gibson had just introduced into the cultural vernacular. (Hint: It wasn't anti-Semitic, and it consisted of two words, the first being "sugar.")

A few days later, relaxing in a friend's midtown apartment, Short, 56, feels Gibson's pain. Well, sort of.

"I keep thinking that he must have just bolted up at 3 in the morning and said, 'Oh, my God, I dreamt that I got so drunk I started screaming about Jews, and it was reported in the press. I better go back to sleep.'"

Our increasing fascination with such celebrity foibles helped inspire Short's show, which opened Thursday at the Bernard B. Jacobs Theatre. Despite the pronoun in its title, Fame "has nothing to do with me," he insists.

Later, Short amends that statement: "I am making fun of myself. I'm saying, 'I'll give you all the angst and the horrors of my life -- to the point that I can get a spot on Oprah, or the cover of Vanity Fair.'"

For Short, a happily married father of three with no known criminal or rehab record, that task requires a good deal of creative license. Conceived by the Canadian stage and screen veteran with two longtime friends, composer/lyricist Marc Shaiman and lyricist Scott Wittman -- the duo behind the hit musical Hairspray -- Fame takes us on a personal journey marked by pain and hard-learned lessons.

Short, we learn, was a child trapped in a ludicrously dysfunctional family, who later succumbed to the dark allure of drugs and reckless living.

OK, so he wasn't and he didn't. But as Short reasons, "You'll have to work harder constructing a piece about me than you would have if I'd told you that I shot heroin for 10 years."

Shaiman and four additional performers join Short in a variety of roles, among them personalities as diverse as Judy Garland, Jodie Foster and Celine Dion. Short also revives some of his characters from Saturday Night Live and other gigs, such as uber-nerd Ed Grimley and the balloon-shaped interviewer Jiminy Glick. The idea for Fame sprang from an annual Christmas bash thrown by Short and his wife, Nancy.

"Marc would play piano, and people would get up and do numbers," Short recalls. "It became an event. I remember one year, in the mid-'90s, I got a call from Steve Martin around September, and he said, 'I can now rest for the rest of the year, because I've figured out my Christmas party piece.'"

Janice Crystal, the wife of Short's fellow SNL star Billy, suggested that the party might be a good premise for a show. Short consulted Shaiman and Wittman, and the three began fleshing out what evolved into a freewheeling send-up of pop culture, from Broadway musicals to reality TV.

"I never watch reality television," Short says, but he admits that its popularity fascinates him.

During one dinner with Norman Lear, Short asked the renowned creator of the classic sitcom All in the Family for his perspective, "because we're in the middle of this horrible situation in Iraq, and 30 or 35 years ago, on prime-time television, you would have a beautifully written scene with two great characters, Archie and Meathead, discussing Iraq. Both sides would be represented, and it would be funny and fascinating. And (Lear) said that, for him, reality television is based on one word: humiliation. Everybody must be humiliated."

A sobering thought, perhaps, but Short is determined to serve it with a grain of salt, and without vinegar.

"I think we're just observing some simple facts," he says. "We're satirizing everything, including the audience, and the audience is empowering. What I'm really saying is, 'This is what you want.'"

To see more of USAToday.com, or to subscribe, go to http://www.usatoday.com

© Copyright 2006 USA TODAY, a division of Gannett Co. Inc.