At birth, Miley Cyrus was known as Destiny Hope Cyrus, but everyone called her Smiley and thus Smiley became Miley and, well, you may now continue with your day.
If you had somehow survived without knowing that salient fact, then you have not consumed Smiley, er, Miley's 2009 autobiography, "Miles to Go," one of the many works of astonishing egotism and self-involvement lampooned in "Celebrity Autobiography," the new comedic entertainment that has moved into the vacant Shubert Theatre.
This take-down of the literary efforts of the likes of Carol Channing or David Hasselhoff or Whatever Kardashian (they all blurr) offers a slight, but intermittently amusing summer attraction for anyone who has snagged a ticket, sufficiently affordable so that you are not constantly questioning your value for money for the entire 90 minutes.
As conceived by Eugene Pack and Dayle Reyfel, "Celebrity Autobiography," has been knocking around for a good long while. I first saw it some 16 years ago in Chicago. The production consists of celebrities of various dubious wattage reading the output of campy others of their ilk.
When I saw the show Sunday, the cast featured Scott Adsit (who was doing this years ago), Mario Cantone (ditto), Jackie Hoffman, Andrea Martin, Ben Mankiewicz, Nia Vardalos, Rita Wilson and Christopher Jackson, but your mileage and content may vary. This is an attractive gig for said celebs, who get to look cool and self-aware and who make a buck without having to commit to standing on the stage of the Shubert for months at a time and, since everyone here is reading, there is no requirement to learn any lines.
The shtick here -- and it is indeed a clever concept -- is that all you have to do is read the actual words of actual celebrity autobiographies, and the writer then hoists themselves on their own petards, to quote "Hamlet," itself a bit of a celebrity autobiography but not one used here. This show prefers to quote from Tiger Woods, mined for his creepy phallic references, or Oprah, who somehow was moved to hack on and on for pages about chai tea.
At my show, Hoffman gave Her Oprahness a husky voice of God. Worshipping chai. Most amusing. So was Cantone, whose full-blown impressions liven up the B material and contrast nicely with the dryness of others.
This show begs a question: Why are so many celebrity autobiographies so crap?
Many reasons. Actors, singers and sports people typically are not great auteurs. But they have clout and their sycophantic ghost writers tend to keep their eyes on the sweet paycheck rather than exerting some kind of quality control. Celebs also experience day-to-day lives where no one ever ignores their needs, meaning that they start believing those needs actually matter.
In fairness, they're under pressure to feed their fans juicy titbits about their everyday lives, which maybe goes someway to explaining why Neil Sedaka's autobiography is weirdly fixated on his digestive system.
That's nothing, though, compared to Geraldo Rivera's tension-fueled recounting of his sexual assignation with Liza Minnelli in a Studio 54 bathroom, a tawdry and hairy tale of coitus kinda interruptus that Rivera bizarrely felt drawn to make public.
The most interesting genre in this show, though, is the celebrity autobiography that attempts humility while actually scaling great heights of narcissism. We hear in the show from Justin Bieber, who meditates via Jackson on his visit to the Louvre in Paris wherein theorizes that, due to the paparazzi presence, he is more popular than the Mona Lisa. "How can this be?" he asks, at length, seemingly oblivious to the truth that the very act of telling the story makes him look absurd.
You'll be shocked to know that the Kardashians have pretty much the same story with the same painting at the same museum and reach the same conclusions.
Some of "Celebrity Autobiography," though, is centered on old Hollywood revenge (of a kind) like the rivalry between Carol Channing and Barbra Streisand or the faded romantic travails of Eddie Fisher and Elizabeth Taylor.
On occasion, you get to hear about the same traumatic event from two different perspectives as one reader intersects with another, scaling new heights of pettiness and triviality for your amusement.
