Read with a straight face
Local celebs Dratch, Cantone ready to recite memoirs of the rich and famous on Broadway
Locally grown stars Mario Cantone and Rachel Dratch are both hitting Broadway, baby. The Stoneham-raised actor and Lexington-born comedian will be part of the cast taking on the latest iteration of “Celebrity Autobiography: In Their Own Words” starting at the end of the month.
Cantone, who’s a vet when it comes to this particular show, and Dratch will be doing ironically hysterical readings from memoirs of the rich and famous when the four-performance series graces Broadway for the first time in its decadeslong history.
And while the duo will be appearing every night the act is going down at New York City’s Marquis Theatre, they’ll also be joined by a sprinkle of other star-performers, including: “Saturday Night Live” vets Alec Bald
win and Cecily Strong; scrappy standup comedian Lewis Black; “Queer Eye” food guru Antoni Porowski ; as well as the once and future queen of soap operas, Susan Lucci.
“Celebrity Autobiography” will be running at the Manhattan theatre from Nov. 26 through Dec. 19. Although Eugene Pack and Dayle Reyfel developed this routine back in 1998 and the show has since become a fixture within NYC’s arts scene, it’s only been strictly off-Broadway up until this point.
Since its inception, the act has famously featured an ever-rotating cast who’ve read excerpts of A-listers’ autobiographies verbatim, inevitably transforming the seriously intended snippets into fodder for sheer laughter. In the past, the show has plucked words from the pages of books written by everyone from Britney Spears, Elizabeth Taylor and Madonna , to Sylvester Stallone, Burt Reynolds and Tommy Lee. Performances will be doing down on Monday nights at 8 during the upcoming run, which is being produced by Reyfel, Angelo Fraboni, Carl Pasbjerg, Magic Space Entertainment and EP Productions.