CELEBRITY AUTOBIOGRAPHY: The Library Is Open, Kind Of – Review

You see a lineup including Jeff Hiller, Kenan Thompson and Bobby Moynihan attached to an easy pitch like comic readings from Hollywood memoirs and you’re pretty much prepared for what Celebrity Autobiography entails. You know that, as with all comedy shows, quality will vary and brace yourself for some deeper sips of your drink whenever it dips. Nights like these are low-risk and, hopefully, high-reward.

Those dependable three (Hiller, Thompson and Moynihan) were highlights from the opening night cast of Celebrity Autobiography, a revue of sorts which has popped up throughout the country, including Broadway in 2018, since 1998. Eugene Pack’s creation, which he co-developed and co-directed with Dayle Reyfel (the two also star), will take up residence at the Shubert this summer, with an ever-changing cast and, presumably, similarly shifting source material.

Rounding out that opening night cast were Scott Adsit, Mario Cantone, Jackie Hoffman, Andrea Martin, Ben Mankiewicz, Nia Vardalos, Rita Wilson and, in a “special appearance,” Gayle King.

Now, I’m someone who frets constantly about our growing cultural amnesia, how even the previous decade’s worth of culture is immediately retconned as ‘old’ and how we’re losing the ability to lovingly critique our stars in favor of flattened online self-identification. If a caftan’d queen does a fierce Liz Taylor impression but no one saw it on Reels, will she ever have happened? So I generally welcome the idea of Mario Cantone reading (surprisingly bitchy) passages from Carol Channing’s memoirs on Broadway.

But even allowing for the comedy-club clause of varied quality, Celebrity Autobiography is stale, and for me to pretend like it is a brave, silent prayer in the days after the death of TCM’s founder would be its own bit of laughable writing. It’s stale in star selection and it’s stale in style, which often feels stuck in an early 2000s roast sensibility. This is most evident through Pack’s picks (Neil Sedaka…yay?), performance (the type of “get a load of this guy”  vibe comedians affect to appeal to the everyman while not admitting anything of themselves) and purpose – or lack thereof.

Purpose need not be the name of the game with something like this, but the production occasionally does approach having something to say about celebrity, delusion and earnestness, or at least meet our current understanding of how we currently think of them. Jeff Hiller might be earning some of the biggest laughs on Broadway right now, not because his impressions of Cher and the dog that played Sandy in the original Annie are terribly contemporary, but because of the characters he creates from them in quick sketches: recognizable for their specificity but also for the human traits he gives them. (His Sandy is something of a diva.)

Kenan Thompson’s Justin Bieber and Andrea Martin’s Kris Jenner discoursing on the exclusionary pleasures of fame is an enjoyable punching up, as are Christopher Jackson’s sly takedowns of Ryan Seacrest and Michael Bublé’s sociopathic cleanliness; Rita Wilson’s airheaded Pamela Anderson is not. She plays Anderson, not “in her own words” – where the pre-show announcement and Pack, throughout, insist on reminding us these stories originated – but as a character in Mötley Crüe’s joint autobiography, where she’s exactly the bimbo the past few years have proven Anderson is decidedly not. (Wilson acquits herself with a brilliant Céline Dion.) Celebrity Autobiography has an icky relationship with its side characters, often women, who it feels content mocking through the double-distance of someone else’s story. Mario Cantone’s Liza Minnelli, apart from being way too much, doesn’t get to offer herself up for critique via her own singular stories, but rather through – of all people – Geraldo Rivera’s account of an affair they might’ve had.

This is far too much critical thought for this type of show, so can I simply recommend Nia Vardalos as a race-hopping Khloe Kardashian begging her personal trainer for JLo’s abs and Beyoncé’s ass? It’s not an unenjoyable evening, though it does feel like the idea’s best manifestation is as a YouTube clip of a skit at some gala benefit we didn’t attend. (Or, I dunno, lock in a consistent cast who can really mine fixed passages for punch?) Ticket costs, typically irrelevant when evaluating the artists’ work, are increasingly Broadway’s elephant in the room. This being such a low-prep, low-lift show for those involved, most of whom from the nose-to-the-grindstone comedy world, and with the production itself taking the tone of “We’re not celebrities, the kooks in these memoirs are,” it does become impossible to ignore material reality. Celebrity, for all its joys, can be a tough sell.

Celebrity Autobiography is in performance through August 16, 2026 at the Shubert Theatre on West 44th Street in New York City. For tickets and more information, visit here.