Question: What current Broadway production has the most genuine laughs? Answer: Easy—the just-opening Celebrity Autobiography, which includes the repeated phrase, “We couldn’t make this stuff up.”
It’s not written by a single comedy writer like Jean Kerr or Neil Simon or like this year’s Fallen Angels revival tossed off a century ago by Noel Coward. Not a comedy from, say, a team like Moss Hart and George S. Kaufman.
Nuh-uh. The undeniable humor here is supplied by a harvest of writers. They’re celebrities, as the title promises, who over the decades proved unable to resist giving (gifting?) their autobiographies or memoirs to presumably panting fans.
Some years back now Eugene Pack and Dayle Reyfel got their own urge at the West 72nd Street Triad to round up actors for reading from this species of volumes, volumes seemingly resulting from celebrities thinking to tell all humbly or seriously or self-aggrandizingly or combinations of those or other instincts.
Or maybe not to tell all, since, as a friend said to me a few days back (and others have also repeatedly opined), “All memoirs are self-serving.” That’s quite often, of course, as the self-servers have convinced themselves they’re really serving others.
The Triad evenings were successful. So why not, Pack and Reyfel have reasoned, give larger audiences the opportunity to belly-laugh at celebrities making fools of themselves? And presto-chango, here it is.
For a run that has the look of something put together to fill the Shubert before something more strictly B-way arrives, Pack and Reyfel, both also directing, have gathered 48 performers to read from autobiographies by any number of scribbling well-knowns.
The night I was there chuckling and occasionally laughing out loud boasted, in proper alphabetical order, Scott Absit, Mario Cantone, Jeff Hiller, Jackie Hoffman, Christopher Jackson, Ben Mankiewicz, Andrea Martin, Nia Vardalos, Rita Wilson, Pack himself, and Reyfel herself.
And be aware they didn’t restrict themselves to reading calmly and forthrightly. Oh no, they did not. They acted the excerpts with huge dollops of gusto. It can be reported here that the comics among them—Cantone, Hoffman, Martin, Hiller—really went to town on the vulnerable material. Oh boy, did they! Somewhere the autobi-ers they assailed had to have been suddenly shaken without knowing why.
Pack and Reyfel have prepared the ingredients with intriguing, highly risible results on a stylish Derek McLane set, those authors: David Hasselhoff, Justin Bieber, Geraldo Rivera, Vanna White (experiencing trouble turning letters on the gameshow board), Dolly Parton, Oprah Winfrey, Neil Sedalka, Ryan Seacrest, Celine Dion, Michael Bublé, Miley Cyrus, Beyoncé, Tommy Lee, Pamela Anderson, Cher, Khloe Kardashian, Suzanne Sommers, Matthew McCanoughey, Carol Channning, Ethel Merman, Sandy (the dog from Annie), Arnold Schwarzenegger, Tiger Woods, Joe Namath, and on and on, boisterously featuring Elizabeth Taylor, Debbie Fisher, and Eddie Fisher, that eye-popping marriage-swapping trio.
This last grouping fall into a sly Celebrity Autobiography category that Pack and Reyfel call mash-ups. These are groups of writers addressing the same subject—diets, for instance. Sommers and McConaughey are both poets, or so they proclaim. (Cast members don’t go easy on their poetic creations.)
Yes, the Taylor-Reynolds-Fisher mash-up is good for extra-special giggles. Each of the three penned (alone?) an autobio. It’s no surprise then that slightly different versions of the same event(s) are recalled from different angles. Just who called Debbie to proclaim that Elizabeth and Eddie had fallen head over hills for each other after Mike Todd passed on? We’ll never know who got it right. That’s if even one did.
Aside from embarrassing the disclosed celebrities, the yuk-a-minute enterprise has another perhaps-unintentional, perhaps purposeful goal: to put an end to celebrity autobiography once and for all.
Although not a celebrity, I’d like to request that all readers of this review who ever learn I’m planning an autobiography will do whatever necessary to put a stop to it. Many thanks in advance.
Celebrity Autobiography opened May 18, 2026, at the Shubert Theatre and runs through August 9. Tickets and information: celebrityautobiography.com
