After an evening with Seth Rudetsky, you may never think of Broadway in the same way again. A musical comedy polymath who’s worked with just about every bold-faced name in the business, he’s blessed with manic enthusiasm, lightning-quick comic instincts, and a knack for explaining the good, the bad and the hilariously awful whether he’s deconstructing Barbra Streisand or extolling the badness of The Brady Bunch Variety Hour.
“Alice doing ‘Shake Your Booty’!” he marveled during a recent phone conversation. “It’s mystifying! Where is the shame?”
Babs and The Bradys are among the many divas and diva wannabes who get their due in Seth Rudetsky’s Big Fat Broadway Show, coming to the Straz Center’s Jaeb Theater this weekend. Think of it as “a combination of America’s Funniest Home Videos and The Daily Show,” says Rudetsky, who comes equipped with audio/visual evidence and promises that the show is as much fun for the Broadway-averse as the Broadway-obsessed.
The latter already know Rudetsky from his hosting duties on Sirius XM Radio’s Broadway channel. He’s a fast-talking, piano-playing dervish, expressing his admiration with frequent interjections of “Ah-mah-zing!” and “Bra-vah!” and at ease with performers from his long career as musical director, actor and singer. He’s also a composer — his spoof of ’70s disaster movies, aptly entitled Disaster!, opens this week Off-Broadway, and if the reviews are good, he hopes to be in “an amazing mood.”
Sat., Nov. 9, 7:30 p.m.; Sun., Nov. 10, 2 p.m. Jaeb Theater, Straz Center, Tampa. Tickets from $35.50, 813-229-STAR, strazcenter.org.
