By Michael Barbieri****What do you get when you bring together MAC Award winner Amy Wolk and panelists from the worlds of Broadway, cabaret and television, telling outrageous and often hilarious stories about their careers and their pasts, with the understanding that some of those stories may be complete and utter LIES?
You get I Only Have Lies For You, a new live game show presented onstage at the Laurie Beechman Theater!
I recently caught the Season 1 Finale, wherein Amy, Musical Director William TN Hall, and panelists that included Telly Leung (Aladdin), Jenn Gambatese (School of Rock), Kelvin Moon Loh (Spongebob Squarepants), Sarah Chase (“The Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt”), Steve Rosen (Spamalot), and Wesley Taylor (“Smash”), all got big laughs from the packed house!
The concept is fairly simple: It’s a lying contest! The panelists are divided into two teams. Over three rounds of play, contestants on one team tell stories about their shows, past auditions, onstage flubs and even childhood experiences. The opposing team must guess if those stories are true or not. If they guess correctly, they rack up points. In order to better fool their opponents, panelists can defend their stories by any means possible, including song and dance!
The night I attended, some of the best stories included:
• Kelvin Moon Loh’s account of a night he delivered a line incorrectly at the beginning of a performance of Spongebob Squarepants, almost ruining the plot line of the entire musical The story was true!
• Sarah Chase telling us about an episode of “Law & Order” she was shooting and how she delivered her one line—“Oh my GOD! The crane! It’s FALLING!”—so badly that the director took her aside and simply told her “Act better!” She was asked to show us how bad the reading really was. And yes, it was excruciatingly bad—and funny. And her story was true!
• Telly Leung recalling a night when he was appearing in Allegiance, a very serious musical about a Japanese family’s experience in an internment camp during World War II. As he began his big number, he went up on his lyrics, so he just grunted his way through the song instead! The other team asked him to prove his story by recreating the moment, which he did, quite hilariously, grunting and groaning and grabbing his chest. Oh, and that story was true, too!
Perhaps the biggest reaction came when Steve Rosen told us about seeing Liza Minnelli in the film of Cabaret when he was a child, which led to a lifelong obsession with Minnelli. He collected all her albums, and if I remember correctly, he even told us he mounted an amateur production of Cabaret in school. The opposing team grilled him about his love of the star and eventually decided he was telling the truth. His response: “I don’t know a THING about Liza Minnelli!” He had fooled everyone and the audience erupted into gales of hysterical laughter and spontaneous applause!
I Only Have Lies For You is a ton of fun. It’s fast-paced, fascinating, and above all, very, very funny! There’s also nothing else like it in cabaret these days; you get a lot of entertainment for the money! For a $15 cover charge, plus a $20 minimum, you’ll get some of the hottest talent on Broadway and the possibility that they’ll sing, dance, reenact terrible moments from their careers and tell amazing true stories—or not!
The best news of all is that Season 2 is coming this fall! New shows are coming Sunday, September 9th; Sunday, October 7th; Sunday November 4th and Sunday, December 2nd. All shows at 9:30 pm.
So remember, “It’s a Sin to Tell a Lie,” unless you’re playing I Only Have Lies For You!!
I Only Have Lies For You is also available as a podcast. You can find it at http://ionlyhaveliesforyou.libsyn.com/ as well as through iTunes. For more information, go to www.ionlyhaveliesforyou.com
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