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Boston Herald
Boston Herald
11 Oct 2011
Jim Sullivan


NextImg:‘Celebrity’  apprentice

Kim Kardashian. Ashley Judd. Snooki. The world is awash with celebrities and their memoirs.

And these books provide grist for the comic mill of the award-winning performance series “Celebrity Autobiography.”

On Monday, six actors — the star being former “Saturday Night Live” comic Rachel Dratch — will tackle about a dozen celebrity vignettes. Co-creators and actors Eugene Pack and wife Dayle Reyfel will join Lyric Stage regulars Larry Coen, Kathy St. George and Timothy John Smith, reading from celeb memoirs verbatim. They’re not doing impersonations, but interpretations. Pack and Reyfel will choose the passages to be read.

“The ones they pick are usually ones where the author has taken themselves way too seriously,” said Dratch, on the phone from New York. “It’s the theme that runs throughout that makes it so funny.”

“Nothing is meanspirited,” said Pack, from Los Angeles. “It’s done with a wink. If you’re famous, you have a mem-oir, and this is making fun of the memoir. ”

The Lexington-raised Dratch, 45, has been doing this gig for about two years. “Each actor is bringing something different,” she said. “That’s what’s fun about it. It’s never quite the same show. You apply your comic whatever — whatever you think is funny. It’s fun for me because I don’t have to learn any lines and the material they pick is really funny even though it wasn’t intended to be.”

Expect to see Dratch read from Madonna and Elizabeth Taylor.

One of the best bits, Dratch said, has been Pack reading from “Laughing in the Rain” by Neil Sedaka. “He lists everything that he eats in a day in painstaking detail,” Dratch said. “You think it’s over and he goes, ‘If I’m in an Italian restaurant … ’ and you think that’s over and he goes Chinese, French, Japanese. He goes to every kind of restaurant, tells what he orders. The first time I heard it, my eyes were popping out of my head about how far this guy was going.”

“Here’s the irony of it all,” Dratch added. “I’m writing one myself. Although I’m trying to be funny and a lot of these people aren’t trying to be funny. I’m not writing what I eat every day.”

Dratch will be finishing her memoir shortly and expects it to be published in April.

“Celebrity Autobiography” at the Lyric Stage, Monday. Tickets: $25-$35; 617-585-5678.