Las Vegas Weekly

May 27, 2010 · 5:10 PM

Wayne Brady admits to nerves in return to standup at Venetian

By Robin Leach

Wayne Brady.

Photo: Kirvin Doak Communications

Improv comedy king Wayne Brady returns to The Venetian Showroom tonight after a six-month hiatus. He nearly lost his voice trying to host tapings of Let’s Make a Deal by day at the Tropicana and by night doing 90 minutes of unscripted, unrehearsed and unplanned Making It Up standup at The Venetian.

“It’s good to be returning to my second home,” Wayne told me. I chatted with him yesterday as he commuted between his L.A. home and Las Vegas. After congratulating him in advance of his birthday next week, he told me: “I’m very happy to have a new birthday coming up.

“It’s a good thing. I don’t look at it as getting a year older. I’m very happy I’m here to celebrate it because not everyone can say the same thing, sadly.”

Here’s our conversation:

Robin Leach: Do you think you were working a little too hard and you needed to take the break?

Wayne Brady: Maybe that’s my body’s way of saying it, but I’m no stranger to hard work, and I just felt that I was doing what was normal. I just couldn’t be the entertainer who stands there with a microphone in the middle of the stage, tells a joke or even a singer that sings a song . It was the improv, doing the character, doing all the singing and dancing, flying back and forth, then the tapings. It was ’round the clock, so I think to a degree, it was my body telling me that I needed to ease off a little bit.

Photo: Blush

Wayne Brady at Blush in the Wynn.

As great as it is having to work -- I come from that old gypsy tradition of you work while you have it because it’s such an up-and-down business -- you do the best you possibly can do doing it and strike while the iron’s hot. But the problem is that you tend to forget that your body is a machine, and you really don’t want to mess the machine up, and I used my voice for so many things that I think I did need to take a second to just go, “OK, I’m just gonna shoot the TV show,” and nothing else. Then when I go back to The Venetian, I’ll be 100 percent, so I can give the audiences exactly what they’re paying for.

RL: Now this time it’s a less rigorous schedule that you’re returning to? Or is it that you set lesser time so you can flex your muscles in other areas like the musical Rent and then the Toronto Comedy Festival and eventually a possible return to Broadway -- but all in a logical order rather than all at once?

WB: That’s exactly it because life is short, and I want to be able to take advantage of everything I can. But I don’t want to kill myself doing it, so I had to start thinking like an adult rather than an 18-year-old kid that’s going, “OK, I’m gonna do this and I’m gonna knock this out of the park and then come back to my home at The Venetian and kill it.” Now this will let me do Rent, which is one of the shows that I’ve loved and I’ve been cast in a couple of times over the years and was never free enough to do. Then I can go do the Comedy Festival, then I can come back to The Venetian, and then I can do a record, and then I can go back to Let’s Make a Deal. This way I think I got the best of all worlds because I love doing everything I do.

RL: Wayne, did you come close to losing your voice?

WB: I lost my voice in the sense of not in the sense of “Oh, no, Wayne will never speak or sing again,” but I lost my voice for a short while because of just not being smart. You know, taping, flying, talking and running. Folks don’t always think of having normal lives because they end up seeing so many people on reality TV that all looks heightened, but I’ve got a normal life.

Leila Navidi

Wayne Brady performs with backup dancers at The Venetian on July 22, 2009.

I’ve got a daughter that I’ve got to get up in the morning and take her to school. I want to read to her and hang out with her. Add up your work with your everyday life and all of that wears and tears. I definitely needed to become a lot smarter about how I use my facility -- especially the older you get, the more seasoned you get, you’ve got to take care of yourself.

RL: Do you honestly think that you were pushing yourself too much and it could have been dangerous?

WB: I just think that work caught up with me, and now I’m a little smarter, but I’m going to continue to do everything that I love to do, which is my job. So much of my life is wrapped up in my job. I’ve been onstage since I was 16, so I think I’m just going to take smarter life ways. Especially for when I’m in Las Vegas, I must drink more water, I mustn’t talk all the time. Everyone can take a great cue from the billion-dollar voice of Celine Dion. She takes incredible care of her instrument. She’s a professional. She’s smart, and that’s what I hadn’t done. Now I’ve got to constantly think about that. I must drink a ton of water and stay hydrated.

RL: Did you ever ask Celine for advice?

WB: I think I should have, but I now got a little smarter about it, and so I am definitely using the humidifier and drinking all of my water and getting to bed at a nice time and getting up and working out. I’m doing everything I can do to keep myself healthy because I’d like to be still doing Making It Up when I’m 60, 70, 80 years old. I’m not even joking about that because with modern technology and taking care of yourself, there’s no reason why I can’t do this until the day that I pass away, which I hope will be when I am a very, very old, gray-haired man -- and still making people laugh.

Photo: Erik Kabik/Retna/www.erikkabikphoto.com

Wayne Brady at the 70th birthday celebration for Mayor Oscar Goodman at the Golden Nugget on July 31.

RL: Wayne, explain to people who might not understand it when you walk out on the stage of Making It Up and you don’t have a clue what’s going to happen -- is there an added pressure to perform for the next 90 minutes because there is the possibility that you might freeze?

WB: I’ve never frozen because my work ethic tells me people didn’t pay money to come see me freeze. They pay to be entertained, and they pay to laugh, so that being said, I may never freeze, but, oh yeah, there may be a time when something not funny comes out of my mouth. But the great thing is because it’s improv, if something comes out of my mouth that I don’t like that I don’t think is good, guess what? I can say something right after that and something after that and keep it going until I reach that place that I’m satisfied, that has the audience rolling with laughter and then that has me happy with the show.

RL: Is it double the pressure or quadruple the pressure to walk on a bare stage without a script, without a plan of action, without a blocking?

WB: Stepping on the stage itself, that’s what I’m there for. That’s what I eat, sleep and breathe, so it isn’t that it’s more pressure than doing something else. This just comes with its own built-in pressure, but I live in that pressure and work within those confines. I’ve done it for so long now that I feel comfortable, and I can deal with it. Now do I get scared. Does my heart beat a little faster right as I’m standing behind the curtain? Every single night! Every time I step onstage, my hands are sweating, my pulse is racing. I am completely mortified, but I love that feeling, and that’s what drives the entire machine. As soon as I start -- boom, I’m out of the gate! I think that if I didn’t have that sensation, it would probably be the worst show that I could have ever done. I need to have that pressure. I need to be on it!

Photo: Al Powers

Wayne Brady celebrates his 37th birthday at Lavo.

RL: Does the fact there isn’t a safety net or a special place onstage to crawl to also give you that added edge that you need for the rush of adrenaline to kick in?

WB: Absolutely. The only other person onstage with me is my partner Jonathan, so it’s just the two of us. It’s like jumping out of an airplane. We don’t know what’s going to happen. I love that rush, and nothing else quite compares to it. I think the discipline of improv has its own rush.

RL: How long do we have you back at The Venetian under the contract?

WB: Right now I’m just finishing the dates that I couldn’t do earlier, so end of June, beginning of July, and I think another week or so. A month total, and then we’ll see what we can do. This is really to clear up the mixed set of dates that were caused when I lost my voice.

RL: Then do you decide whether you’re going to stay on?

WB: It’s not even a decision on whether I should stay on or not. I have to go back to Let’s Make a Deal, and that shoots in Hollywood, so I’ll be in L.A. most of the time for the rest of the year. But you never say never, so I want to come back to Las Vegas. Las Vegas is a second home for me. I’m following in the tradition of my hero Sammy Davis Jr., so I have to leave the door open for Vegas, The current run will clean up the dates I missed. Then I’ll tackle all the other things that are cooking, and then hopefully return to Vegas after that. I want to return with another show with the improv element -- maybe a little more traditional in the musical sense or with a book. I might wind down on Making It Up. I love doing it, though. But I love new challenges because I have a short attention span.

All I know right now is that I’m pacing myself for the first time. I’m not going to knock myself out like I did. I want to be around to have my daughter see me as we both get older.

Robin Leach has been a journalist for more than 50 years and has spent the past decade giving readers the inside scoop on Las Vegas, the world’s premier platinum playground.

Follow Robin Leach on Twitter at Twitter.com/Robin_Leach.

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