Las Vegas Weekly

July 3, 2008 · 2:30 PM

Your New Best Friends gets a hand from Dick

By Julie Seabaugh

It was one of those once-in-a-lifetime, you-gotta-know-someone-to-hear-about-it things. After all, Your New Best Friends, the variety production combining classic clowning with bawdy humor and modern attitude, debuted at the Onyx Theatre back in late April and has returned sporadically ever since. When creators and stars Wayne Wilson, Daniel Passer and John Gilkey weren’t taking the show to the likes of New York, L.A. and Seattle, that is. Or when they weren’t occupied with their full-time jobs as La Revecast members. But it was only this afternoon at 1 p.m. that Anthony Cools invited the group – and its members’ family, friends and co-workers -- to his 250-ish capacity showroom at The Paris. And it was only this afternoon that Andy Dick, fresh from serving as celebrity judge for last week’s tapings of Comedy Central’s revamped Gong Show with Dave Attell, stood in for an out-of-town Gilkey.

Photo: Associated Press

Andy Dick slipped into Onyx Theatre to help with Your New Best Friends.

“Daniel and him are really good friends, so he invited Andy out and he came down,” Wilson explained post-performance. “We didn’t really rehearse much together, but Daniel and I did some of our stuff and it’s just been fun to experiment, having someone else to play with. It was just really free; you just had to go with it.”

Highlights included “The Newbies,” a sketch in which Wilson and Passer flopped rhythmically about the stage in nude bodysuits before “urinating” on each other and the crowd, Wilson’s inappropriately hands-on yoga instructor, a musical finale featuring several well-sculpted Cirque dancers, and the overwhelming majority of gags involving Dick. Admission was free, but witnessing the actor/comedian fondling his nipples and adjusting his oversized codpiece in a lavender leotard, not to mention singing a ditty about why squirrels are better than girls (“Squirrels won’t parade around dressed like sluts / They’ll never say no to my sweet sack of nuts”) was priceless.

Luckily, several cameras placed about the room captured the hour and a half performance. “We had a couple of our friends shooting documentary stuff for us,” Wilson said. “We’ve been kind of shooting since we put the group together, just capturing the whole process of it. We do our show all week long, we’ll get on a flight, do a couple of shows, come right back and do La Reve again. It’s just fun: Finding theaters, meeting new technicians and all the problems that go along with that, putting a show on with one day’s notice. It’s just tracking the journey for us.”

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