Let that be a lesson, homophobes, you think proudly. You wanna try to bully me? Prepare to get calmly notified the shit out of.
The DirecTV people get wind of the situation. They feel so bad they take you to Katy’s private VIP section, just offstage. You enjoy the rest of the concert and hang out backstage with Katy and her gaggle. Look, there’s Peyton Manning! He walks up to you and says, “Hey, I’m having a party at my apartment. You wanna stop by?”
Sure, you’ll stop by. It’s Peyton F’ing Manning. (The “F” is for football.)
As a courtesy you tell Katy where you’re going, and politely invite her to come with you, figuring (a) Peyton wouldn’t mind, and (b) no way will Katy Perry want to come. But she says, “Sure, let’s go.” And you and David get in the car, wondering, “Is Katy Perry really, legitimately, going to meet us at a party at Peyton Manning’s house? Because it seems like the amount of pure randomness that would open a hole in the space-time continuum right in the middle of Peyton Manning’s apartment.”
But you get there, and soon enough Katy shows up, only it’s not just Katy: it’s her entire gaggle of gays. And now the party consists of Peyton and his wife, the small remaining group of (presumably) straight local businessmen and their wives, and you and your (presumably) gay husband, and Katy Perry and her entourage of ten bright, colorful, hilarious, wonderful people, dressed at least to the nines if not the tens, joking and laughing and drinking and generally acting like you would expect the ten-gay-man entourage of Katy Perry to act at a party at 2:00 a.m. They take over the place. Their energy fills the room. Dance music starts blaring, loud.
But it’s cool, and it’s fun, and Peyton and his wife are awesome, and everyone gets along, and you all end up staying till four ’cause you’re having such a blast. And then the next day you watch the Super Bowl from Bob Kraft’s suite alongside Michael Douglas and Pat Riley.
So all in all it’s a good weekend, except for the one thing.
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For a 100 percent gay-friendly vacation, go HERE.
For a 100 percent straight-friendly musical number, go HERE.
In either case, feel free to stick around the end of this chapter for a few minutes and schmooze with Michael Douglas. Did you know he produced One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest? It’s true! Ask him about it.
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1On How I Met Your Mother, episode 127: “Oh Honey.” She played Zoey’s dumb cousin, and did so with the skilled comic chops of someone who in reality is as smart as a whip.
In 2009 you host the Emmys for the first time to widely favorable reviews. You have solid jokes, a wickedly witty and on-point opening number courtesy of your old partners-in-crime Marc Shaiman and Scott Wittman, and a whole lot of goodwill. Last year’s ceremony was infamously cohosted by five reality-show stars—Heidi Klum, Jeff Probst, Tom Bergeron, Howie Mandel, and Ryan Seacrest. Individually, any one of them might have been fine, but as a quintet they were, in the words of the Los Angeles Times, a “historical disaster.” (Really? Come on. Chernobyl was a historical disaster. The 2008 Emmys were a less-than-fully-realized awards show.) As a result, the bar has been set at ground level. You leap over it, then sit back and let critics call you a high-jumper.
But four years later the Emmys ask you back again, and this time the reviews afterward are more mixed. All right, not mixed; negative. All right, not afterward; during. Steven Levitan, the creator of Modern Family, calls them “the saddest Emmys ever” while accepting his Emmy. That’s not good. In fact, if anything, it’s ungood.
What goes wrong? In a word, death. A lot of famous television figures have passed away over the previous twelve months. This is not in itself uncommon. Over the years it’s become quite customary for TV stars to end their careers by dying. Usually these deaths are noted in a single “In Memoriam” montage, but this year Ken Ehrlich, a really nice guy and a show business veteran, decides to give lengthy, star-studded tributes to five different recently departed figures. Edie Falco remembers James Gandolfini; Rob Reiner salutes Jean Stapleton; and most controversially Jane Lynch pays tribute to Cory Monteith, the Glee star who had just died of a heroin overdose. To her credit, Jane speaks very honestly about the senselessness of Cory’s death, and insists that we run an antidrug public-service announcement immediately after. But many people still deem it wrong to single him out for remembrance. (The late Jack Klugman’s family is angry he wasn’t singled out for commemoration, and you can’t really blame them.) The larger point is, at five different times over the course of the night, the show goes to commercial with the stench of death—tragic early death, in Gandolfini’s and Monteith’s cases—in the air. You voiced concerns about this beforehand, but they were not heeded. Sure enough, from a hosting standpoint, their deaths spell your death.
And that’s not to mention Carrie Underwood’s mournful version of “Yesterday” marking the fiftieth anniversary of JFK’s assassination. Or your buddy Elton John’s sad ballad in honor of Liberace. Or the Emmy for Outstanding Writing for a Drama Series being presented posthumously to the writer Henry Bromell. By the end of the night, you’re surprised the Grim Reaper himself hasn’t started escorting the winners offstage and into eternity. Afterward Steven Levitan elaborates on his onstage comments: “Poor Neil Patrick Harris, who was so brilliant, had to keep digging himself out of the holes dug by these sad moments, time and time again. It was very difficult.” Yes. Yes it was.
Aside from all that there’s still an “In Memoriam” section, and a few days before air the producer shows it to you, because he’s very proud of what he’s done with it. Instead of just cutting or dissolving from one face to the next, he’s morphed them into each other. That thing they do in Michael Jackson’s “Black or White” video? That’s what he’s done with two dozen dead members of the Academy of Television Arts and Sciences.
Oh, dear lord.
It takes an extraordinary amount of begging and cajoling by you and the writers to persuade him to replace it with a more conventional montage, and thank god. As deathly as the show turns out to be, that would have been deathlier. It would have forever banished the “In Memoriam” video to the realm of an “In Memoriam” video.
There are also more than the usual amount of booking issues. You can’t always get who you want, as the Rolling Stones nearly said. Booking is always an issue with awards shows; a lot of ideas rely entirely on the participation of specific people, and if they are unwilling or unable to be involved you’re screwed. In some cases, that’s probably for the best. There’s an attempt to arrange a running bit throughout the broadcast of an “Emmy kiss-cam” that will feature random celebrities kissing backstage. It’s another idea you’re skeptical about, and apparently so is everyone else: No one is willing to do it. No one. Not even actual married couples. You mercifully kill the Emmy kiss-cam a few days before the broadcast.
But in some cases it’s more heartbreaking. Ken had talked to the White House about the possibility of getting President Obama to appear on the show. It’s a great idea. Although you don’t keep up with politics, you’ve heard that Obama is considered powerful in certain circles. So you and the writers come up with a pretaped bit involving TV presidents—Tony Goldwyn (Scandal), Billy Campbell (Lincoln in Killing Lincoln), Julia Louis-Dreyfus (Veep—she is “just” the vice president, which was the joke), and Jay Pharoah (SNL’s kick-ass Obama impressionist). You will intercut among them as they say things as if they had actual authority, and then at the end Obama will appear and essentially remind them who the real president is.
You get the draft out to the actors, and immediately the attrition begins. You lose Billy Campbell right away—he’s in Canada shooting. Scheduling also proves too much of an issue for Julia. You write a new draft replacing her with Martin Sheen as President Bartlet from The West Wing, but when Sheen says he wants Aaron Sorkin to rewrite his parts, it’s another fond farewell.
A revised draft with only Tony, Jay, and Obama goes to the White House. They approve, with the cav
eat that we add a mention or two of the Affordable Care Act rollout that is happening around the same time. This is problematic. To have the president appear merely in his capacity as president is one thing, but having him soft-sell policy initiatives is quite another. You pretape Tony’s and Jay’s parts and schedule a taping at the White House, but you feel conflicted. As it happens you are not nearly as conflicted as Syria, which that week explodes into a full-on international humanitarian crisis, taking with it any chance the president would want to participate in your silly little Emmy bit.
Oh, plus there’s no opening number.
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To pull off one of the more extraordinary musical numbers ever on live TV, go HERE.
To continue hosting Emmys, go HERE.
A few months earlier you’d opened the Tonys with “Bigger,” one of the more extraordinary musical numbers ever pulled off on live TV. You don’t want to compete with that, so for the first time at a major awards show you eschew1 an opening number. (Instead you include a number in the middle of the show. It’s called “The Number in the Middle of the Show,” and that’s exactly what it is, an absurd uptempo sparkly dancy thing, costarring your buddies Nathan Fillion and Sarah Silverman, that provides a nice little boost of midfuneral energy.)
Your opening is a pretaped bit in which you sit in a chair and binge-watch every episode of every nominated show, followed by an opening monologue that’s “interrupted” by previous Emmy hosts—Jimmy Kimmel, Jane Lynch, Jimmy Fallon, and Conan O’Brien. It turns out their interruption has been orchestrated by Kevin Spacey as Frank Underwood. The bit is good, but it’s not jumping-through-a-hoop-then-disappearing-from-the-stage good.
After a show like this, you make an effort to learn lessons so that you can do better in the future. You make that effort for approximately twelve hours, until you get the news that the ratings for the Emmys were the highest in eight years. At which point you realize that the true lesson is the usual lesson, which is that there is no lesson.
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To spend more time with Nathan Fillion, go HERE.
To spend more time with Sir Elton John, go HERE.
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1Gesundheit.
And now a word from your friend …
SARAH SILVERMAN
We met backstage at something about six years ago. What was it? The shitty Creative Arts Emmys before the real Emmys? I don’t remember. I just remember exchanging mild but genuine dick sucks (on my end anyway). Through the years after that we would see each other, schmooze with each other, and move on. Then eventually, mostly through David, we exchanged info and took that next step from fake show-biz friendship toward real show-biz friendship.
When you and David saw I had nowhere to go one Christmas Eve (it was really no tragedy—I’m a stay-home-on-holidays kind of Jew anyway), you would not have it. I went to your beautiful, warm, art-filled home, ate special veggie food David made for me, which was probably the best food I’ve ever had, and was allowed to go home—after a long night of food, laughing, and games—only after accepting a giant bag filled with presents. One, a brush, is still my brush. My one brush.
Then you and I were both cast in Seth MacFarlane’s comedy western A Million Ways to Die in the West. I was so happy I had a friend in the cast. You remember, we were shooting the movie in this small town in New Mexico known for its turquoise jewelry, crystals, and dreamcatchers, where there’s almost no place to get food after 9:00 p.m. I hadn’t had a social night out in two weeks until the night I e-mailed you and asked if you wanted to get dinner. You texted me you were downstairs in my hotel lobby getting a drink. I quickly took a puffsky as I’m wont to do before a fun dinner out, then ran down to meet you.
We walked to the only place open, a pizza place called The Upper Crust (not the one in Boston). It was empty and the burnouts working there were jazzed to see us, which was nice. We ordered pizzas and you got a beer, because you’re a man, and sat at a table outside. We gabbed and laughed and were having a great old time until you looked down at your phone and saw that David was calling. As I overheard (listened in) on your conversation I began to feel an intense pain in my side that went up to my shoulder. So while you were having a conversation with David, I had one with myself consisting of gentle but desperate assurances that I was fine and not dying and please don’t blow your first night out with another human being in two weeks on some phantom pain.
Meanwhile, poor David was at his wit’s end, alone with the twins, one of whom would not go to bed. David was trying his best to be loving but stern, but he is weak with the kids, as I would undoubtedly be if I had them. I can’t take kids’ tears. Somewhere in my screwed-up head I feel like they’re crying about the Holocaust or Darfur and it seems so wrong to ignore.
You were the perfect husband—feeling terrible and guilty that you weren’t there to help and instead having a great night with your superfunny comedian friend, Sarah. But even as I registered this, the world got really far away and I felt a familiar feeling. I knew I was going to faint. It’s something I’ve always done infrequently—maybe once a year or so—but when it happens there’s nothing I can do about it, and it was coming. You saw it on my face before I could even say anything.
“Are you about to pass out?”
I remained calm, and would have laughed if I weren’t so totally outside of my body already. I managed to say, “I am fine. I faint sometimes. I will be 100 percent fine. I need to lie on the ground with my feet up is all. If the guys from the restaurant look over, tell them I tweaked my back and I’m just lying flat for a second.”
And down I went.
It happened a couple times, and both times you held my hand and were so loving. Little gestures like that mean so much. I had accepted already that this was wildly embarrassing for both of us and apologized while floating in and out. I remember saying, “I didn’t want David to have all the attention.” You laughed and said, “Now I don’t have to feel bad that I was out having a good time without him! This sucks!”
When I returned to my body, you walked me home and safely to my little room. I ate some olives I had bought and the salt brought me fully back.
And that’s that. The moral is, never leave home without Neil Patrick Harris and/or olives.
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To appear in a musical number with Sarah, go HERE.
Everything you’ve learned and achieved as an actor, performer, entertainer, and host culminates in 2014 when you play the title role in the Broadway revival of the rock musical Hedwig and the Angry Inch, which after nine years on HIMYM you instinctively refer to as HATAI.
The producer of the show, David Binder, had approached you as early as 2007 about portraying Hedwig, the tragic, triumphant, transsexual German-American rock star. You’ve been a fan and admirer of the piece ever since you saw its legen—wait-for-it—dary run at the Off-Broadway Jane Street Theater in 1998, which starred its creator, John Cameron Mitchell, singing with a band led by the show’s songwriter, Stephen Trask. Both that production and the subsequent movie version had achieved cult status, but the creative team had long and correctly felt Hedwig deserved a broad(way)-er audience. They were seeking a more mainstream star, you were their first choice, and they were willing to wait a few years—until Ted Mosby finally met his soulmate—to snap you up.
But why, exactly, would you want to take on that role? Two major aspects of both Hedwig and Hedwig seemed to go against your performance grain. Hedwig is feminine, alluring, a convincing-enough woman for her innocent male teenage protégé to fall in love with, and you are … not. In fact over the years you’ve gone out of your way to eliminate any traces of femininity from your behavior. It’s what’s enabled you to credibly play Barney Stinson on HIMYM. So how are you going to pull off the part of a man who’s had his part pulled off?1
Then there’s the rock ’n’ rolliness of it. The music in Hedwig is 100 percent straight-up rock ’n’ roll, and that too has never been your style, either vocally or personally. You
r musical tastes run more toward show tunes and the big band era, and though you’ve done a lot of singing onstage it’s never been in the rock idiom. The closest you’ve come was Rent, but that eclectic score was more of a rock/show-tunes hybrid. Will you be able to get your voice to sound genuinely rock ’n’ roll? And if so, will you have the discipline and endurance to keep it that way for a four-month run?
These are challenges, but the challenges are exactly what make it so appealing. The challenges, coupled with the fact that the show and the character are just so good, so rich, so human, so vital. She is a truly larger-than-life figure, and she’d better be, because the entire show is pretty much her. She’s onstage for the entirety of the show; she has all the dialogue and almost all the singing, and not a small amount of dancing, either. She has to be a dazzling spellbinder displaying complete control of the band behind her, the audience in front of her, the story within her … everything, except the potent emotions and resentments that flare up and eventually burst through in a climax filled with rage, forgiveness, and catharsis. It’s a live high-wire act with a great degree of difficulty. And yet with its emphasis on risk and physicality and showmanship (not to mention costume and hair changes) it is the logical end point of the progression of live high-wire acts you’ve done up to now: Rent and Cabaret and Assassins and “Not Just for Gays Anymore” and “Bigger.” After all, the premise of the show is that you’re giving a concert to a large group of theatergoers. In a sense, Hedwig would be the ultimate host job.