The lying game; This month, a legendary comedian and a fictional lounge act fake their way to Broadway, writes Adam Green.(Martin Short)

Byline: Adam Green

You may know Martin Short as a brilliant physical comedian-a cast member of SCTV and the Tony-winning star of Little Me-but did you know that the Canadian-born Short is also a survivor of childhood abuse at the hands of his father, the beloved Saskatoon song-and-dance man Shim O'Short? Not to mention a recovering drug addict and an ex-lover

of the late Princess Margaret's, who once, when he asked her how the queen was doing, said, "Are you talking about my sister, my mother, or my husband?"

Short reveals all this and more in his new musical autobiography, Martin Short: Fame Becomes Me, a sur_real take on the washed-up-_celebrity-bares-his-soul-onstage genre. It also follows in the tradition of literary memoirs that refuse to let "what actually happened" stand in the way of their gut-wrenching tales of redemption. "This show is nothing but lies from beginning to end," admits the director, Scott Wittman, who, with his Hairspray songwriting partner Marc Shaiman, co-wrote the frisky score, which skewers the history of musical theater.

With over-the-top sets by Scott Pask and a talented cast of supporting players, this is no bare-bones one-man show. It aims to capture the precision anarchy of postmodern sketch comedy and the freewheeling schmaltz of old-fashioned musical revues. When I saw it in Toronto, Short's wild comic gifts sometimes got lost amid the fourth-wall-breaking plot twists and inside-showbiz shenanigans. Fame Becomes Me hits its stride when it lets ...