Wayne Brady: Making It Up

The multi-talented Wayne Brady is back in Las Vegas for another run of his critically acclaimed improv-based show, Wayne Brady: Making It Up (which is technically titled Making %@it Up) at The Venetian. And while no two shows will ever be the same, one thing you can bet on is that Brady and improv partner Jonathan Mangum will manage to have audiences laughing non-stop for 90 minutes every night.

As expected, the show requires audience participation – in the form of suggestions for each sketch’s premise or setting — and no matter what the audience throws at Brady and Mangum, they take the ball and run with it.

On a recent night, things got off to a raucous start with Brady’s “gangsta rap,” incorporating random, SAT-type words. (Kudos to Brady for successfully working in a verse about a colonoscopy!) From there, Brady and Mangum tried some “One Word at a Time” storytelling. As the title would indicate, each of them spit out one word at a time, back and forth like a verbal ping-pong match, as they weaved the tale about Peter Pan and a Managerial Consultant. (Hey, not every audience suggestion can be a winner)

“New Choice” was another solid exercise, where the duo was forced to make a “new choice” and redo random lines of dialogue, changing the direction of the sketch. The audience member’s suggestion for the “romantic vacation setting” that Brady asked for was… Afghanistan. From the moment Brady entered the scene, to the big payoff, there were wall-to-wall laughs.

Another highlight of the show has Brady selecting an audience member, asking her a few questions about her career, her personal life, her typical day at work — and then creating an improvised jazz musical about her life. And the sketch got even bigger laughs when Brady busted an unfortunate audience member who crossed in front of the stage, hoping to slip out to the ladies’ room.

But it is the show’s final sketch, “Celeb Idol,” that proved to be the real showstopper. Brady sang improvised songs in the style of various bands and singers; the song titles were made up and written down by audience members before the show. Along with an MC Hammer-styled piece called “Is She a Hooker?” Brady closed out with Prince’s “Purple Rain”-inspired “Bad Vasectomy” — complete with a spot-on impersonation of Prince in the process, which was just one more example of the star’s ability to do just about anything.