Brady’s bunch

Improv comic’s repertoire of impressions geared to singers he admires Singer, actor, improv comedian and talk-show host Wayne Brady has a goofy side, and its roots run deep.

On Stage Who: Wayne Brady

When: 8 tonight

Where: Cape Cod Melody Tent, 21 W. Main St., Hyannis

Tickets: $44.50

Reservations: Ticketmaster at 1-800-347-0808, or www.melodytent.org.

“I started working at Disney World at 16. I was Goofy,” says Brady, 32. “Right away, when I got the job, I started watching cartoons to prepare. I figured if I couldn’t communicate talking, I had better learn to communicate as Goofy to get my point across.”

Brady says being a Disney character taught him a lot about using body language and gauging an audience. “Goofy’s a very tall, big character, and you don’t want to scare a kid, so I got very good at trying to read people and how they might react,” Brady says.

Interacting with the audience would prove a critical skill in the improv career Brady started at Orlando’s SAK Theater in 1990 and then took to television as a regular on the “Whose Line Is It Anyway?” show presided over by comedian Drew Carey.

Improv was also an element in Brady’s variety TV show and is the backbone of the show he and his stage partner, Jonathan Mangum (the boss in newer episodes of “Drew Carey”) will bring to the Cape Cod Melody Tent in Hyannis tonight.

“It’s an improv concert, really, with a three-piece band,” Brady says. “We call on a lot of people who give us things to work with…. a lot of it is very physical, and it’s very fast.

“The last half-hour of the show we end up doing a fake music show. I perform all these hits in different styles, with lines from the audience like ‘It’s raining in my pants.’ “

Brady not only sings in different styles, but as different performers. His repertoire includes Rod Stewart, Tina Turner, Prince, Louis Armstrong, Sammy Davis Jr., Johnny Cash, Stevie Wonder and Sam Cooke, to name a few.

But Brady is quick to point out, “I have not studied impressionism. I’ve just gotten better as I’ve done them. I happen to be good at people who I’m a fan of.”

That leaves the field pretty wide open for Brady, who is partial to all kinds of music. One of his favorite songs is Cooke’s “A Change Is Gonna Come,” but musicians he enjoys include Eminem, 50 Cent, Shania Twain, Celine Dion, Brooks and Dunn, Stevie Wonder and Aretha Franklin, to name a few.

When he imitates a musician, Brady says, voice is only part of it: You can’t do Bob Dylan without having a “Dylanesque” guitar playing in the background and striking his hunched-over harmonica pose, he says.

“It’s not so much an impression as a broad stroke,” Brady says of what he does. “You have to be able to pick that one thing everybody knows about a person. With Tina Turner, I adopt the crouched pose and strut. When I’m doing Prince, I stand still, let the spotlight hit me and make big, big eyes. He told me he saw me impersonate him and he loved it.”

But sometimes Brady chooses the less obvious of a singer’s stances. While many Elvis impersonators start with thrusting hips and the famous lip curl, Brady chooses the quieter side. He lets the band start playing and then dips his body, looking up with those Elvis eyes.

“For me, it’s as a fan and it’s all out of love,” he says of mimicking those he admires. “I used to do Michael Jackson a lot, but not so much now out of respect. If I hear one more ‘Michael Jackson is a white woman’ joke, I think I’ll gag.”

Brady says there have been two television takeoffs on him that he knows about.

“There is a gentleman on ‘Saturday Night Live,’ I don’t know his name, who impersonated me. He was actually pretty funny,” Brady says. But, he says, “Aries Spears does a horrible impersonation of me on ‘Mad TV,’ which isn’t funny. If you’re going to try an impression, you have to be as good as the person you’re impersonating at what they do. Otherwise, it just comes across as mean.”

Even when you’re doing an improv scene, Brady says, you have to make sure you have the skills to pull it off.

“If you’re doing an opera scene, you don’t have to be the best singer, but have to be able to carry a tune.”

The next date in Brady’s busy calendar will have him carrying quite a few tunes: He’s headed for Broadway Sept. 9, playing lawyer Billy Flynn in the musical “Chicago.” He’ll be a fast-talking roller rink DJ in the ’70s-era film “Roll Bounce” he’s developing a television series, “a kind of ‘Baretta’ with comic touches” and he’s already shot an episode of “Stargate SG-1” in which he plays an evil alien who fights with Tealc (Christopher Judge) and gets stabbed and … “You’ll have to watch for the rest,” Brady teases.

“I’m an actor who’s funny,” Brady says of his eclectic career. “I rely on being able to form a character. But I make what I love funny.”

(Published: August 7, 2004)