William Shatner makes most screen actors look like puppets with too many media-training classes.
It’s not as if he’s a great thespian like, say, Christopher Plummer — for whom Shatner understudied in “Henry V” in 1956, only to kill him off with photon torpedoes in “Star Trek VI” 35 years later.
But while there aren’t any Oscars or Tonys on Shatner’s shelves, he’s much more than an actor — he’s a personality of galactic proportions. There’s a sense that he does what he wants when he wants, with a devil-may-care lack of concern for propriety or a normal career path.
That meandering road has now taken him to Broadway, where his solo “Shatner’s World — We Just Live in It” opened last night.
It’s on the rambling, ramshackle side — think of it as “S#*! William Shatner Says” — but the star’s admirers will gobble up this ham-and-cheese sandwich of a show. As for those on the fence, they may find themselves won over by the man’s unique mix of candor, self-deprecation and grandiose ego.
The bad news first: Despite a flamboyant recording career that may or may not have peaked with last year’s demented cover of “Bohemian Rhapsody,” Shatner performs only one tune, the Brad Paisley-penned “Real,” and it comes at the very end of the evening.
Almost as frustrating, there’s nothing about TV’s “T. J. Hooker” or his own “TekWar” novels. Really, Bill!
At least Shatner dishes out just enough “Star Trek” stuff to keep rabid fans happy. He mocks former co-star and everlasting nemesis George “Mr. Sulu” Takei early on, but then takes an hour to get to Capt. Kirk. Before that, we hear about Shatner’s boyhood in Canada, his early stage work and, most notably, a cross-country drive ferrying a rabbi and his wife.
Flanked by two docking stations — that is, a pair of desks and chairs — he reminisces with the occasional video clip. His stories unspool in rough chronological order as he highlights his various activities and passions — NASA! “Boston Legal”! Priceline! — as well as drops Jewish-mother jokes and a couple of references to his having “a rocket up my ass.” In space, no one can hear you groan.
This terrain has already been covered in several memoirs, including 2011’s “Shatner Rules,” but hearing those stories from the horse’s mouth is something else.
A highlight is an anecdote involving the memorable sentence: “I used to hunt with a bow and arrow, so I know about stalking game.” That the tale also involves an RV and a ski pole is what makes this show more entertaining than it has any right to be.