William Shatner returns to Broadway

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Published on February 16, 2012 04:58PM EST

Tonight, the one-man show Shatner’s World: We Just Live in It opens on Broadway after touring Australia and Canada. The limited engagement, through March 4, marks William Shatner’s return to the Great White Way for the first time since 1962. In the video interview below, he shares one of the many stories you’ll hear him tell on stage and reminds us that back in the ’60s, you didn’t get instant Twitter reviews as you left the theater.

We had a few more questions for Shatner:

You trimmed the show from two hours to roughly 90 minutes for Broadway. What’s a story we won’t get to hear?

I was asked to do something in the Vancouver Winter Olympics, and the Winter Olympics for Canada didn’t work too well in the opening ceremony. The four spars — only three went up, one didn’t. When I went to go on [in the closing ceremony], my teleprompter wasn’t going. [Lucky for us, he’s recounted that tale before. Watch it here.]

The show covers your passions, like your horses, and your career. When we last saw Denny Crane and Alan Shore on Boston Legal, they’d just gotten married. Where would they be today?

I think we would have lived happily ever after and adopted a baby. [Laughs] David E. Kelley, who is a genius, conceived the idea of marrying these two heterosexual guys for tax purposes. I talk about that in the show, and actually play a moment from one of those balcony scenes.

If fans want to bring a gift to the stage door, what should they bring and what shouldn’t they bring?

Well, don’t bring food. We never know what’s in that food. Don’t bring explosives, they have a way of going off. I think gold would be really terrific.

A cell phone goes off during your show. What do you do?

If a cell phone goes off, so do I actually. [Laughs] Answer it, have a brief conversation, and tell me all about it.

You’re known for hosting football parties. Tell us a story about your Super Bowl party.

My allegiance to football teams is somewhat smokey because we’re from Los Angeles, and so we’ve lost the Rams and the Raiders. Los Angeles, the second-largest city in the United States, does not have a professional [football] team. So we don’t know who to root for. My wife comes from near Indianapolis, so we were rooting for the Colts for the longest time, but along with Peyton Manning, we gave up. We had to choose a side, so my wife chose New York and I chose Boston, and she won. You’ve got to buy tickets to the one-man show at the Music Box Theatre to come and hate me because I was pulling for Boston.

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