I once had the dubious honor of delivering a toast at my younger sibling’s wedding, so I certainly understand the frantic, antic feeling Paul (Mark Vigeant) experiences before mounting the dais to deliver his best man’s speech at his baby brother’s nuptials. But at least my oration preceded an unmemorably ordinary ceremony, and not a surprise New Age throupling that can’t be explained to the underage nieces. Fumbling with his prepared remarks, he unwisely decides to go off-script, swiping gifts, slagging off the DJ and spilling the tea on family strife before a final breakdown.
Vigeant starts the show perversely positioned in the far back of the theater, ranting to an unseen buddy on his cell while swigging a brewski. That soon transitions to chaotic crowd work with his fellow wedding guests before the spotlight falls on his celebratory address, which doubles as a drunken roast-style stand-up routine that swiftly slides from passive-aggressive to straight-up hostile. He’s amazing at ensnaring audience members into participating in his pie-eyed polemic, endowing them as relatives with elaborately improvised back-stories. His audience participatory monologue somehow drags T.S. Eliot and Sir Ian McKellen into the increasingly unhinged mix, which motivates his recruits to wear ridiculous cat costumes and other absurd actions.
This sloppy stemwinder could stand to be 10 minutes shorter; nobody really needs a wedding speech to run nearly an hour, and the crowd started to grow restless during Paul’s 11th-hour search through a bowl of audience suggestion slips for the meaning of love. Still, this dramatic drunken demonstration of what not to do at a wedding gets a ton of mileage out of the material before detouring into a delirious interpretive dance number. Vigeant may be the biggest disaster to hit wedding receptions since the Electric Slide, and I raise my flute of cheap champagne to him for sustaining the insanity as long as he manages.
Mark Vigeant: The Best Man Show
Starlite Room, Savoy Orlando
60 minutes; 18 & up
$10
Get tickets
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This article appears in May 14-20, 2025.