Telly Savalas — just saying the name conjures the image of a smooth-pated Greek loverman wearing a sexy, wide-collared shirt and suggestively dangling an ever-present unfiltered Camel between his Adonis lips … um, where was I? Tom DiMenna is a tad obsessed with Savalas, too — so much so that he’s created Who Loves Ya, Baby?, his “cabaret supper with Telly.” His inspiration for the show comes from a YouTube video you should watch immediately and often ( youtube.com/watch?v=J94-_w9ARX0” youtube.com/watch?v=J94-_w9ARX0), showing the actor “singing” an ultraslow version of “If” to a huge, projected image of his lady love. “He was the biggest thing around for a while, the first TV cop to become a global phenomenon,” DiMenna says. “He united people unlike any other ethnic star. And he was a hilarious narcissist — so totally in love with what ‘Telly Savalas’ came to represent — that he began a singing career, even though he couldn’t really sing à la William Shatner and have a sense of humor about it. We don’t have a Telly Savalas in our culture today, and I think it’s a shame. My show’s premise is that the world has lost its way, and Telly has come back to give you all a good kick in the pants and a sultry romantic song to remind us of the humanity we seem to have lost in today’s modern world of hand sanitizers and asthma medications.” Oh yeah.

Wed., July 14, 8 p.m., 2010

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