Summer vacation
Beach chair, umbrella, a good book? For comic actor Kevin James, fun means a 22-stop tour and a different audience to wow every night.
By CHASE SQUIRES
Published June 9, 2005
Kevin James has a full career. He stars in one of the few long-running network sitcoms left on television - he's also an executive producer - and he has several movies in the making to follow his recent success in Hitch.
His personal life is busy, too. With wife Steffiana De La Cruz expecting this fall, the new husband is also about to become a new father.
So why would the 40-year-old star of CBS's The King of Queens, who is said to be making up to $600,000 per episode, go back to the standup comedy circuit? Escape.
"It's like a vacation for me. It is fun for me. It's something I enjoy doing. I go across the country and do shows; it's a lot of fun," he said in a phone call from Los Angeles, a week before hitting the road on a 22-stop tour of the East Coast.
He'll find himself in Hollywood (Florida, that is) tonight, in Tampa at the Tampa Bay Performing Arts Center on Friday and in Orlando on Saturday. From there, on to New York.
James came from the streets. Well, the road. Before he was King, he was nobody. Just a guy from Stony Brook, N.Y., doing standup.
No matter where he goes from here, he said, he's still a guy who does standup.
James caught a break in 1996 at a Montreal comedy competition. A partnership with CBS followed, then a boost from friend Ray Romano of Everybody Loves Raymond, and within a couple of years, he was an overnight success.
The timing just seemed right for James. He fell into the male-fantasy sitcom hero genre: goofy overweight guy with the hot, thin wife. He's blue collar, just as the Blue Collar Comedy Tour got hot.
If it sounds too good to be true, too engineered to be luck, James said you have to believe him. It's been hard work, but it's been fun, and he doesn't have a plan.
"I just kind of enjoy it; I'm just doing my thing," he said. "I don't feel any different inside. I feel like a kid still. I just let it flow naturally. I never really had a game plan."
Watch his television show, you see the real Kevin James. Go see him on tour doing standup, you see the real Kevin James.
"I'm saying these words," he said.
Even with all the celebrity - film roles, the continued run of King of Queens and new movies on the horizon - James said he always feels the tug of the road.
The road, however, is losing ground to his growing fame. Grilled, which has James and Romano playing cutthroat meat salesmen, is rumored to be out this year, but the studio hasn't set a release date. Internet site IMDB.com reports that Field Trip, in which James plays a substitute teacher wrangling sixth-graders, is in production; and Monster Hunter (he's a child psychologist who can find the monsters under the bed) and Man in Uniform (an average Joe whose life improves when he puts on a police uniform he found) are also in the works.
So James said he gets away when he can, calls home from the road and tries out new material, ideas that have rattled around between takes on TV and movie sets. He tries to write. Sometimes the new standup bits work, sometimes they lead to more, sometimes the stuff bombs.
"You go through ebbs and flows of feeling stuff's not working," he said. "You just kind of keep trying."
James said whatever happens, he goes out onstage and plays himself. People find that funny. If you like the show, you like James.
Friday's show: sold out.
PREVIEWKevin James performs at 8 p.m. Friday in Morsani Hall at the Tampa Bay Performing Arts Center, Tampa. The show is sold out. If you can't catch him live, The King of Queens appears on WTSP-Ch. 10 on Wednesday nights (weekly listings are flexible during the summer, so check times); it's also on WTOG-Ch. 44 nightly. And James and Ray Romano star in a weird sports documentary at 9 p.m. June 18 on HBO called Making the Cut, chronicling the pair's bid to make the cut at the Pebble Beach National Pro-Am golf tournament. James does a great Romano impression.