AMERICA’S  GOT TERRY
The Man of 1,000 Voices” brings his cast of characters to Central Pennsylvania
By David Onda

Photos: Press photo

When Terry Fator stepped on stage at the 2007 auditions for NBC’s America’s Got Talent, judge David Hasselhoff scoffed at the sight of him.

“Oh, no, a ventriloquist,” remarked The Hoff.

Months later, Fator won the entire competition, taking home the $1 million prize. One year after that, he opened his very own show on the Las Vegas strip. Today, he performs five nights a week, 48 weeks a year, at Vegas’ Mirage Resort and Casino under a five-year deal reportedly worth $100 million.

How did a ventriloquist become one of the hottest shows in Sin City? It’s simple: You’ve never seen a ventriloquist like Terry Fator.

The 45-year-old, family-friendly entertainer combines comedic bits and singing celebrity impressions with a ventriloquist act that includes more than a dozen puppets. Fator’s puppet-impression combinations include Winston the Impersonating Turtle singing a spot-on rendition of Etta James’ “At Last,” Vicki the Cougar belting out the pop songs of the Pussycat Dolls and an African-American puppet name Julius crooning the sexy tunes of Marvin Gaye. And that’s only the beginning.

Fly caught up with the talented Mr. Fator to find out how a middle-aged dude from Texas made it cool to be a dummy. What happens in Vegas comes to the York Fair on September 18 (tickets are $36 and $42; for more information, visit www.yorkfair.org).

Fly Magazine: You’re coming to the York Fair this month. When you’ve got
a deal like the one you have in Vegas, why travel all the way across the country to perform in small- town Pennsylvania?
Terry Fator: The number one most important aspect of my entire career is the fans. Absolutely, positively. If I don’t have fans, I don’t have anything. And I have had such an outcry from fans that have just been begging me, “Please, come to our neck of the woods.” So I’ve decided to take one week of my vacation — I have four weeks off a year — and take [the show] across the country and give my fans what they’ve been asking me for.

FM: Did you really once play a show in a 1,000-seat auditorium for one person?
TF: Yes, it is really true. My sister was there and she thought it was the funniest thing she had ever seen. In one sense it was very funny, because I was up there doing a show just like I would perform for 1,000 people, and there was one person. In another sense, it was just incredibly discouraging. The most amazing part of that story is that it was about a week or two before I got the call that I was gonna be on America’s Got Talent.

FM: Is there anything worse than being criticized by David Hasselhoff?
TF: [laughs] It was very difficult for me to do America’s Got Talent to become famous. I’m a guy who really does not take straight criticism for the sake of criticism well. If it’s constructive criticism, that’s one thing. But if people just don’t like you or they just say bad things about you, that was one of those things that really, really hurt me. But as far as David Hasselhoff — I actually took that as kind of funny. When he did that, I really thought to myself, “Good. I’ve got him exactly where I want him.” I knew they were expecting something bad and I knew that I wasn’t bad. I worked for 32 years, and I knew that I had developed something unique.

FM: I read that you don’t really care for your own singing voice.
TF: I really don’t. I’d much rather be doing an impression of somebody than singing myself.

FM: Who would win in a fight between your dummies and Jeff Dunham’s dummies?
TF: Without a doubt, Jeff Dunham’s dummies. My puppets are lovers, not fighters.

FM: You guys must get compared a lot, being the two big acts in ventriloquism.
TF: We are. I wouldn’t argue with that. Me and Jeff have kind of brought ventriloquism into the mainstream in a way that hasn’t been seen since the ’70s and early ’80s, but there are a lot of great ventriloquists out there working. Me and Jeff are very different in our approaches. Jeff is a stand-up comedian who just happens to tell jokes through puppets. I am an impressionist who uses ventriloquism as my medium.

FM: How did you and Jeff succeed in changing ventriloquism from a joke into a legitimate, mainstream form of entertainment?
TF:I believe there are a lot of ventriloquists that are stepping up their game and beginning to write material that is more relevant to today’s style of entertainment and comedy.
I think that’s really what Jeff and I have done. It’s not so much what we’ve done as ventriloquists as what we’ve done with material. People tend to think that ventriloquists are corny and are children’s entertainment. We’re no longer just for children’s parties.

FM: You must try out a lot of song and puppet combinations. I’m curious about the ones that didn’t work.
TF: I have found that I can have an impression that I feel I do very well, that I know the audience will like, and it’s tricky to try to find a character that could pull that impression off. I do an Aaron Neville impression and I was so excited to get it in the show, so I created a black puppet for my Las Vegas performances. I did it and it just tanked. And I thought, “Wow, I thought people would love this.”  So I really started analyzing my show and I thought, “OK, let’s see if I take a character that you would never in a million years expect would do an Aaron Neville impression and have him do it.” And it’s now one of the most favorite routines that I do in the show.

FM: Have you ever done an impersonation in front of the person you’re impersonating?
TF: I did get to perform for Styx. The entire band was performing here in Las Vegas and the night before their performance, when they had the night off, they all came and were in the audience and I did the Styx song. They loved it.

FM: How was it meeting Kermit the Frog on the AGT finale?
TF: That was surreal. That was one of the coolest things that ever happened to me. When I was on America’s Got Talent they asked me, “Who’s your hero? Do you have a hero?” The stipulation was that they had to be alive. I said, “Kermit the Frog is my number one hero. I love him. I wanna meet him so bad.” My second was Dick Van Dyke, who I have just been a huge fan of my whole life. I never expected that I would get to meet Kermit the Frog, and they were able to pull it off. They got him to come out and perform [with me].

FM: You actually had a much better singing voice than Kermit did.
TF: [laughs] Well, he’s a frog. Come on!

FM: Have you done any other interesting duets?
TF: Oh, yeah. I did some stuff with Tony Orlando and The Commodores. I performed with them at my opening at the Mirage.

FM: Do you ever worry that the puppets will revolt?
TF: [laughs] I think the short answer is that I have never, ever, ever crossed the line between reality and fantasy. And I am absolutely not one of those ventriloquists whose puppets have their own rooms or their own houses. They’re puppets, they’re not special. They go in cases. I do not spend any extra time with them at all unless I’m rehearsing or working.

FM: Say this all ends tomorrow and you can’t do your act anymore. What line of work do you enter?
TF: I’ll figure out some way to entertain. I just love to entertain. I like people,
I like encouraging people, making people laugh and making people feel good. Regardless of what I did, I know it would be something that uplifted people and made people feel better about themselves.