Ashley Blanchet, principally as a glamorous beauty pageant loser, manages to turn her caricature into young Sarah’s savoir. Dembo, among other chores) offers neat comic caricatures as well as that delicious New Hampshuh accent. The remaining adult roles are split between three actors, with results that lift the proceedings just about every time one of them appears. Here, with a perpetual Manhattan in her rapidly emptying glass, she demonstrates that wry delivery as well as offering an especially lovely song explaining to her misfit granddaughter that “You’re beautiful… to me.” Neuwirth, with pairs of Tonys ( Sweet Charity and Chicago) and Emmys ( Cheers) on her mantle, has been slaying audiences with her zingers since 1980 or so. Goldstein, in a perfectly awful toupee, is suitably overbearing as the cringeworthy father with a tragic hurt underneath. Levy, who starred in Frozen and more recently displayed strong dramatic abilities as Rose Stopnick in Caroline, or Change, goes even further here in the emotional second act. Glick, at 14 already a veteran of Frozen, Les Misèrables, and the like, seizes this exceptional role and demonstrates full-throttle comic spirit. All of which might well leave you more satisfied during curtain calls than at intermission. The considerably superior second act of this two-hour musical deals with, as you might guess, the severe depression that overtakes Sarah a fair amount of explanatory backstory, which adds significant emotional heft to the evening and an unlikely deus ex machina in which Miss New Hampshire springs to the rescue. A discovery which, in Silverman’s autobiographical world, is intertwined for comic effect with the shooting death of John Lennon. (The child deprecatingly laces her language with deliberately offensive ethnic color, so there is no mistaking.) Sarah does not try out for the cheerleading squad-one cliché avoided-but as soon as the trio of schoolgirl tormentors consider that maybe Sarah is personable enough to join their circle, they discover that big secret of hers.
We follow Sarah as she enters a new school following her parent’s divorce, bragging to her classmates that “now I have two houses and, come on, that’s pretty cool.” You know the story: Sarah is immediately ostracized by the white bread locals for being-well, a gefilte out of water. They live in Bedford, a small-town in “New Hamp-shuh,” as it is pronounced repeatedly for comic effect (and is, indeed, repeatedly comic).
#Steven wetter movie#
(Didn’t Neil Simon’s stage mother live in a world of movies and movie magazines?) There is, too, the sociable and altogether normal 13-year-old sister Laura (Emily Zimmerman), and a musical-comedy Nana (Bebe Neuwirth) with a clutch of lacerating one-liners and a spirit-crushing skeleton in the closet. Beth Ann (Caissie Levy) is so depressed that she rarely leaves her bed, living in a world of television and People Magazine. “Crazy Donny’s Factory Outlet, with prices that won’t make you vomit!” goes the song. Donald (Darren Goldstein) owns a small-town discount fashion outlet that plasters the airwaves with cheesy, sexist television commercials featuring the proprietor shimmying like a lox between two 1980-era nubile jingle singers. Her parents are, as is typical in this genre, divorced. Sarah (Zoe Glick) is the oddball-ugly duckling-brilliant nerd among a family of outcasts. In Silverman’s parlance, I suppose you might say a gefilte fish out of water. The girl’s true problem, though, is not that she wets the bed it is, rather, that she is a fish out of water. Rather, it is laced into the proceedings in (very funny) chunks and spurts. All at the Atlantic is not a bed(-wetter) of roses, alas. Silverman is working with two collaborators here, and her (very funny) touch does not fully permeate the musical. Primary on the list of attributes is a most intriguing leading character in Sarah Silverman at 10, as originally limned in the controversial comedian’s 2010 memoir. The new musical, in its pandemic-delayed premiere, has quite a lot going for it.
In this case, the underlying problem of the evening is no secret, emblazoned as it is on the title page. Sarah Silverman’s The Bedwetter, at the Atlantic, is one of those problem plays about a misunderstood child with a physical/medical/emotional affliction-choose one-that further separates her from friends (although she has no friends), family, and everyone. Twitter Bebe Neuwirth and Zoe Glick in The Bedwetter.
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