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      ‘Fortress: Sniper’s Eye’ Review: Back to the Bunker

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      A barely-seen Bruce Willis heads up this lifeless action sequel set in a remote forest compound.In the wake of Bruce Willis’s recent diagnosis of aphasia, it’s worrying to note that he has no fewer than seven movies still waiting to be released. We can only pray that one of them is a more worthy swan song than Josh Sternfeld’s execrable “Fortress: Sniper’s Eye,” a sequel so dumb that no effort by Willis could reasonably be expected to save it.Not that he’s onscreen long enough for us to judge, given that his character, a battle-hardened former C.I.A. agent named Robert, spends most of the movie conveniently confined to a hospital bed nursing a gunshot wound. Roughly a month after the murder-y assault detailed in last year’s “Fortress” (the name of a nebulous forest retreat with a high-tech command bunker), we find the survivors reassessing their lives — and, one hopes for the actors who play them, resolving to make better career choices.Before landing in that bed, Robert had journeyed to Russia to rescue the supposed widow of his nemesis, a gloating villain unaccountably played by Chad Michael Murray. Elsewhere, Robert’s cyber-savvy son (Jesse Metcalfe) is making eyes at Kate (Kelly Greyson), the impressively ripped director of the facility whose habitual crop-top-and-shorts ensemble — as we learn when the inevitable second assault kicks off — also comes in commando olive.Plot-wise, Alan Horsnail’s screenplay is as dull as the cinematography and as awkward as the performances. It does, however, make swiping money from a U.S. Treasury website look so easy we should probably all be doing it.Fortress: Sniper’s EyeRated R for ropy action and risible acting. Running time: 1 hour 27 minutes. In theaters and available to rent or buy on Apple TV, Google Play and other streaming platforms and pay TV operators. More

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      ‘Fiddler’s Journey to the Big Screen’ Review: Making a New Tradition

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      Daniel Raim’s admiring documentary uses interviews and movie clips to detail the making of Norman Jewison’s beloved movie musical.Once, movies released on home media came with an ancillary disc holding a catalog of behind-the-scenes extras. Daniel Raim’s gleefully reverent documentary “Fiddler’s Journey to the Big Screen” has the feeling of such specials, mingling interviews and movie clips to chronicle the making of Norman Jewison’s 1971 musical movie and salute its enduring success.Despite his name and a lifelong interest in Judaism, Jewison is Protestant, and he worried that fact would preclude him from directing “Fiddler on the Roof.” Hollywood proved him wrong. Raim is interested in how Jewison sought to preserve the story’s essence while making creative updates, and in doing so “Fiddler’s Journey” touches on issues of Jewish representation but does not interrogate them.The documentary’s most moving segments involve music. Raim wisely works in many instances of “Fiddler” actors and music department members reciting lines or singing lyrics from the movie, often from memory. Raim intercuts these contemporary moments with the original scenes, accentuating how the power of cinema lies in its ability to endure even as its creators fade.Other making-of stories — perhaps most notably, “Hearts of Darkness: A Filmmaker’s Apocalypse” — show film sets as sites of chaos, mishaps and folly. Here was a production that instead came together under seemingly minor stress, with all of its players eager to bare their hearts for the camera.Fiddler’s Journey to the Big ScreenNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 28 minutes. In theaters. More

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      ‘Los Conductos’ Review: Lost Souls Above Medellín

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      A former cult member tries to restore his life.A couple of times in this short and occasionally exhilarating feature from Colombia, its director, Camilo Restrepo, contrives striking visual juxtapositions. His camera closes in on a dead man’s white shirt, soaked in blood, and focuses on the bullet hole in both the shirt and the man’s chest. It then cuts to a bright red motorcycle fuel tank and a gasoline nozzle going into it. The dark circular hood of a ceiling security camera is replaced by the sight of a gray balloon expanding while being filled with helium.What these connections add up to is … enigmatic. Shot on 16-millimeter film stock that seems as rich in specks and cracks as it is in color, “Los Conductos” takes a long way around in telling its story, one of loneliness, defiance and intractable yearning. Luis Felipe Lozano, an itinerant laborer and nonactor whom Restrepo met in 2013, plays Pinky, a character whose life is based on Lozano’s own. Circuitously, Pinky speaks in voice-over about falling in with a group of people “united by a sense of loss we felt in the world.” But for almost half of the movie, we see him alone. He gazes at Medellín from high ground; he steals a motorcycle; he wields a gun.It is only late in the movie that we piece together his involvement with a cult, and his subsequent desire to seek revenge against its leader, referred to as Father. Father seems, on closer scrutiny, to be nothing more than a ringleader of thieves; in one shot, he holds a messy ball of copper wire, obviously ripped out of stolen electronics.Like “Days of the Whale” (2020), Restrepo’s movie shows us a Medellín that’s far from action-movie drug cartel clichés. Out of Pinky’s marginalized life, Restrepo conjures a lush but nevertheless desolate cinematic atmosphere.Los ConductosNot rated. In Spanish, with subtitles. Running time: 1 hour 10 minutes. In theaters. More

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      ‘Africa’ Review: Aging and its Discontents

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      In Oren Gerner’s semi-fictional portrait of his family, a father grapples with retirement, poor health and a growing sense of obsolescence.In Oren Gerner’s “Africa,” a son observes as his father tries, futilely, to deny the inexorable advance of old age. Based on the real-life experiences of Gerner’s family and friends in the Israeli community settlement of Nirit, and starring the director’s parents and relatives as themselves, this docu-fictional drama finds Meir, Gerner’s 68-year-old father, at a painful crossroads.Meir is a reluctant retiree whose fragile pride is shattered when he loses his post as the organizer of the town’s annual ceremony to a group of teens. Bristling against a sense of obsolescence, he throws himself into building a bed for his grandson, undeterred by a heart condition that has rendered him frail.Enacting quotidian situations from their everyday lives, Meir and his therapist wife, Maya, offer quiet, unshowy performances — if you can call them that. Even when the writing is a bit forced — as in some brusque exchanges between Meir and his grandchildren, which underline generational differences rather pointedly — the old man conveys a genuine desperation. At times his wounded masculinity borders on the pathetic, particularly when he bickers with Maya, who exudes the infinite patience that only comes with a long, loving companionship.These unfiltered moments are occasionally undercut by Gerner’s tendency for broad-strokes affectation. The film’s title is one such unfounded flourish, drawn from the home videos of a family trip to Namibia, which Gerner weaves arbitrarily through the film. As for the Gerners’ own locale, the film never delves into cultural context, even when Meir discusses his time as a soldier or comments that he shares a birthday with his nation. The result is a bittersweet family portrait that, though relatable, lacks the specificity that makes for truly universal cinema.AfricaNot rated. In Hebrew, with subtitles. Running time: 1 hour 22 minutes. In theaters. More

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      ‘Hatching’ Review: The Best-Laid Plans

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      Scrambling creature feature with psycho-horror, this inventive oddity brings tween anxieties to monstrous life.Painted in gumdrop colors and faux good cheer, Hanna Bergholm’s “Hatching,” set in a leafy Finnish suburb, is a nightmare of puberty and poor parenting. Suffering from both is Tinja (a wonderful Siiri Solalinna), a 12-year-old gymnast and resentful collaborator in the manufactured perfection of “Lovely Everyday Life,” a relentlessly upbeat video blog maintained by her controlling, unnamed mother (Sophia Heikkila).When a frantic crow interrupts an afternoon’s filming — and destroys the family’s screamingly pink-patterned living-room — Mother reacts by swiftly snapping its neck. This sharp swerve from serene to shocking will recur throughout the film as Tinja, a milky mist gathering ominously behind her, finds an abandoned egg in the dead bird’s nest and hides it in her bedroom. It will grow startlingly large, finally hatching, tellingly, at the touch of her tears.What emerges is a freakish, gooey-feathered monstrosity, its pleading eyes and spindly legs in comical contrast to its ferociously-toothed beak. The disgusting creature’s devotion to Tinja, however, fills an emotional void in the needy girl, seeming to intuit — and, eventually, act on — her deepest anxieties. In the process, the beast becomes the physical manifestation of Tinja’s suppressed fury, an evil twin determined to bloodily erase every obstacle in the girl’s path to happiness.A sometimes uneasy merger of monster movie and psychological horror — with a dollop of social-media satire — this inventive first feature mines tween confusion (there are nods to both bulimia and menstruation) for grotesque fun. The film’s humor, however, doesn’t dilute the essential sadness at its core: that of a lonely girl so lacking a source of love that she’s forced to create her own.HatchingNot rated. In Finnish, with subtitles. Running time: 1 hour 26 minutes. In theaters. More

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      ‘A Black Lady Sketch Show’ Has the Most Exciting Comics (and the Silliest)

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      Robin Thede and her castmates bring a light, joyful touch and a comedy-nerd sensibility to this HBO series that often, delightfully, descends into the absurd.In this Friday’s episode of “A Black Lady Sketch Show,” Robin Thede, its charismatic showrunner and star, plays the world’s worst thief. She picks fights with conspirators during a heist, wears a glittery silver wig that isn’t exactly inconspicuous, and, before stealing a diamond, takes a selfie and posts it to social media.It’s a stylishly executed genre spoof, with a solid premise and slick split-screen editing. And yet, its polish merely supports what really makes you laugh: the flamboyant goofiness of Thede, who commits to preposterousness with deadly seriousness. Her physical comedy, kinetic and rubbery, constantly shifting and shameless, italicizes everything. When she maneuvers across the room like a member of the Ministry of Silly Walks, the whole expensive-looking production becomes part of the joke.The truth of sketch comedy is right there in the name. Quick and broad strokes are at the core of the fun, and that can’t be entirely manufactured in a writers’ room. Take it from no less an authority than Bob Odenkirk (“Mr. Show,” “Saturday Night Live”). In his new memoir, “Comedy Comedy Comedy Drama,” he writes about his considerable experience brainstorming, acting and producing sketches, concluding that ultimately “performance matters more than writing and ideas, loony behavior trumps clever constructions.”“A Black Lady Sketch Show” on HBO has all these elements, but now in its third season, the balance has shifted and it’s grown into, above all else, a spectacular showcase for Thede, the most influential and exciting figure in sketch at the moment. She leads a strong cast, including stalwarts Ashley Nicole Black and Gabrielle Dennis as well as the more recent addition Skye Townsend. It’s worth remembering that it wasn’t that long ago that the title sequence of this show included as many Black women as could be found in the casts of four decades of “Saturday Night Live.”Townsend, left, and Dennis are part of the show’s strong cast.Tina Thorpe/HBOCreated in 2019, “A Black Lady Sketch Show” announced its point of view about representation in its title and also in who it hired, becoming the first sketch series with a cast and writing staff exclusively made up of Black female talent. But this only gets at a small piece of the show’s impact. Its first season, still its best, featured the writer Amber Ruffin before she started her talk show, and the cast member Quinta Brunson before she left to create the hit sitcom “Abbott Elementary.”What marks the sketches are formal pivots (in a common twist, a scene is often revealed to be an ad or documentary); a light, joyful touch; and a comedy-nerd sensibility deeply versed in the history of television. You see this not just in the obscure references to “A Different World” or the meticulousness of a “227” parody, with Thede as a deliriously spot-on version of Jackée Harry’s Sandra, but also in the nudge-nudge casting. (Garrett Morris! David Alan Grier!)The comedy here usually offers new spins on classic territory: sportscasters providing color commentary on mundane events, or spoofs of vampires, zombies and marginal figures from the time of Christ. In these familiar premises, Thede, whose parents named her after Robin Williams, foregrounds character and improvisations, allowing room to riff and improvise, never letting seconds go by without a joke. Tying the sketches together are scenes with the cast in a story line that involves an apocalypse you never truly believe is real. This show can veer toward darkness, but horror is a tool rather than the point. In my favorite sketch this season, Thede plays a Midwestern-nice woman with a “Fargo” accent whose affection for stitched inspirational quotes and cutesy mottos shifts from benign to twisted. It might change the way you look at small-town antique stores.Thede has talked about her love for the wildly popular if far too forgotten 1990s sketch show “In Living Color,” which featured a talent-rich, mostly Black cast and a constantly changing writers’ room often filled with white staff members. It was more topical, celebrity-obsessed and wavering in its comic voice than “A Black Lady Sketch Show.” But what both series share is a delight in oversize personalities like Hadassah Olayinka Ali-Youngman (Thede), a political radical whose overly enunciated delivery is a cousin to Damon Wayans’s Oswald Bates from “In Living Color.”“I will never be enslaved,” she says with conviction, before counting the ways. “Mentally, physically, spiritually, metaphysically, biologically, specifically, pacifically, Michael Ealy, Robert E. Lee, none of the Lees.”Ashley Nicole Black specializes in understated character types.Tina Thorpe/HBOPerhaps because of the lasting influence of Tim and Eric, the trend in sketch comedy has been for scenes to get absurd quickly. The second season of “Three Busy Debras,” which just began on Adult Swim, is one example. On “A Black Lady Sketch Show,” Thede builds her jokes with patience, taking time to establish the world of her character before spiraling into the surreal. On last week’s episode, Thede played a croaking spelling-bee host, a chirpy morning-show meteorologist and a peacocking art-school student. Each of these are tightly drawn and fully realized before descending into total nonsense. Sometimes it comes in an aside. (“Whoever can help me find my keys outside Domino’s will immediately be crowned the winner,” the spelling-bee host says.) What they share is an outsize confidence and clueless bravado that remains, against all odds, endearing.Even when she plays herself, Thede displays this quality. In an interstitial scene, she asks her castmates, wine glass in hand: “You know what I like about me?” After a self-important pause, she spoofs showbiz self-deprecation: “Even though I’m evolved, I’m not perfect, you know?”Her co-stars can match her comic energy, especially Dennis, whose cartoonish characters have a mischievous eccentricity. Black provides an appealing contrast, generally playing closer to earth, satirizing more subtle character types, like an understated spy and an overly positive friend praising you for sleeping on the job. As the show has matured, it’s become less interested in lampooning the world than in creating its own.One of its most biting sketches imagined a focus group where the wildly contradictory negative feedback about a show involved prescriptive demands. The artists returned with a new attempt that was a video of the critics. They still hated it. It’s a nice shot at the caution of showbiz today, one that comes with a hard-earned lesson: Sometimes, for a comic to find what works, you have to tune out the audience. More

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      ‘The Mystery of Marilyn Monroe: The Unheard Tapes’ Review: Gossip Girl

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      This documentary teases a vague conspiracy surrounding Monroe’s death — but mostly rehashes well-circulated facts and rumors.If you call a movie “The Mystery of Marilyn Monroe: The Unheard Tapes,” your job is to provide at least something worth listening to. This documentary, directed by Emma Cooper in the latest addition to Netflix’s catalog of true-crime (or crime-ish) stories, begins by teasing some sort of conspiracy surrounding Marilyn Monroe’s 1962 death from an overdose. But mostly the film presents a banal rehash of established facts and well-circulated rumors about Monroe’s life.The tapes in question are the interviews that the Irish journalist Anthony Summers recorded while researching Monroe; he published his conclusions in the 1985 book “Goddess: The Secret Lives of Marilyn Monroe.” The movie version adds the ostensible perk of hearing the real voices of John Huston, Jane Russell and Billy Wilder, among others, as actors lip-sync to their remembrances — which, again, are mostly footnotes.Summers apparently got more tantalizing intel from the family of Ralph Greenson, who was Monroe’s psychiatrist, and from Fred Otash, a private eye who in the tapes says that Jimmy Hoffa wanted him to dig up dirt on John F. Kennedy and Robert F. Kennedy. Throughout the film, Monroe is said to have been involved with both Kennedy brothers. Fears of Communism and loose talk of nuclear weapons may have had something to do with something. But the insinuations, a greatest-hits of Cold War paranoia, hardly amount to a dispositive case or even a coherent theory.Finally, Summers, who appears continually, presents his ideas surrounding Monroe’s final hours and potential inconsistencies in the timeline. The claims are more of a “hmm” than a bombshell.The Mystery of Marilyn Monroe: The Unheard TapesNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 41 minutes. Watch on Netflix. More

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      Sarah Silverman on Her Family Show About Divorce and Depression

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      “Everything’s couched with hard jokes, but it’s also vulnerable,” the comic said of “The Bedwetter,” her new musical comedy.When the comedian Sarah Silverman was maybe 8, her father gave her a joke book. This was no childhood compendium of riddles and rhymes. It was a collection of “tasteless” humor, and on the very first page, she recalled, it contained a zinger about Little Red Riding Hood getting it on with the Big Bad Wolf.As a child, Silverman was mystified by these punch lines. As an adult, she said, “I went, oh my God, what is wrong with my father?” And then she wrote the whole bit into “The Bedwetter,” the new Off Broadway musical based on her memoir of the same name. It’s one of many R-rated episodes that were inspired by her beloved dad, who taught her to swear when she was 3, unwittingly setting her on the path to becoming a comic.The family life she has memorialized onstage was short on boundaries and weighted with despair. “The Bedwetter,” which begins previews April 30 at the Linda Gross Theater, centers on a 10-year-old Silverman, who suffered from the embarrassing condition of the title. It deals frankly with divorce and depression — but it’s a raucous comedy.“Everything’s couched with hard jokes, but it’s also vulnerable, and sad,” she said. “I really hope people bring their kids.”Silverman and cast members in their Times Square rehearsal studio, preparing the show (again) after a two-year pandemic delay.Mark Sommerfeld for The New York TimesAn Atlantic Theater Company production originally scheduled for the spring of 2020, the show lost one of its original creators, the musician and Emmy-winning TV and stage composer Adam Schlesinger, who died from complications of the coronavirus on April 1, 2020. His death and the two-year pandemic delay deepened the meaning of the production, its creators said, even as it sharpened the jokes. Seeing the show through became a mission for some of his collaborators.And it arrives as Silverman, 51, has reached an unexpectedly beneficent phase of her career, and a new level of maturity in her personal life. As the cultural lines around “appropriate” humor are repeatedly redrawn, she is one of the few performers who has, seemingly genuinely, all but renounced the early work that put her on the map.For decades a convulsive and taboo-busting top comic, she has transformed into a still bitingly funny and progressive feminist voice who advocates for earnest connection (even with Republicans). With a huge, cross-generational network of comedy friends and a pandemic-era podcast that doles out gentle advice, she’s become an unlikely moral center of the comedy community: a Gen X Mr. Rogers, with a topknot ponytail and a profane streak.“Sarah’s secret weapon is her big heart,” said the filmmaker Adam McKay, a friend and a producer of her 2017 Hulu series “I Love You, America.” Erin Simkin/Hulu“She’s able to take audiences into shadowy, tricky places because we all trust her and know she’s a force for good,” said the filmmaker Adam McKay, a friend and a producer of “I Love You, America,” the 2017 Hulu series that showcased her efforts at bridge-building humor. “Sarah’s secret weapon is her big heart.”The confluence of darkness, dark humor and love is the key to “The Bedwetter,” which began when Schlesinger, the witty Fountains of Wayne power pop bassist, read Silverman’s 2010 best-selling memoir, and decided that chapter headings like “My Nana Was Great but Now She’s Dead” and “Hymen, Goodbyemen,” were the seeds of great comic songs. Silverman and Schlesinger began working on the project a decade ago, becoming friends in the process. “We started going to this piano bar karaoke every other Friday,” she said, noting that she still can’t strike the standing get-together from her calendar.Some of the reference materials for the show in the rehearsal space.Mark Sommerfeld for The New York TimesPhotographs of Silverman and her family from the ’70s and ’80s.Mark Sommerfeld for The New York TimesShe was speaking over lunch recently at a bustling restaurant near Union Square. She’d arrived on foot and alone, looking not AARP age but like the early ’90s N.Y.U. student she once was, in jeans, a Santana ringer tee and a backpack. (“I always say, you should live well below your means — you don’t need a purse, get a backpack.”) Her conversation was generously detailed and inquisitive; she acted out her stories, but not enough to draw much attention in the room. Almost no personal detail was too embarrassing to share, anyway. “I learned disassociation at a very young age, as a bedwetter who had to go to sleepover camp,” she said.Having known that abject social terror — she wet the bed well into her teens — Silverman leans into compassion. She even had empathy for a guy at Comic-Con who, years back, suddenly punched her in the face while wearing a Hulk fist. “I could tell he just didn’t know what to do with all his feelings.”But she also knows how to cackle her way out of the depths. She mentioned a friend’s death. “Suicide, I think, is sometimes so — ” Silverman began, when she clocked the waitress dropping by our table.“So whimsical!” she concluded, in purposeful earshot. “I don’t know, it’s the one thing you really should put off till tomorrow, every time.”When the pandemic cut off her stand-up tours, she started a weekly podcast, and professed surprise about the number of callers in real need, with problems both personal (depression) and cultural. “Are we Jewish?” asked one woman, befuddled by her family history. “Being Jewish is a state of mind!” Silverman replied. (One of her three sisters is a rabbi, but Silverman herself is not religious.)Silverman in the Times Square rehearsal space. “Sincerely confronting one’s darkness in the same space as making light of it was a formative example for me,” the actress Ilana Glazer said of Silverman’s work.Mark Sommerfeld for The New York Times“I thought it would be silly and dumb, and then I’d talk politics,” she said of the podcast. “Then I get people so earnest, and — I’m my mother — I think I can help. But so much of the time I’m talking out of my ass; just the classic someone-who-does-a-lot-of-therapy thinking they’re a therapist.”Still, she added, there “are just things I’ve learned, because I’ve lived a long time, and I’m curious.”HER INFLUENCE IS WIDELY FELT. “I look up to Sarah,” the actress and writer Ilana Glazer (“Broad City”) wrote in an email. “She can hold the nuances of the big picture, socially, historically, personally — and process those complexities spontaneously” in her work. Silverman is not the only comic to reveal her struggles, but she may be the most honest. “The idea of sincerely confronting one’s darkness in the same space as making light of it,” Glazer wrote, “was a formative example for me.”Silverman has dipped into dramatic roles (she played a lesbian who died in childbirth on the Showtime series “Masters of Sex”) but mostly has a side career as the funny, smart friend in movies; she’ll next host “Stupid Pet Tricks,” a takeoff on the old Letterman bit, as a variety series for TBS. And after a decade of condo-tower living in Los Angeles, she just bought her first home, to the relief of friends like Chelsea Handler.“I ran over to take a look at it, concerned she bought a one-bedroom bungalow tucked underneath the Griffith Observatory,” Handler, the comedian and author, wrote in an email. “When I saw she had bought herself a big-girl house, I thought, well, there we go, she’s accepted adulthood.” Silverman’s boyfriend of nearly two years, Rory Albanese, the showrunner for Jon Stewart’s “The Daily Show,” has moved in; the first time she’s cohabitated with a partner in over a decade, and the very first time on her own turf.For a musical about a bedwetter, you need a bed. It’s a central piece of the set for the show, which begins previews April 30 at the Linda Gross Theater.Mark Sommerfeld for The New York TimesSilverman, who said she has been on Zoloft since 1994, is open about her mental health. She was clinically depressed as a kid and, back when doctor’s orders were rarely questioned, was prescribed a dosage of Xanax that would hobble a SoundCloud rapper. Also, her first psychiatrist hanged himself. It’s all in the musical, along with her mother’s debilitating depression which, in the show, leaves her largely bed-bound. (But remember, it’s a comedy!)The Covid shutdown and Schlesinger’s death came as the musical’s creators were in New York, ready to start rehearsals for their imminent run. Instead they began gathering on Zoom to check in. Eventually, they brought in as a creative consultant the musician and composer David Yazbek, a Tony winner for best original score for “The Band’s Visit” and a nominee for “Tootsie.”At that point, there was a surreal and palpable sense that someone was missing, Yazbek said. “Being able to laugh was not just sort of healing and important, but actually kind of vital — for us, I’m not even talking about any audiences.”That sentiment did go in the show, buoyed by Silverman’s own experience with loss. Her mother, Beth Ann, who recovered from depression and went on to become a successful theater director in New Hampshire, died in 2015; as did the 30-year-old writer Harris Wittels, who worked on “The Sarah Silverman Program,” her Comedy Central series; and Garry Shandling, the comedian and a mentor, in 2016.That year, Silverman suffered a near miss of her own, when she had a rare case of epiglottitis, a swollen abscess around her windpipe, and was rushed into emergency surgery. After her discharge, in withdrawal from pain meds, “I was chemically suicidal,” she said; she had not been given her anti-depressants during the hospital stay.“It will be familiar to so many people,” Silverman said about how the musical explores the emotions raised by divorce.Mark Sommerfeld for The New York TimesGoing through these traumas and emerging laughing, “I don’t think a lot of people do that with such finesse,” said Anne Kauffman, the director of “The Bedwetter.”IN THEIR TIMES SQUARE rehearsal studio, there were inspo pictures of the Silverman family circa the ’70s and ’80s; Sarah inherited her eyebrows from her dad, Donald, who owned a discount clothing store. The cast, which includes Darren Goldstein and Caissie Levy as the Silvermans and Bebe Neuwirth as Nana, cycled through a kaleidoscope of anger, anxiety and silliness. It was very funny. Ganged up on by some fifth-grade mean girls, who taunt her with “You’re short and dark and strange and ooey,” Zoe Glick, who plays Silverman, is enthusiastically self-deprecating: “I couldn’t agree more!” she sings cheerfully. “I’m the type of kid that’s too Jewy to ignore.”The music is as sticky as the best pop song — Schlesinger’s touch. Both Yazbek and Henry Aronson, the musical director, said they tried to channel him as they finished the project. He worked in a Beatles pop tradition, Aronson said, “a certain deceptive simplicity, harmonically.”Silverman, taking notes at a table, popped up to sub for an absent actor, sweetly singing a jingle for “Crazy Donny’s Warehouse (for Your Messy Divorce).” If it was initially bizarre to watch her family’s emotional upheaval recreated — her parents split when she was around 7 — “I’m also so thrilled, because I feel like it will be familiar to so many people,” she said.Kauffman, the director, said Silverman has illuminated her history — “What was your mom like in this moment? Would your dad have cracked a joke?” — with what works dramaturgically. “She just has this incredible memory and ability to articulate exactly what she was experiencing, which is like a director’s dream. Her as a 10 year old is very viscerally present.”And she punches up the jokes. When Glick was doing a scene that involved making fart noises, Silverman advised her: “Point to your mouth, to really focus” on the body part it’s standing in for, she told her, in less PG language. “It will be funny.”Silverman has moved on from the incendiary language she used at the beginning of her career. “It’s so funny what a burden some people feel it is, to have to change,” she said.Mark Sommerfeld for The New York TimesA word — OK, a paragraph — about farts (and also a sentence I never expected to write in The New York Times). If you thought Silverman might’ve outgrown her affinity for juvenile, scatological humor after a half-century, you’d be wrong. “She has an inability not to laugh if you fart,” Yazbek said. During rehearsal, I caught her giving Joshua Harmon (“Bad Jews,” “Prayer for the French Republic”), who wrote the book with her, a demo in fart noise technique, her hands cupped around her mouth.She has never not wanted to be a performer, said her sister Laura Silverman, who recalled that when she had friends over as a kid, Sarah would pop out of a closet, doing costumed characters, to entertain them.And her family was supportive in creative ways. “I would pick up the phone and call the operator and have her sing ‘Tomorrow,’ from ‘Annie,’” said Laura, an actor and writer. “I would say, I didn’t want her to be scared to sing or perform in front of anyone, at any time.” When Silverman, as a very young child, unleashed the string of curse words that her father taught her — a cherub with inky curtain bangs, working blue — “I would get this wild approval from adults, despite themselves,” she said. “It felt so good, made my arms itch with glee, and I became addicted to that.”Only when she wrote her memoir did she connect the dots between that feeling and her comedy: “So much of my standup, especially early on, was shock, shock, shock,” she said, “and totally trash.” She used racist epithets, misguidedly, to prove a point, which she now says she regrets — she’s gladly left that language behind. “It’s so funny what a burden some people feel it is, to have to change,” she said.The only word that Silverman whispered, in our three hour lunch, was “menopause.”When pressed — no, pleaded with — she said she would write about that topic, though she’s still working out the terms. (“There is not a female word for emasculating, but that’s what menopause is.”) But talking about her body and her needs, is “how I learned to be vulnerable and honest,” she said. “It’s an incredible revelation some people don’t even realize they can do. The truth! It’s really wild.” More