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    Review: Rachel Bloom Shines in ‘Death, Let Me Do My Show’

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    The writer-performer wanted to avoid the pandemic, but couldn’t. Her new solo show dives into birth, death and cosmic confusion.Rachel Bloom came to perform her latest live show in New York, and she really wanted to do it as if it were 2019. That was the year when her musical-comedy series, “Crazy Ex-Girlfriend,” ended its four-season run on the CW, and Bloom was getting ready to hit the road. But in 2020, some things happened.Now that she’s finally able to face a live audience again, the writer-performer wanted to treat the coronavirus pandemic as a parenthesis: She was keen, as she put it at the Lucille Lortel Theater a few days ago, to “go back to my old material unsullied by trauma.”Some things, however, can’t be brushed aside easily, even with the help of gleefully blunt songs, or a few jokes.Fate, life, inspiration, rumination, grief, time, a dark power greater than even the gods of comedy: Whatever you want to call it, something derailed Bloom’s plan, and “Death, Let Me Do My Show” deals with what she was trying to avoid talking about onstage. (Spoiler alert: the “Crazy Ex-Girlfriend” cast member David Hull plays one of the aforementioned forces.)Which is that in the spring of 2020, she found herself in a conjunction of events so chaotic, so intense and so scary that had they been part of a Hollywood movie, critics would have accused the screenwriter of being a tad too melodramatic and over-reliant on far-fetched coincidences.In the early days of the pandemic, Bloom gave birth to a daughter. The baby had fluid in her lungs and was placed in intensive care. At the same time and on the opposite coast, Bloom’s close collaborator on the series, the musician Adam Schlesinger, was also in the hospital, with Covid-19.Bloom’s child lived; her friend died.Those harrowing days form the conclusion of Bloom’s memoir, published in November 2020, “I Want to Be Where the Normal People Are,” and are the crux of her almost-one-woman show. Bloom bounces from incomprehension to fear to regret to anger to cosmic confusion (she starts questioning her atheism) and back again. All the while, she expertly deploys a jokey, graphic candor that telegraphs honesty and forthrightness — that, after all, is what we expect from a woman who brightly talks about bodily fluids and whose perky song about trees that smell like semen feels like a deep cut from a bizarro “Mary Poppins” cast album. (The music director Jerome Kurtenbach leads a three-piece backing band.)Directed by Seth Barrish, a regular Mike Birbiglia collaborator, “Death, Let Me Do My Show” lands closer to Birbiglia’s classic self-examination than to the recent solos by Kate Berlant and Liz Kingsman, which toyed with the genre’s form and conventions, and reflected on the very nature of narcissism.Bloom is an old-fashioned vaudevillian — because this is the 21st century, she got her start not at a borscht belt resort but by uploading videos on YouTube. (Do look up her 2012 duet with Shaina Taub, “We Don’t Need a Man“; Taub and Kurtenbach are two of Bloom’s several co-songwriters in the new show.) Bloom is also a bona fide theater kid who is fluent in both displaying va-va-voom extroversion and mining her anxieties and struggles for art. The new show toes, often dexterously, the line between confidence and vulnerability, earnest emotion and winking self-dramatization — a number sending up “Dear Evan Hansen” captures the way that hit musical relies on rooting for an unreliable, somewhat unsympathetic lead character.The songs are the highlights here. Bloom is especially good at puncturing emotion with surreal detail, as when she sings the tender “Lullaby for a Newborn,” then reminds us she had been cradling her bottle of water swathed in a towel. More than blunt language — a tool that loses its sharpness with use — this absurdist vein effectively draws laughs, but it also underscores the show’s real subject: the often cruel arbitrariness of life.Death, Let Me Do My ShowThrough Sept. 30 at the Lucille Lortel Theater, Manhattan; rachelbloomshow.com. Running time: 1 hour 25 minutes. More

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      Mike Birbiglia to Return to Broadway With a New Show This Fall

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      The comedic storyteller, who previously brought a solo show to Broadway in 2018, has a new act for a new age.Mike Birbiglia, the comedic storyteller who has mined his experiences with romance, fatherhood and sleep disorders for narrative purposes, will return to Broadway this fall with a new show prompted by swimming.Birbiglia has been developing the show, called “The Old Man & the Pool,” through a series of performances over the last year at venues including Berkeley Repertory Theater in California, Steppenwolf Theater Company in Chicago and Center Theater Group in Los Angeles.The Broadway production is scheduled to begin previews on Oct. 28 and to open on Nov. 13 at the Vivian Beaumont Theater at Lincoln Center.Birbiglia, 44, previously appeared on Broadway in his solo show “The New One,” which had a two-month run that began performances in 2018.“The last show was, in some ways, about birth, and this show, in some ways, is about death, through the storytelling lens of hitting middle age and realizing that our bodies are slowly in decline,” Birbiglia said. “The most crucial thing about it is that it’s funny — it goes to the darkest places about life and death for hopefully 90 minutes of laughs, where at the end of it people feel better on the way out than when they came in.”“The Old Man & the Pool” is directed by Seth Barrish, a frequent Birbiglia collaborator who also directed “The New One,” and includes contributions from Ira Glass, the “This American Life” host, who executive produced “The New One.”Birbiglia said he has felt “euphoric” about returning to in-person performing after the pandemic shutdown, when, he said, he worried about the future of the form. “It’s almost like before the pandemic, entertainment was elective, and now it’s essential,” he said.And why Broadway? “I’ve always thought of the shows as solo plays, somewhere between storytelling and theater and comedy,” he said. “What happens with Broadway, in addition to these being some of the best theaters in the world physically and sonically and in all the technical ways, there are some people who only pay attention to Broadway, so that’s meaningful. It opens up the aperture to more people, and that’s the really the goal.”Although Lincoln Center Theater is a nonprofit organization, this show is a commercial venture produced by Sue Wagner, John Johnson, Patrick Catullo and Seaview, a production company founded by Greg Nobile and Jana Shea. More

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      in Theater

      Barrow Group Announces New $4 Million Performing Arts Center

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      The 35-year-old Off Broadway company and training center will open a new space, which will include a 60-seat theater and five studios, in April.At the outset of the pandemic, prospects looked bleak for the Barrow Group, the 35-year-old Off Broadway theater company known for its actor training programs. It pivoted its existing classes online, and then, in July 2020, vacated the space on West 36th Street that it had leased for 18 years.But now — as a result of Paycheck Protection Program funding, a Shuttered Venue Operators Grant, and a robust appetite for online training and artist development programs that generated over $1.9 million in earned revenue since the beginning of the pandemic — it’s preparing to open a $4 million performing arts center at 520 Eighth Avenue, just around the corner from its old space, in April.“Our brokers were able to negotiate a way-below market deal,” Robert Yu Serrell, the company’s executive director, said of the new space; the company entered into a 15-year lease in November, with two five-year options to renew. “It’s actually less than what we were paying at our former space, and we’ve got more space and more security,” he said, referring to the building’s security system.The Barrow Group, which has grown from offering 70 classes a year in 2010 to 661 online and in-person workshops since April 2020, was searching for a bigger space even before the pandemic, said Lee Brock, who founded the theater in 1986 with her co-artistic director and now husband, Seth Barrish.The new 13,155-square-foot-space — just over 3,000 square feet larger than the previous building — will feature a 60-seat theater, five sound-attenuated studios, offices and a community gathering space. Phased renovations are expected to begin this month.The company, which counts Anne Hathaway, Tony Hale and Noah Schnapp (“Stranger Things”) among the actors who have completed its training programs, has an annual budget of approximately $1.6 million. It has served more than 5,200 actors, writers and directors since the start of the pandemic, Serrell said.In the near future, its focus will remain on developmental programming and training, Barrish said, with a plan to eventually produce shows commercially as well. Some of the theater’s recent productions have included “Awake” by K. Lorrel Manning, a series of nine short plays that tackled topics like homophobia, police violence and immigration; and a revival of Martin Moran’s “The Tricky Part,” a memoir of sexual abuse that the New York Times critic Ben Brantley called “beautiful and harrowing.”“That will be Phase Two,” Barrish said. “When we get work that we feel wants to be shared commercially, we’ll do so. As to when we’ll have that project and when we’ll rent a theater, I’m not sure yet.” (The 60-seat theater, he said, is meant as a space for developmental work, not commercial productions.)The Barrow Group has raised about $2.5 million for the two-phase, $4 million renovation project, the first phase of which will cost about $800,000, Serrell said. More