Review: Cat Cohen: Broad Strokes, a Medical Emergency Cabaret

If you ever wanted to know how Tony Award-winning set designer Derek McLane would design a production of The Phantom of the Opera, look no further than Broad Strokes, Cat Cohen’s musical stand-up comedy routine, currently playing the Lucille Lortel Theatre.

Flickering chandeliers litter the stage like slain lovers surrounding a dark, high-backed throne (one wonders how much of this set has been salvaged, either physically or mentally, from McLane’s design for the recently shuttered Death Becomes Her). It primes the audience for a Gothic experience, or at very least a show that addresses the inevitable return of magic and unreason in reaction to the high age of “trust the science.” It also proves to be a bit of a letdown when Cohen fails to satisfyingly explore that incredibly rich territory.

True, her opening number, “By the Sea,” alludes to Wuthering Heights and Jane Eyre, but these references are superficial, vanishing like an apparition at the song’s conclusion. So too the word “hysteria,” an antique term Cohen deploys in this first song that helps us believe that disparities in medical treatment between the sexes are a thing of the past. Perhaps that topic is a little too heavy for this show, although it is about Cohen’s personal account of having a stroke at the age of 30 and undergoing heart surgery, an intervention that scuttled her planned tour of Europe in 2023.

One set detail does offer a clue about the true nature of the show: attached to the side of the throne is a holder for a big dumb cup. Kelsey Randall’s costume for Cohen, a busty period gown hiked into a miniskirt, offers another hint. Oh yes…we’re about to have a kiki, mama. It’s giving Fringe Festival solo show on an off-Broadway budget.

If you enjoy straight millennial women appropriating the slang and cadence of drag queens, you’ll love Cohen, a regular at Joe’s Pub and Club Cumming who nevertheless feels not quite ready to make the leap to a larger stage, despite already having a Netflix special.

Unfortunately, the element that makes this hourlong stand-up act unique (the songs) also proves to be the weakest, with Cohen hitting all the notes but delivering them without much flair or distinction.

The songs are also hit-or-miss. Her second number, “Complete Control,” offers a bracing look at how consumerism has lulled Americans into the false belief that everything is a matter of willpower (Sophocles would have loved us). Her third song, “Are You Mad at Me?,” is a similarly idiosyncratic take on middle-class conflict aversion, though it has very little to do with the surrounding story, shoehorned in like a trunk song the composer couldn’t quite let go (Cohen wrote all the songs with music supervisor David Dabbon).

And the dance anthem “I Don’t Claim This Energy,” about a trip to the ER, is a textbook definition of a redundant song (though I would still dance to it if I was drunk at a club). The moment is better served by the subsequent number, “Hypochondriac’s Anthem,” which follows immediately after.

Cohen is much steadier in the spoken parts of the script, peppering her central narrative with quippy asides and dishy tangents. When she’s on a roll, it feels like an artillery barrage of laughter, with each new joke arriving before we’ve had the chance to catch our breath from the last one.

Director Alex Timbers seems to have encouraged this, coaching Cohen to be faster, louder, and brighter in her delivery—sometimes to her detriment. So much of the comedy revolves around Cohen being that girl, the one whose story you will know intimately by the conclusion of brunch even if she’s not seated at your table. And while that can make for some spectacular comedic arias, it becomes rhythmically stale and ultimately unsustainable over the course of an hourlong set.

But there is a solution lurking in the shadows of her blazing aura. Cohen has a fascinating tendency toward hit-and-run horror, at one point singing, “One time this guy raped me and I apologized to him.” Later, dreaming about being a “normal girl,” she sings, “My husband could kill me with his hands but he won’t.” We barely have time to gasp at this brief glimpse at the quotidian terror in which so many women live before Cohen drives on to her next target. I wondered what the show would be like if Cohen allowed those neo-Gothic moments of darkness to linger, if she tempered her manic delivery with more grounded beats. It might make for a more interesting, substantial show.

But at 65 minutes, Broad Strokes feels a bit slight for a full off-Broadway production. There isn’t much drama or suspense, or really anything that throws us for a loop: Cohen is diagnosed with a medical condition, her doctor prescribes a treatment, her insurance authorizes that treatment, and the procedure is a success. She even gets to go to Europe the following summer. It’s a happy ending for all involved, expect perhaps those who paid the top ticket price.