Broad Strokes
At first mention, a young woman suffering a stroke does not sound like a promising premise for a comedy, much less a musical comedy. It suggests frantic texts to a medically literate friend, and the sort of midnight internet search that convinces you that a headache is an aneurysm. Yet Catherine Cohen, whose comic persona has always depended upon turning private neuroses into public spectacle, has discovered in "Broad Strokes" an almost perversely fertile subject: the surreal experience of having a stroke at thirty, discovering that it was caused by a congenital hole in her heart, and then finding herself grateful, in a sense, to have been proved right about all the things she had spent her life worrying about. Under Alex Timbers’ brisk and extravagantly theatrical direction, Cohen turns a medical emergency into a fantasia of vanity, anxiety, pop culture, and self-invention. The result is a compact, highly polished Off-Broadway debut that is considerably more inventive—and considerably funnier—than its premise has any right to be. [more]