You mellow with age, they say. So whither, now she’s 31, the comedy of Catherine Cohen? When Cohen unleashed herself on the 2019 fringe – and later on Netflix – it was with an emotional car-crash of a musical comedy act, pasting sequins on her neuroses and narcissism and splaying them fabulously across the stage. But are those Olympian heights of anxiety and self-absorption still scalable now?
Yes and no, on the evidence of her second show, Come for Me. The Cohen it introduces, with opening number The Void, is recognisably the same self-ironic, self-obsessed monster as before. She performs, and commentates on every detail of her performance. She self-glamorises, ad absurdum (“Dating me is what critics and fans alike are calling an immersive experience”). Her sentences teem with put-on voices, hashtags, air quotes and asides.
Maybe there’s no longer the shock of the new that accompanied her debut. But I love this act; I could watch it all day. It’s the social-mediated psyche set loose on stage to music – and fine music, too, with piano from Frazer Hadfield and lyrical free-associating from Cohen, now sweetly trilling, now starting to blather, midway through a horoscope song, about the various ways one might enjoy artisan bread.
But as the set progresses, a slightly maturer Cohen emerges. Yes, anxiety about relationships, sex, and her body stays high in the mix. And the ego is still all-consuming. But there’s reflectiveness, too, and perspective. Two songs, in their differing ways, make peace with, and indeed celebrate, her dysfunctions and out-of-control appetites. A final number, with its breezy melody and bleak lyrics in playful opposition, finds the New York resident in transit between youth and maturity.
It’s also full of laughs, which Cohen never forgets to deliver. There’s oversharing, fresh perspectives, and life-stage material about freezing her eggs and having a boyfriend who’s also – quelle horreur! – an uncle. But there’s also ridiculousness in abundance, from a comic with a sense of her own daftness, that at every pivot, pose and sashay finds hilarious new ways to express itself. Would you call it mellow? Not exactly. But outrageously sharp and funny? Absolutely.
