When Catherine Cohen’s The Twist …? She’s Gorgeous played the Edinburgh fringe in 2019, I fell hard for its charisma and swagger, its wickedly funny songs laying bare the troubled soul of an Insta-addled, personality-is-performance millennial. Belatedly, the show now makes it to Netflix, to answer the question: does the comedy of rapturous self-absorption still fly on the other side of a global pandemic?
Happily, it does, Cohen easily assimilating Covid into the story of her own, endlessly fascinating self. If watching on TV can’t rival up-close-and-personal contact with the New Yorker’s starburst personality, this is still a cracking watch. Accompanied by Henry Koperski on piano, Cohen greedily hogs the stage and the attention (“Look at me doing comedy in a rhinestone romper!”) with this suite of songs and standup on the workings of her fabulous, fraught life and mind.
