A musical about trauma, fart jokes and incontinence, The Bedwetter, based on Sarah Silverman’s memoir of her New Hampshire childhood, arrives at the Atlantic Theater after a long and terrible delay. In March 2020, as New York City’s theaters closed, the show paused its rehearsals. And then, on 1 April 2020, Adam Schlesinger, the musical’s composer and a founding member of the sportive rock band Fountains of Wayne died, an early casualty of the pandemic’s first wave and the worst possible April Fool’s joke.
This gives The Bedwetter – clever, comic, small-scale splendid – a mournful metatext and a kind of terrible irony. Because The Bedwetter includes many bad jokes, nearly all of them delivered by the 10-year-old Sarah (Zoe Glick, a ball of big pubescent energy), a precocious misfit. And it is also a musical about taking the worst that life gives you, accepting it and moving on. Which is of course what The Bedwetter itself has done.
