One year after breaking into the mainstream with a 2022 Netflix special, the comedian/cabaret singer Catherine Cohen suffered a stroke. She was 31, days away from a European tour, and suddenly faced with a personal crisis worthy of her very millennial sense of uniqueness. Cohen has now channeled that experience into a one-woman show, Cat Cohen: Broad Strokes, that combines elements of stand-up, cabaret, and first-person storytelling about personal trauma.
She’s developed the persona of a no-filter woman with an almost delusional sense of her own entitlement. “I always wanted to be the main character and the author and the lighthouse,” she says early on. Indeed, she radiates main character energy, turning up in an elaborate costume that’s equal parts Disney princess and Renaissance fair (designed by Kelsey Randall). She also strides about a Gothic castle set that includes candelabras, heavy drapery, an upstage arched window frame surrounded by Corinthian columns (designed by Derek McLane and lit in day-glo colors by Jake DeGroot).
Honestly, I have no idea what director Alex Timbers’s elaborate production design has to do with the show — but Cohen looks fabulous. Happily, she also seems to have fully recovered from a stroke caused by a previously undiagnosed congenital heart condition that she underwent surgery to correct. Cohen leans into the metaphoric possibilities of her experience, from the discovery of a literal “hole in my heart” to the fact that her cardiologist was named Dr. Love.
Broad Strokes has more of a narrative structure than Cohen’s previous work, much of it centering on her medical crisis and how it fits a pattern of repeatedly finding herself out of step with her peers, or, in her words, “young for her grade.” Having a stroke at 31 definitely fits the pattern. Her stories are often hilarious, very scatological (there’s a riff about periods), and capped by original songs (composed with David Dabbon) that she performs backed by an onstage three-person band.
Cohen is an accomplished singer, with a powerful vocal instrument, but her songwriting seldom rises above the level of pastiche. Her tunes have a bouncy pleasantness to them, but also give the feeling of Kapwing- or Suno-generated tunes that set text messages to music. She has a tendency to cram too many syllables into a single line and resort to awkward half-rhymes like vomit/pocket. The show’s score may bring to mind unflattering comparisons to Rachel Bloom, who covered similar grappling-with-mortality territory in her song-filled one-woman show Death, Let Me Do My Show (performed three years ago at the same venue, the Lucille Lortel Theatre).
Fans are likely to be more forgiving of the show’s weak spots, enjoying the many pop culture references and TikTok tropes that Cohen crams into a single sentence. (“I also love physical touch: my dream is to be fingered while using Apple pay to buy a Baggu bag,” she jokes at one point.) But despite positing an evolution from a fame-starved striver (“I need to be liked by all of New York and L.A.”) to a self-described “normal girl,” Cohen never once lets down her brash, sometimes abrasive persona to reveal a more vulnerable side. If she’s changed at all, she lets us see only the broadest strokes. ★★★☆☆
BROAD STROKES
Lucille Lortel Theatre, Off Broadway
Running time: 1 hour, 5 minutes (no intermission)
Tickets on sale through Sept. 25 for $49 to $130