"Having introduced the most unappealing topic in the world, Death, Let Me Do My Show manages to be both harrowing and hilarious; like the best comedy, it is rooted in concerns that are deeply personal yet also hits a universal nerve."
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Dressed in a glittery, silver suit—costumes by Kristin Isola—Bloom immediately takes control of an audience who already admire her from her standup comedy and her bitterly funny TV show, "Crazy Ex-Girlfriend" plus her solo tour of "What Am I Going to Do with My Life Now?" and, perhaps, from the recent iteration of this amusing musing of life and death and birth and Covid. Bloom ponders her pre-pandemic self and the trauma of the birth of her daughter who had a life-threatening condition. Covid limited her visits to her baby in the NICU and caused the death of her close friend and writing partner Adam Schlesinger who, ironically, shared the NICU when it was partly converted to a Covid ward.
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“ ‘Rachel Bloom: Death, Let Me Do My Show’ is an acquired taste. This means you have to keep up with her rapid delivery that lasts a mere 80 minutes. I was not familiar with Ms. Bloom, and I was definitely in the minority – but this did not stop me from keeping up because Bloom is a very articulate and precise performer. She knows exactly where she is going and will do everything she can to make sure you stay on the path.”
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a show about death, Bloom’s personal experience and personal take on it. But in many ways, the show is also still the glitzy musical standup she initially intended…The result is certainly clever, undeniably entertaining at times, but also largely hollow. By framing her experiences through a synthetic comic filter, she keeps us at a distance from much of anything meaningful or memorable about this greatest mystery of human existence, or the reactions it inspires – which is to say, fear, grief, cosmic questioning.
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“The songs are wonderfully absurd yet incisive riffs on the ways people grapple with anxiety about death. The show is a comic triumph but stops short of profundity or catharsis, as Bloom seems reluctant to really confront the melancholy inherent in the material...Bloom offers a peak at the darkness that lurks behind the silliness but is sure to keep it at bay and to foreground laughter.”
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“The songs are the highlights here. Bloom is especially good at puncturing emotion with surreal detail...More than blunt language — a tool that loses its sharpness with use — this absurdist vein effectively draws laughs, but it also underscores the show’s real subject: the often cruel arbitrariness of life.”
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“The show instead leaves the impression that Bloom is rushing to process grief, joy, and the last decade of her career before the pop culture moment moves on. Perhaps with more room for reflection, her next show will strike a different chord.”
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“Bloom is so good in her default mode, with a glint in her eye and dozens of curse words in her mouth, that she wins you over to her helter-skelter view of the world. She wins Death himself over too, or at least manages to get him to sing along with her about the cum trees.”
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