The Bedwetter
Sarah Silverman’s raunchy musical comedy falls flat
If you’re familiar with Sarah Silverman’s style of comedy, it won’t surprise you that “The Bedwetter,” based on Silverman’s memoir The Bedwetter: Stories of Courage, Redemption, and Pee, begins with 10-year-old, potty-mouthed Sarah (Zoe Glick, in a terrible wig) ingratiating herself to her new classmates with the promise of dirty jokes she’s learned from her dad and expletives to boot.
The pedigree of the creative team is impressive: a book by Silverman and Joshua Harmon, known for his sharp comedy with hits such as Bad Jews and Significant Other, music and lyrics by the late, Emmy- and- Grammy-award winning Adam Schlesinger, who tragically lost his life to COVID-19 in April 2020, and directed by downtown staple Anne Kauffman. But the skills of these talented artists did not cohere to create anything compelling.
It’s funny, for sure. Sarah is a precocious kid whose lewd sense of humor is encouraged by her father, Donald (Darren Goldstein, perfectly sleazy), and goes unnoticed by her mostly absent, bed-ridden mother Beth Ann (a criminally underutilized Caissie Levy). “We’re divorced,” Sarah tells her new classmates. But now she has two houses!
There’s just one problem: practically every night, Sarah wets the bed. The fact that this could be an emotional response to her parents’ divorce goes right over the heads of the adults in her life, including her alcoholic Nana (Bebe Neuwirth).
While Sarah’s older sister Laura (Emily Zimmerman), the pretty one as everyone will remind Sarah, longs to fit in with the new kids at school, Sarah impresses the girls in her class—Ally, Abby, and Amy (Charlotte Elizabeth Curtis, Charlotte MacLeod, Margot Weintraub, respectively)—by letting the insults they try to hurl her way roll right off her shoulders. And fart jokes. Lots of fart jokes. When she is invited to a slumber party at Amy’s to watch the Miss America pageant—Miss New Hampshire (Ashley Blanchett, funny and golden-voiced) figures largely in the plot—Sarah reluctantly agrees. She wets the bed but her humiliation is usurped by the shooting of John Lennon (???).
After seeing the hypnotist Dr. Grimm (Rick Crom, a veteran of the stage, who inhabits his multiple roles with amusing characterizations), Sarah is, as you might imagine, eventually humiliated and kicked out of the talent show by her new friends, too. She spirals into a depression so deep not even Xanax can cure it, not even a kickline of dancing, yellow Xanax pills!
The tonal shift between the two acts is jarring. What was once crude and funny becomes trenchant and self-serious. There’s a tragedy at the center of the Silverman family that the musical uncovers, but the creators haven’t made a space for it without departing from the musical’s overall tone.
I haven’t read Silverman’s memoir so I can’t speak to the show’s adherence to the source material, but the eleventh-hour plot involving Nana feels shoe-horned into the piece, as if the creators felt like they needed more material to cram in. The stakes never feel particularly high, certainly not high enough to feel invested in any of the characters’ plights. Silverman and Harmon fail to convey a child’s desperation and embarrassment to its proper, heightened extreme.
The music, too, doesn’t swell to any recognizable heights. Remaining strictly in a folksy-rock-meets-musical-theatre vibe, the songs blend together. Minutes after leaving the theatre, I couldn’t hum one melody from the show.
Ellyn Marie Marsh is hysterical as Sarah’s militant middle school teacher Mrs. Dembo, and other characters throughout the show. The ensemble doesn’t feel superfluous, rather they are well-integrated into the piece. Laura Jellinek’s sets move, almost, seamlessly from scene to scene and, along with Kaye Voyce’s costumes and Tom Watson’s hair and wigs, portray the 1980s with a winking eye. Television sets are put to clever use throughout the production. I was delighted each time screen and stage blended together in harmony.
I left wondering why this was made. According to the program notes, it was Schlesinger who came to Silverman with the idea to turn her memoir into a musical. As hard as they’ve tried, this musical does not “sing.” The seeds of potential are there within the piece but, as it stands, it’s not ready for life beyond this run.
“The Bedwetter” opens on Monday May 23 at the Atlantic Theater Company’s Linda Gross Theatre.