Full Press Page for MOMMY QUEEREST: It's Jewdy's Show!
Washington Post
MOMMY QUEEREST Is Solid Gold Laughs!
By Peter Marks
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, December 22, 2009
Judy Gold talks in her new one-woman show, "Mommy Queerest," about the moment she and stand-up comedy found each other. It happened during college, when as part of a holiday game she was required to get up in front of her roommates and friends with a microphone and make fun of every one of them.
Of such larks are fateful connections made, for Gold, the brassy progeny of a New Jersey suburban Jewish family, is authentically uproarious, the sort of compulsively entertaining type who'd keep you laughing even holding court at a corner table in a diner at 2 in the morning.
She is taking the expanded, music-added version of her latest piece for an inaugural spin at Theater J, and it proves a more vivid, and more tickling occasion than her last show, "25 Questions for a Jewish Mother," performed at Theater J in 2008. That prior production had an arty conceit, in which Gold tried to speak in the voices of other Jewish women she'd interviewed. It turns out she's at her very best when she simply kicks back and converses with us in her own.
The voice is actually an amalgamation: It belongs both to her and her mother, Ruth, from whom Gold clearly has inherited a big mouth -- and whose bottomless sense of outrage the comedian mines for consistently hilarious effect. ("We had two types of communication," she reports, "screaming and not talking to each other.") As we come to appreciate through "Mommy Queerest," the omnipresent tensions of the Gold household honed a comic performer's ability to conjure life as an opera of perceived slights and exaggerated anxieties.
"Mommy Queerest" is a cheeky reference to Gold's life as a lesbian mother of two sons, whom she raises with a former partner (and who after their breakup moved to another floor of her building on the Upper West Side) as well as with her new partner, a psychotherapist from Westchester. It also, of course, compels you to think of the Tyrannosaurus rex of American motherhood, Joan Crawford -- though reading between the lines of Gold's piece, you understand the maternal commodity of monstrous proportions that she is really dealing with here is love.
Gold shares the stage with a piano and a screen, the latter used for photos of the families that meant the most to her -- her own and the ones she was addicted to, on television. From "The Partridge Family" to "All in the Family," sitcom clans informed her upbringing and even her view of success: a running gag in "Mommy Queerest" has her at each phase of her adult life pitching to utterly uninterested TV executives a half-hour comedy about her gay family.
This gives Gold the intermittent opportunity to dash to the piano and plunk out the theme songs of "Gilligan's Island" and "The Mary Tyler Moore Show" and "Welcome Back, Kotter." (What cosmic force has ordained that these lyrics stay forever fresher in the memory than do, say, the opening lines of Chaucer's "The Canterbury Tales"?) Naturally, Gold's dead-in-the-cradle sitcom, called "It's Jewdy's Show!," has a theme song of its own, whose refrains Gold sings with unapologetic gusto.
As staged by Amanda Charlton and co-written by Gold and Kate Moira Ryan, "Mommy Queerest" doesn't depart all that dramatically from the tradition of the Improv or Caroline's. What distinguishes it is the brisk wit and genuine charm of its earthy star.
Mommy Queerest
By Judy Gold and Kate Moira Ryan, with Eric Kornfeld and Bob Smith. Directed by Amanda Charlton. Lighting, Cory Ryan Frank; sound, Chris Baine; projections, Andrew Boyce. About 75 minutes.
DC Theater Scene
Mommie Queerest
December 25, 2009
by Steven McKnight
Judy Gold is just like the woman next door. That is, if the woman next door just happens to be a 6 foot 3 inch Jewish lesbian stand-up comic and mother of two. Her one-woman autobiographical show Mommie Queerest, currently running at Theater J, is a wonderful juxtaposition of the mundane, the unusual, and the occasionally outrageous which ends up being a warm and funny delight.
Judy Gold has coped with many of the same problems we all face: the awkwardness of youth, complicated parental interactions, and the challenges of dating and relationships. She’s also had a couple of more unusual and difficult challenges: getting others to accept her sexuality and, later, her desire for a career in show business. As a young girl, Judy coped by escaping inside a television set. She found that the world of cheesy sitcoms we all loved (whether we admit it or not) offered comfort when there was none in the wider world. After all, who wouldn’t want to live in The Brady Bunch world or have a caring teacher like those in Room 222?
Having used those shows to save her life as a kid, Gold now uses them as an effective device to share her hopes, life, and fears with the audience, recalled both with visuals on a large upstage screen and by Gold herself, frequently resorting to the piano on stage next to her. The later-life television references hit home immediately. Like sweet Mary Richards in The Mary Tyler Moore Show, she heads to the big city in hopes of making it on her own. In the meantime, her adult relationship with her outspoken mother resembles that of Dorothy and Sophia on The Golden Girls.
We see Gold as she goes from network to network, trying to pitch a sitcom based on her own life. As her life changes so does the sitcom, and this device allows her to pause and assess her life, her career, and the extent society has come to accept her and other lesbian women. These mini-sketches are comedic highlights. Each sitcom pitch has an explanatory theme song for It’s Judy’s Show only to have a dense network executive try to understand the idea before ultimately rejecting it.
Gold has the full set of professional stand-up comedy chops and delivers non-stop laughs, yet what makes the show truly special is her searing honesty as she explains her life. No matter what bizarre thing happens, it is to her a normal life with just the occasional edgy moment (including the inevitable Leave It to Beaver joke) to spice things up. While she occasionally uses blue language, none of it seemed to matter to the blue-haired audience members, much less the younger ones.
The set resembles a comedy club, complete with tables and chairs lining the stage. Although the use of the screen for family movies and other pictures is endearing, none of director Amanda Charlton’s staging distracts from Judy Gold.
Perhaps the only false note about Mommie Queerest is the title. While the act does have personal and political themes inextricably tied to Judy’s sexuality, Mommie Queerest has old-fashioned charm and heart and will provoke laughter from all sorts of mothers and their offspring.
Mommie Queerest
Performed by Judy Gold
Book by Judy Gold, Eric Kornfeld and Bob Smith
Lyrics by Eric Kornfeld . Music by John McDaniel
Directed by Amanda Charlton
Presented by Theater J
Washington Jewish Week
'It's Jewdy's show'
With lots of laughs, Gold mines her life as sit-com
by Lisa Traiger, Arts Correspondent
Just two days after Mayor Adrian Fenty signed a city council bill legalizing same-sex marriage in the District, actress/comedian Judy Gold opened her one-woman show Mommie Queerest (It's Jewdy's Show!) on Sunday at the Washington DC Jewish Community Center's Goldman Theater. The raucous, sometimes bawdy, sometimes bathos-filled 75-minutes makes one woman's case for expanding the boundaries of marriage to include same-sex couples.
Gold, a self-described perennial outcast as a 6-foot-3-inch tall, lesbian, kosher-keeping Jewish mother of two, takes a softer approach in her cabaret-like evening than the racier, edgier Sandra Bernhardt, who took no prisoners last year at the WDCJCC in calling out some Jews, Republicans, Sarah Palin and anyone else who rubbed her the wrong way. Instead, Gold's show, which runs through Jan. 3, toggles between standup bits, home movies, confessionals and a smattering of re-jigged 1970s TV-themed songs sung and played on the piano by Gold.
Two seasons ago, Theater J introduced Gold to D.C. audiences in her warmly embraced 25 Questions for a Jewish Mother. This time, her all-new extended monologue mines personal stories rather than intermingling experiences from a representative swath of Jewish mothers across the political, religious and geographic spectrum.
The work, developed with writers Kate Moira Ryan, Eric Kornfeld and Bob Smith, and directed by Amanda Charlton, examines Gold's coming of age, coming out and coming realization that she has become, for better or worse, her own worst enemy: a Jewish mother.
Gold takes pleasure in scrunching up her face and appropriating a horrid-sounding raspy, yenta's voice with a New York accent, no less. It's the kind of voice that makes your hair stand on end; slouching kids hear it and straighten up. Kids making funny faces sober up, by God, before they freeze like that.
Gold clearly loves her overbearing mom, and her unassuming, milquetoasty father, too, but she has gotten much comic mileage out of playing on the shrewish, Jewish stereotype -- cracking jokes about her mother's claim that sitting too close to the television causes radiation sickness, or eating (nonkosher, of course) cheeseburgers on newspaper on the backyard picnic table or undermining Hadassah ladies who don't appreciate jokes about, well, nuts. There is a profane and bawdy streak to Gold, so those easily offended might beware; but she's no bluer than most of today's young comics.
In her show, she pitches her life story as a sitcom. Once upon a time, children fantasized about lives based on fairy tale princesses, princes and golden apples. They grew up with Disneyfied ideals of happily ever after. But for adults who came of age in the 1970s and early 1980s, fantasy families solved their problems and lived a modern-day happily ever after -- for another week at least -- on 30-minute (with commercials) TV sitcoms from the golden age of the pop culture form.
Gold, sitcom obsessed as a child, found her own Rosebud, so to speak, in the lives of blended, singing, impoverished and all-around dysfunctional families like the Bradys, Partridges, Evanses and Bunkers of The Brady Bunch, The Partridge Family, Good Times and All in the Family.
Gold has pegged her rising standup career on taking off if she could only sell her own life -- and lifestyle as a lesbian, Jewish mom -- to a network for sitcom fodder.
At the piano, she reworks the great theme songs of nearly a dozen classic sitcoms -- from Gilligan's Island to The Mary Tyler Moore Show, Welcome Back, Kotter and more, reinventing them to introduce her self-styled It's Jewdy's Show!
Alas, no network bites -- not even the gay cable network, hmmm -- and Gold finds herself back on the road, her relationship rocky and her mother overly demanding.
The fortysomething Gold has a rich appreciation for the many foibles and blunders of the Nick at Nite sitcomland that she inhabited through first-runs as a kid. It's curious though, if younger generation Xers, spoon-fed the gruel of reality television from MTV's Real World and Survivor, will have accumulated enough pop culture resonances to laugh at many of Gold's best TV sitcom bits. She had a hard time getting more than a giggle for an Ethel Merman punchline -- "What," she exclaimed, "only two people know who Ethel Merman is?"
In revamping her own life as a sitcom -- two gay moms, an ex, two little boys all living in a tiny Upper West Side New York apartment -- Gold wants more than celebrity. Her deepest wish is to see her life as a viable and acceptable alternative to the rest of the family dysfunction that appears in 13-week seasons each fall.
"I want to see families like mine" on television, she sermonizes at one point, acknowledging the District's recent vote.
At the root of Jewish theater, in every generation, rests the centrality of family. From the Yiddish King Lear to Harvey Fierstein's Torch Song Trilogy, from Clifford Odets' kitchen table dramas to Neil Simon's kitchen table dramedies to that fiddler sawing away at his violin on the rooftops of Anatevka, Jewish theater is foremost the interplay and dysfunctionality of family laid bare.
Judy Gold's Mommie Queerest adds a new dimension to the makeup of family, but it remains one that is undeniably Jewish -- and funny enough to take an evening away from your own family's foibles to get to know the Gold bunch. After all, as she belts with a touch of brassiness, "It's Jewdy's Show!"
Washington Examiner
Judy Gold brings raw, unique comedy to D.C.'s Theater J
By: Barbara Mackay
Special to The Examiner
December 28, 2009
Judy Gold has performed at Theater J before, but her last offering there was very different from the current show, "Mommy Queerest (It's Jewdy's Show!)." In "25 Questions for a Jewish Mother," she presented the results of 50 interviews conducted on a cross-country trek to find out the meaning of Jewish motherhood.
In "Mommy Queerest," Gold takes us on a more internal trip, examining the ways in which her personality was formed by her family and by the endless television sitcoms she watched to escape the reality of her own life.
Gold is nothing if not straightforward. She was (so she says) unpopular, a too-tall girl who didn't fit in, who fought with her mother and longed to make people laugh. Happily for the world, Gold followed her dream, becoming a successful stand-up comedienne and a proud, gay mother of two boys.
With a no-holds-barred book written by Gold, Kate Moira Ryan, Eric Kornfeld and Bob Smith, Gold performs on a stage shared only with a piano, a stool and a microphone. Periodically, she plays the theme song of a remembered television show, or music she has written herself.
As Gold reminisces about the imaginary "families" she escaped to during her younger years -- "The Brady Bunch," "Family Ties," "Laverne and Shirley," to name a few -- photos of those shows flash on a huge screen behind her, interspersed with photos of Gold from the time she was in a carriage until she was in college. Gold's narratives about those shows and photos are interspersed with re-enactments of conversations with her parents, her sister, her first girlfriend, etc. Director Amanda Charlton keeps the show's pace swift.
Throughout "Mommy Queerest," Judy inserts self-deprecating humor and mimics critical voices from the past, unsubtle reminders that the source of Gold's success is her acerbic wit. On the issue of same-sex marriage, for instance, Gold makes her feelings abundantly clear.
But "Mommy Queerest" is not a piece of political theater. It's proof that a liberated, funny, uninhibited, intelligent woman can create the loving environment she always longed for. Her own television sitcom will undoubtedly come.