This is a review for Rachel Bloom show in Dallas for her "What Am I Going to Do with My Life Now?" show that no one asked for. I have a lot of thoughts and they have to go somewhere.
Rachel Bloom is the co-creator and the lead of Crazy Ex Girlfriend and she is a star. I had October 23 marked in my brain for months as the day she was coming to Dallas. I'm especially glad I got the tickets because she announced the night before that she was cutting the last leg of her tour due to the stress of her pregnancy. Dallas was going to be her penultimate stop. I paid a lot of money in fees to Ticket Master and got seats for myself and a friend in the balcony. The first two rows of the balcony were just full of women with single tickets who had asked to be moved up closer, and that atmosphere made the show so fun.
Danny Jolles, her long time friend and collaborator, opened up all of the spots on her tour. He worked with her back when she did pieces for College Humor (Like "Mary Poppins is Efficient") and he played the awkward and fidgety George on Crazy Ex Girlfriend. His comedy is hilarious and self-deprecating and a little absurd. He ruined Beauty and the Beast by proving how stupid the library gift is, because essentially the Beast doesn't put in any effort, he just allows her to use a room in his house. I definitely appreciated his scheme of making mattress commercials that advertise based on how great a mattress is for sex, too. He introduced Rachel after his set and she was just as good as I had hoped.
Before she had even told a single joke, she literally undressed on stage to put on a T-shirt someone from the crowd gifted her.
The "toad of shame" lanyard, as she explained, is a relic of CXG history. The prop master, Manuel Baca, who had also worked on True Blood, laminated a squashed toad and anyone who broke a prop, ruined a shot, or was disruptive in any way had to wear the "toad of shame" (She also talks about it in this Instagram post). She gleefully told this story while actually stripping, turning her back to the crowd to peel off her shirt and put on the new one, which she wore the whole show.
I had no idea what I was in for when I bought the tickets since the whole mystery of the tour was wondering what she was going to do with her life after CXG ended. It was essentially a "greatest hits and new directions" sort of show, mixing stand up with musical comedy. She moaned about her pregnancy, told anecdotes about her celebrity, and would literally shout "HIT IT" every time she wanted to burst into song.
Some of the songs were old standbys from the show, like "The Sexy Getting Ready Song," but others were new, like her song about the Virgin Mary's period, which was both hilarious and horrifying. She has a true talent for making the most seemingly random things funny and damn, that woman can really sing. Her powerful belting rang out to every corner of the Majestic Theater, and her physical comedy is so wild that it read clearly even to my seat in the top balcony. Her fine tuned facial expressions are so perfect for TV, but they added a subtlety to her performance that I definitely appreciated. In short, I am obsessed with Rachel Bloom and I wish I could have her make musical numbers for all the boring moments in my life.
She also brought along Scott Michael Foster, a Dallas native and Nathaniel on Crazy Ex Girlfriend. He wore a Dallas Cowboys' jersey and he is just as cute from the upper balcony as he is on TV. I was really impressed with his live performance of "Let's Have Intercourse," accompanied by plenty of hip swiveling.
He paired up with Danny to play the chorus of mathematicians in another old favorite, "The Math of Love Triangles." You can just tell that these people actually like each other outside of the show they put on, which just makes my rewatching much more enjoyable. Kathryn Burns, the two time Emmy Award winning choreographer from the show, joined the party to teach audience participants the choreography from "Friendtopia." (She's insanely talented and I'm pretty sure her jumpsuit was from Madewell). Her and the boys played the ensemble of cats from another CXG song, "F*ckton of Cats" (turned to "Butt Load of Cats" on live TV for obvious reasons).
(I would embed the shaky video I took but none of them are even slightly recognizable as actual human beings rather than just shiny blurs...)
The performance was the perfect walk down memory lane for those of us missing the show after the conclusion of its final season, but I especially appreciated Rachel's inclusion of new pieces. She talked about how she's going to be a "real pop star" now, which she used as a segue to singing a comedic song with an echoey, bass-heavy beat about how she was actually stuck in a cave that caused all of the echoes. She told us about how her pregnancy had caused her to think over cultural idiosyncrasies like circumcision in a truly horrifying song about "the foreskin angel" (as she is having a girl, this is no longer an issue she needs to ponder, but essentially the song is about how the result of circumcising a child will give them a guardian angel made out of foreskins who will protect their penis... and as unpleasant as the image is, I was literally screaming with laughter).
In a weird way, I'm so proud of Rachel and the evolution of her work, and I'm grateful for her continued emphasis on body positivity and mental health awareness. I started watching CXG during my first summer home from college when I was at the downturn of a truly intense depressive episode. My older sister recommended it to me, citing that "it's like a musical about depression and feminism, you'll love it!" By that point, the show had been running for almost a year, and I eagerly awaited new episodes while scouring Youtube for her other works. I spent the summer after that forcing everyone in my life to watch the video for "Fuck Me Ray Bradbury" and singing it in the shower.
Her work is a perfect mix of absurd and powerful, and Crazy Ex Girlfriend did a lot especially to talk a lot about issues that are so often hushed in the world of entertainment. It was one of my first times seeing a woman who was empowered emotionally, intellectually, sexually and who was also shown as vulnerable and broken without reducing her to her illness. Musical numbers like "Sexy French Depression" (another song she sang live) parodied the common portrayal of mental illness and showed a sliver of that actual experience. It was the first time I've even heard Borderline Personality Disorder even mentioned in pop culture, and they actually showed Rebecca's progression as a character who was learning to deal with a scary illness.
I'm going to miss the show a lot and continue to do private performances of the soundtrack every time I go on a long road trip. I'm going to try not to burst into tears when I think about how Rachel sang "You Stupid Bitch" and "A Diagnosis" (above) with such honesty and how she told the audience how important it was for her to hear from viewers that she was not alone in this experience. And I'm going to set up post notifications for Rachel's Instagram so that I can be in the loop about her upcoming ventures, because I know she's not stopping here. She is a woman with so many talents, a soon to be mom, and a real, truthful, vulnerable, and down-to-earth person. Even though I didn't get to live my dream of Rachel inviting me on stage to sing a power ballad with her, I enjoyed every minute.
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