Attending a Katherine Cohen concert New show “Come For Me” It feels like being caught in a tornado or watching “Fast and Furious The Vaudeville Years.” The pacing of her new comedy show is so relentless that she’ll fly past three more comedy shows before the joke ends and she catches her breath. Filming sex with your boyfriend? Are you listening to real crime podcasts? Freezing eggs? Every act is built on less. But in “Come for Me,” it’s a sequel to last year. “A twist…? She’s gorgeous,” Cohen spends just a few minutes on each and then moves on.
When it comes to musical numbers, she’s one of the rare singing comedians of our time, so she packs more delicious hooks than most pop albums.
This is a great tease. Cohen suggests she has enough material to keep us going for days, but for us she decided to give us just an hour.
Even meta-annotations like Mr. Cohen’s trademark “Bridge!” announcement. In the middle of a few songs, it’s delivered breathlessly. She strikes a dramatic pose, for example leaning seductively against a wall, but only for a moment. During a show at Joe’s Pub last Friday, she commanded the crowd to “unfold her arms!” But she didn’t stop to react, smoothly going from song to request and back to song. (By contrast, the looping absurdity of Ikechukuu Ufomadu’s 30-minute opening set benefited from his slow, deliberate form.)
This comes naturally to Cohen, who teases us only as a way to incite the act of revealing her true subject: herself, or rather, herself. She enjoys it while mocking our confession-age attitudes.
Katherine Cohen, whom we meet onstage, is a brilliant, relentlessly bouncy narcissist who has too much information and not enough. The set includes a hilarious account of her sex life with her boyfriends (and the people they invite to join in), in which self-deprecation and gloating merge to bring her to a higher level. Has become – or is it? — millennial oversharing and self-confidence run wild. “Dating me has been described by critics and fans alike as an immersive experience,” she exclaimed.
“Come for Me” is rawer and sweeter than her previous shows, while also giving off a floral scent of doubt and vulnerability. Her first song, “The Void,” hints at a groping need to fill emptiness without ever being moody, and her final song, “Good Not Bad,” pokes its upbeat melody. I’m covering it. Luckily, this slight expansion of Cohen’s emotional palette resonates with her musical palette, as she’s backed by a three-piece band rather than just a pianist, making her beaming gonzo’s It does not interfere with vitality. Here are some more details.
come for me
Until June 30th at Joe’s Pub in Manhattan. Public Theater.org. Running time: 1 hour 30 minutes.
