Sarah Silverman Podcast (YouTube)
Sarah Silverman is everyone’s darling comic whose continuing cheeriness makes her seem nowhere near her 51 years of age. But her latest endeavor, a musical play called “The Bedwetter,” is not such a hit with the critics.
Playing at the Atlantic Theater Company off Broadway and originally set to premiere in the spring of 2020, but delayed because of the Covid crisis, The Bedwetter, is based on the bestselling memoir by Sarah Silverman. The play was written by Silverman with Joshua Harmon (Bad Jews) and features a score by the late Adam Schlesinger (Fountains of Wayne).
Adam Schlesinger, died from complications due to the Coronavirus at the age of 52 in April of 2020.
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The Bedwetter features the world premieres of Ngozi Anyanwu, David Lindsay-Abaire and Jeanine Tesori, Clare Barron, Sanaz Toossi, Joshua Harmon, Sarah Silverman and Adam Schlesinger. Silverman’s inclusion in the play counts as a premiere because it is her first play.
The play is based on Sarah Silverman’s best-selling book “The Bedwetter: Stories of Courage, Redemption, and Pee.” The Bewetter was Sarah Silverman’s first book, a memoir. The publisher called it, “at once shockingly personal, surprisingly poignant, and still pee-in-your-pants funny.”
In this collection of humorous essays, Sarah Silverman told tales of growing up Jewish in New Hampshire, losing her virginity, learning to curse at 3 years old, and being a bedwetter until she was old enough to drive, and in a surprisingly poignant piece, she recounts the accidental death of her infant brother. ”Of course, in her loopy, taboo-breaking way, she always manages somehow to leave you laughing. But then you’d expect nothing less from a woman who sang to her boyfriend on national television that she was “F***ing Matt Damon.”
Unfortunately for Sarah Silverman, the critics did not like the play so much.
“Potential abounds in the tangled show,” says the NY Post. It adds that the show’s, “smart framework screams out for a bold and moving musical. So why does it come off so slight and tentative?”
Saying that the musical show sprung a leak, the critic for the NY Times wrote that The Bedwetter, “is a potty-mouthed pleasure. But in jimmying the original into a more serious musical format as it proceeds, it achieves only a middling geniality.”
“The show seems to spring a leak, losing all its giddy energy as it sinks into the serious,” added the critic.
The Wrap said, “Perhaps “The Bedwetter” could have been even more saccharine.”
