“It’s Jewdy’s Show”

Posted by Gail M. Burns - June 2010

“It’s the story of a girl named Judy…”

I am the same age as Marcia Brady and Judy Gold is the same age as Cindy. If you don’t know who Marcia and Cindy Brady are (or Jan, Greg, Peter or Bobby) then you will miss whole premise of It’s Jewdy’s Show: My Life as a Sitcom. Gold is a six-foot-three Jewish, lesbian mother of two and an Emmy Award-winning actress and comedienne, but you don’t need to be any of those things to get Gold’s humor. You just need to speak Classic American TV Sitcom.

Gold is very talented and experienced, very professional, and very good at what she does, which is making jokes about being a six-foot-three Jewish, lesbian mother of two sons. She is very funny, and her humor is, by today’s standards, quite clean. She also plays the piano and sings quite nicely. If she had done more singing and less nattering about her life, I think It’s Jewdy’s Show would have been a better piece of theatre. As it stands now it is too long for good stand-up and hasn’t got enough songs for a decent musical.

I have to say that when the WTF first announced that this show would kick off their season, I was rather put off. I was put off by the title, and, since I knew next to nothing about Gold, other than that her previous solo theatre piece 25 Questions for a Jewish Mother had made the rounds of theatres like The Colonial, Proctors, the Paramount, etc., I was put off by the genre. There are a whole bunch of solo shows that play those houses – theatres that present rather than produce – and I never go to review them because I view them as somehow less that “legit” theatre. To me, and I know this is my own personal prejudice, they fall somewhere in between stand-up comedy and a “funny” motivational speaker like Loretta LaRoche. And in my mind shows that play three performances at The Colonial don’t open the WTF season.

In fact, the whole question of whether stand-up comedy is “theatre” has bugged me for a long time, and sometimes I list stand-up performances on GailSez.org and sometimes I don’t. In its favor, stand-up does involve an actor and an audience separated by a semblance of a “fourth wall.” The comic’s material is written, memorized, and rehearsed just like a one-person play like Shirley Valentine or the currently running Mengelberg and Mahler, except that a stand-up comic usually doesn’t employ a director. And the actor playing Shirley Valentine or Willem Mengelberg is not, and doesn’t claim to be, that person, while most stand-up comics perform under their own names and their material often is, or has the appearance of being, autobiographical. There is undoubtedly a difference between the comic’s stage persona and their day-to-day self, but line between on- and off-stage life is blurred in the act.

It’s Jewdy’s Show (Still HATE the title. Can we get someone in here to airbrush out the “ew” and replace it with a “u”? Thank you.) has a script by Gold and Kate Moira Ryan with additional material by Eric Kornfeld and Bob Smith, and a director, Amanda Charlton, a long-time WTF Artistic Associate. There is a set by Andrew Boyce and lights designed by Marcus Doshi. And while Judy Gold is playing a character named Judy Gold who, like the real Judy Gold is six-foot-three, Jewish, lesbian, the mother of two sons named Ben and Henry, and the daughter of the prototypical mid-20th century Jewish mother, there must be some differences. Only I can’t see them. As far as I could tell the stage Judy Gold pretty much tells it like it is about the real Judy Gold – and all of the people closest to her. I can only imagine what life must be like with someone who can, and will, take everything you do or say and put it up on stage or screen for everyone to see and hear.

So while I understand that Gold brings comfort to all the six-foot-three Jewish, lesbian mothers out there, I was slightly uncomfortable listening to such intimate and apparently true details of her life, and those of her loved ones.

In this show, the excuse for all this truth-telling is Gold’s life-long quest to star in her own TV sitcom about her life as a six-foot-three Jewish, lesbian mother of two, and how her real life has been influenced by and resembles the fictional lives of her favorite sitcom characters.

The sitcom references were the parts of the show that I found the freshest and cleverest, because Gold has been using her family members and life as a six-foot-three…well you can recite it by heart now…as material for all the decades she has been in show business, and also because they were the bits that contained music. I really wanted more music, and funnier lyrics. I know the lyrics to all those old theme songs, what I wanted was new lyrics that applied those themes to Gold’s life the same way the script did.

While I enjoyed the evening overall, two things bugged me big time. First, Gold made a few remarks that seemed to imply that all the residents of Williamstown, Massachusetts were Republicans named Buffy. As a proud resident of this town for 30 years, the wife of a native and the mother of two more, I can state categorically that I don’t know anyone named or called Buffy. Before you start making jokes about the community in which you are performing you should learn a little bit about it. Oh, and, the Williamstown Theatre Festival is NOT Williamstown. Try eating at Leo’s Luncheonette or swimming at Margaret Lindley Park.

Secondly, Gold ended with a big rant about how awful it is that most states in the union, including New York where she lives, don’t have marriage equality. I completely agree with her, but this is Massachusetts. We DO have marriage equality and we had it first. That’s right, Jewdy, it was good old Republican Buffy and her friends who legalized gay marriage. A few millennia too late, but we did it and it would be nice to include a word or two of recognition in there. And if you and your partner would like to get married while you’re in town, I can introduce you to a couple of Rabbis.

I am still not sure what this show is doing on the Nikos Stage (still known as the Adams Memorial Theatre or AMT to us townies) as a part of the WTF season, but I laughed out loud several times and can recommend It’s Jewdy’s Show as a pleasant evening of light entertainment. I noticed lots of my Jewish friends and neighbors were in the audience on opening night and suspect that that icky title was devised solely to lure them in. But even as a five-foot-ten Episcopalian, straight mother of two, I found that I had plenty in common with Gold – especially that Brady Bunch connection.

“It’s the story of a chick named Gail…”

“It’s Jewdy’s Show: My Life as a Sitcom” runs through July 4 on the Nikos Stage at the Williamstown Theatre Festival in the ’62 Center for Theatre and Dance at Williams College, located at 1000 Main Street (Rt. 2) in Williamstown, MA. The show runs 75 minutes with no intermission and is suitable for ages 12 and up – or any kids who have already seen and enjoyed Gold on TV. Tickets for the 2010 Williamstown Theatre Festival season can be purchased online at www.wtfestival.org and by phone at (413) 597-3400

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