Candace Bushnell at The Ambassador: A fun, girly night out for Sex and the City fans

Irish Times

14-05-2025

Candace Bushnell: True Tales of Sex, Success, and Sex and the City
The Ambassador Theatre
★★★☆☆
If you saw an uncanny number of kitten-heeled Carrie Bradshaw-lookalikes hotfooting it up
O'Connell Street
on Tuesday evening, they were likely making their way to The Ambassador Theatre for Candace Bushnell's one-woman show.
All that was missing from the scene was a
Dublin Bus
emblazoned with Bushnell's face, (as in the opening credits to Sex and the City, when
Sarah Jessica Parker
spies her larger-than-life image).
For the uninitiated, the Sex and the City TV series was based on Busnhell's book of the same name, an anthology of some of her juiciest New York Observer columns about women in their 30s navigating sex, dating, friendships and 'trying to have it all' in
New York City
.
The series caught the zeitgeist of the 1990s, with the leading characters' names becoming a shorthand for personality traits à la, 'She's a total Miranda by day but she can be a bit of a Samantha after a few drinks'.
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So did Bushnell have three best friends just like Charlotte, Samantha and Miranda?
She took to the stage in a red leather-look skater skirt with a matching red top and heels to answer this and other questions that fans of the series have been asking for years.
And the answer: the three women feature an amalgamation of traits from Bushnell's wide circle of girlfriends.
There are shades of confusion when Bushnell switches from addressing the crowd in her opening monologue to acting out a scene where she talks to friends on an old brick phone. It soon becomes clear that this is a choreographed performance rather than an off-the-cuff Q&A-style event.
Candace Bushnell: True Tales of Sex, Success and Sex and the City at the Ambassador, Dublin. Photograph Nick Bradshaw
Candace Bushnell: True Tales of Sex, Success and Sex and the City at the Ambassador, Dublin. Photograph Nick Bradshaw
Candace Bushnell: True Tales of Sex, Success and Sex and the City at the Ambassador, Dublin. Photograph Nick Bradshaw
There is some built-in crowd interaction though, when she switches to gameshow host mode for Real or Not Real?
Did she date a senator like Bradshaw did in the series? Real!
Did she also meet
Matthew McConaughey
in LA? Real!
Did he say 'I really want to 'bleep' you, baby' to her like he does to Bradshaw in the series? Not real!
With the crowd settled, using a screen of slides as a visual aid, Bushnell goes into her life story, from her 'mini fashionista' days growing up in Connecticut, when she began calling herself Candi with an 'I', to when she decided to move to the big city and become a writer with just $20 to her name.
When she arrives in New York, she calls a much older Pulitzer Prize-winning writer who had told her he could look her up if she was in the city. He invites her to his luxurious apartment and she stays there for a chunk of time, working on short stories. However, shockingly, their relationship deteriorates, and she ends up sleeping on a wad of foam on the floor of a friend's apartment.
In perhaps the most successful set-piece of the show, Bushnell acts out going to the Manolo Blahnik store to buy a pair of black leather boots on credit that a confidante had assured her would change her life. She then high tails it to the New York Observer offices and climbs countless town house steps with her cumbersome purchase to interview for a gossip columnist job. She's up against a man 'with a wife and kids to support' and loses out to him.
Candace Bushnell: True Tales of Sex, Success and Sex and the City at the Ambassador, Dublin. Photograph Nick Bradshaw
Candace Bushnell: True Tales of Sex, Success and Sex and the City at the Ambassador, Dublin. Photograph Nick Bradshaw
Her hopes for her 'big break' are crushed, until she gets a call from the editor offering her the chance to write her own column on single women in New York City. Worried about what her conservative parents would think of her visiting sex clubs and the like for column fodder, she creates an alter ego.
And just like that ... Carrie Bradshaw was born.
For the second part of the show, Bushnell dons a stunning lavender dress with feathery cuffs to talk about the thrill of seeing the Sex and the City TV series come to fruition.
She goes on to describe what she did next, writing books such as Four Blondes, Lipstick Jungle and The Carrie Diaries, the last two of which also became successful TV series, although they didn't quite reach the heights of Sex and the City.
She talks about her 10-year marriage to a ballet dancer that ended in divorce and concludes with the lesson: your girlfriends are the ones who are there for you no matter what. This generates a cheer from the crowd of friend groups, siblings and mums with their grown-up kids, for whom Sex and the City has been a major cultural touchstone.
[
20 years on: the complicated legacy of Sex and the City
Opens in new window
]
Although there was nothing revelatory in Bushnell's show, it was a fun, girlie night out. It was just a shame she didn't indulge the bubbly Dublin crowd with a Q&A section.