Fringe 2025 – Lily Blumkin: Nice Try! ⭐⭐⭐⭐
Blumkin, 28, starts the show in her New Jersey childhood bedroom, which she recalls smelled 'like beef stew' as she never washed the sheets. An unpeopled photo of it, with its ample well-made double bed, is relayed on an overhead screen, suggesting a lack of action.
In an engagingly zany hour, Blumkin – a writer and sketch performer on 'The Daily Show' on the US cable channel Comedy Central – plays nine original characters with zest and sharp comic timing. First up is Jeffrey, her first boyfriend and best friend of the partying barmitzvah boy Josh, on whom he secretly had a crush, and for whom she dons a camp curly-haired wig.
Her first love, though, was Stephanie and she next appears as her dad, Steve, with an eye-liner moustache and red shirt, throwing around a supportive rainbow-coloured tablecloth which he got from gaydaddy.com, dutifully getting himself acquainted with the they/them nomenclature as he seeks, with mixed success, to prove he's not anti-gay.
Other characters include Trish, her mum's best friend, getting sozzled and flinging wine over herself at a book club as she attempts to escape from her two aggressive boys; and a wildly inventive 'sentient clump of hair', wearing a cowboy-style brown string jacket, which had got stuck to a grimy, ceramic tile in the shower. There's also a with-it tallit-wearing rabbi working the crowd at Lily's batmitzvah, a photo of which is relayed on the backstage screen. 'If you like what you heard you can check out my podcast, 'Rabbi riffs' … on myPhone,' he says.
It's all deliciously silly and fondly sent up in a confident and quirky show, which was directed in its New York premiere by Ariel Gitlin and in Edinburgh by Lanee' Sanders.
Lily Blumkin: Nice Try!
Gilded Balloon Patter Hoose, Blether (Until Aug 25, not Aug 14)
Gilded Balloon Patter Hoose, Blether (Until Aug 25, not Aug 14) https://www.edfringe.com/tickets/whats-on/lily-blumkin-nice-try
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