Review by Steve Bennett

From 1997 to 1999, I worked for a newspaper called the Surrey Herald.

Are you whooping and hollering yet? Cos that seems to be the natural, if entirely disproportionate, response to mentioning bits of your CV, if Jennifer Coolidge’s show is anything to go by.

It probably helps if your career history includes being Stifler’s mom in the American Pie movies – the character that apparently popularised the term MILF – and appearing in the Legally Blonde series. She certainly has her fans, judging by this sold-out room.

But getting such a rapturous response to simply reading out her IMDB page leads to a definite laziness in this show; as if she has a sense of entitlement to the laughs, so doesn’t really need to put much effort into getting them.

The result is muddled, lightweight writing that strives to make points – especially about Hollywood body fascism – as well as jokes; but frequently falls short. Rarely has a show felt in more desperate need of a writer to make sense of the jumbled thoughts, slash the waffle, and draw out the punchlines.

When you’re including the tired old heckle putdown of ‘I don’t come to where you’re working and knock the dicks out of your mouth’ as a piece of scripted business, read from a card, you know you’re in trouble.

By rights, then, we should hate this big Hollywood name, giving it the big ‘I am’ and dabbling in stand-up without really thinking it though, attracting bigger box office than a lot of well-established Fringe names.

Truth is, however, that Coolidge is disarmingly likeable, with the ill-conceived thoughts just part of her natural, unpolished charm. She might be all well-maintained ‘teeth, tits and hair’, but being in the actual shape of a woman, she doesn’t fit the LA ideal – and is comfortable enough in that curvaceous body to make plenty of self-deprecatory quips about the fact.

Her attitude is, almost inevitably, sassy and she’s most entertaining when talking about her first-hand experiences of the dehumanising audition process. Routines about bigger celebrities were much less assured, with snipes about Paris Hilton being dumb or Tom Cruise being a freak seeming to be informed by watching too many daytime talk shows, rather than from any Hollywood insiders’ perspective.

Possibly by way of ingratiation, she says she’s thinking of moving to the UK, though with the state of our film industry it’s not clear what she’d do. It wouldn’t be too unkind to suggest she’s not going to be the RSC’s next Lady Macbeth. It’s possible she could earn a crust as an anecdotal storyteller – but she’ll need a hell of a lot of help with the script beforehand.

Review date: 15 Aug 2010
Reviewed by: Steve Bennett