Sophie Sucks Face review: Musical comedy is poignant and surprisingly relatable (for a show about incest)
Image: Dylan Woodley
Sophie Zucker’s show about incest is not about incest.
So, ostensibly, Sophie Sucks Face is about a young Jewish woman hooking up with her cousin in the bathroom at a family funeral, but there is so much more to this incisive one-woman musical comedy show.
Playing all the characters including a really, really heightened version of herself, Sophie takes us to her grandfather’s shiva. She’s explaining her career as an actress to her family and indulging her not-quite-relatives’ self-indulgent views on enjoying the work of cancelled comedians (weirdly mirroring a conversation I’d had with someone about Louis CK just prior to the Fringe, ugh). When her second cousin, fresh out of the Israeli army, turns up looking hot and tortured “from all the murder”, she’s immediately mesmerised and puts her stable, loving relationship to the back of her mind.
Starting in a cute, funeral-appropriate outfit, eventually she’s reciting Kaddish while stripping down to a pleather leotard and sexy boots, less a goodbye to a beloved grandparent and more a huge RIP to her dignity.
Sophie Sucks Face combines excellent writing and stand-up with songs in a range of styles from country to pop to modern Broadway musical to the very specific tunes of the quirky Zoey Deschanel-alike ukulele-playing love interest who’s actually just flaky and a bit rude. Also, a really great Succession interlude.
All at once it manages to profile the mess that grief makes of your brain, the absurdities of pursuing the life of a performer, and the total bravery it takes to actually commit yourself to another human being.
The message: Maybe you have to strip everything away to see what’s really important? Sometimes it takes totally humiliating yourself to lose the inhibitions that have been stopping you from being properly vulnerable with the person you love? Or, it’s just a very funny, very Jewish musical about doing something super gross when you’re sad.
Either way, it takes someone special to make a show about hooking up with your cousin a thing you can sympathise with (though empathy may be one step too far). There are real moments of poignancy that all of us could relate to, when you see her bending over backwards to try to justify a life she’s not sure she feels ready for.
Sadly, I missed the night they were serving Manischewitz, so I just necked a bottle of Palwin No.10 behind the bins (just a lil something for the Jews there). Guess that means I’ll have to go again, just in case…
Sophie Sucks Face is at Underbelly Bristo Square (Dexter), at 10:15pm, until August 28th. Tickets here.
