We all loved US cabaret comic Cat Cohen’s debut Fringe show The Twist..? She’s Gorgeous, which eventually went on to Netflix special glory: but there was something particularly magical about its original Edinburgh Fringe run. Playing late at night in the 100-seat Pleasance Beneath, a massive part of its magic was how the young, unknown Cohen brought Streisand-scale diva-isms to the dinky venue. It was an act, of course, but her apparently colossal self-absorption registered as hilarious deluded in front of the small crowd.
Success complicated this a bit: at last year’s Fringe her second show Come for Me mined a relatively similar vein of millennial diva humour, but the overweening ego of Cohen’s stage persona felt relatively less funny now that she was actually really quite popular.
That Come for Me didn’t quite work in 2024 can partly be attributed to the fact the show was a couple of years older than that, and was supposed to run at the 2023 Fringe. It didn’t because at the age of 31 Cohen had a stroke: clearly a terrible thing to happen to her, but it has to be said it makes for her strongest material yet in Broad Strokes.
Cohen’s first two shows were more about the character, the songs and the vibe than opening up about her life. With the happy caveat that she is now in better health than she was before (see the show if you want medical spoilers), the question ‘what would happen to a ditsy young millennial narcissist if she had a stroke?’ is answered to perfection by Broad Strokes, which takes a story that would have been interesting anyway – the US medical system sounds unimaginably dystopian – and then Cohen-ises it.
Is it true that she googled ‘nearest five-star hospital’ after the stroke? Probably… not? But it’s funny to have the grim situation filtered through her dazzling comic persona, and there are plenty of moments – notably her total fascination with the fact her heart surgeon was named Doctor Love – that you almost feel you’re getting two great shows virtuosically entwined with one another: a deft piece of true storytelling and a ludicrous account of a deluded diva for some reason passing through the healthcare system. Plus the jazzy songs are some of her best yet: the lyrics tend to contain a wryer persona than her stand up, and there’s a particularly great closing number that basically concludes she learned nothing at all from the entire experience.
I hope Cat Cohen is done with medical emergencies, but Broad Strokes’s expert synthesis of her comic persona and her actual life feels like she’s really hit upon the thing she was born to do.
