A teenage winner of Borehamwood’s Got Talent, Candy Gigi’s dreams of entertainment stardom have foundered: “The only role I’ve ever had is dried-up Jewish wife.” That’s the starting point for the outre almost-solo musical Friday Night Sinner!, which finds Gigi (or her fictional alter ego) on a crazed last bid for glory – to become, in her words, “the Jewish Barbra Streisand”. It’s not subtle, but as a showcase for Gigi’s bouffon talent and brass neck, and as a gleefully no-holds-barred hour of bad-taste comedy, it abundantly delivers.
She’s licking audience members’ faces within minutes of lights-up: this isn’t a show that respects boundaries. Whether dialoguing with her subconscious, represented by a giant puppet vulva, preparing the Shabbat meal, or wretching at the sight of her husband David (Jordan Paul Clarke, taciturn on piano), Gigi gives us a ravening will-to-fame warring with a religious culture that requires her to post her knickers monthly to the local rabbi. That asks her, in her mother’s words, to “learn to be happy being unhappy”. Sack off baby-making with dull David in a bid for showbiz glory? That would be, says mum, to “finish off what Hitler started”.
As a sideswipe at oppressive Orthodox Judaism, Friday Night Sinner! (first seen at the 2019 Edinburgh fringe) takes us only so far. There is a moment late in the show where Gigi threatens to play for real this woman crushed by doctrine and a bad marriage. But the moment passes, in another swerve towards rent-a-psychopath behaviour and gross-out carnal comedy (“Clean up your spunk, Adam!”). Nothing wrong with gyrating dildos and outsized squirting boobs, of course – and Gigi involves them in her performance with no little panache. But they do tether us to familiar shock-comedy territory, with little advantage to the story we’re being told.
None of which really matters, mind you, if you get on board with a show that wears its audience-outrage credentials with pride, that’s never far from another fine bad-taste one-liner, and that Gigi performs with a commitment – and a great singing voice – to make the most exacting Jewish mother proud.
