one4review | On 14, Aug 2023

Boston native Maggie Crane’s stand up show manages to uniquely capture and combine moments of both tear jerking nostalgia with laugh out loud descriptive storytelling.

Firstly we are told of the teenage Maggie‘s obsession with Brendan Urie, lead singer of 90’s pop combo Panic! At the Disco. This was a profound and lasting obsession that saw young Maggie through the best and worst of times.

Maggie grew up in Boston Woods with an academic father, a terrifying Irish Catholic nurse mother and an older brother Aiden. Aiden was profoundly disabled but also had the coolest purple sparkly wheelchair. That wheelchair and all the attention that was heaped upon him was a huge source of childhood jealousy. As a child Maggie yearned for that normal family and not one that would spend enormous amounts of time in and around hospitals. Not a family that would take trips over the border to Canada simply to smuggle life enhancing drugs for Aiden. Maggie was just the little sister who craved attention, was stubborn, competitive and prone to tantrums but the little sister who never treated her brother any differently. She remembers his laughter and his personality and not his disability.

To tackle death as a topic in a stand up comedy show is challenging but somehow Maggie still manages to make us laugh.

This is a deeply personal biographical account of a childhood growing up with a profoundly disabled brother and his death at the age of fourteen. This meant that Maggie could have that all the attention from her patents that she craved.

It is, of course, bitter sweet. Maggie questions her-own past behaviour to the difficulties and challenges her family faced.

This is brilliant, very funny, yet at times heart-breaking, storytelling. Quite a unique combination.

*****

Reviewed by Margot

Aug 2nd to 28th at 17:45
Underbelly, Bristo Square (Dexter)