Sarah Silverman's Bedwetter at Arena Stage is the kind of musical that can bring in new audiences

Back in 2010, I was finishing up watching the 3-season run of The Sarah Silverman Program and thought it was among the funniest shows of the 2000s, along with The Daily Show, Arrested Development, Modern Family, 30 Rock, The Office, The Colbert Report, Curb Your Enthusiasm, It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia, Scrubs, and Chappelle's Show.

I couldn’t get enough of Silverman so I purchased and read her autobiography The Bedwetter: Stories of Courage, Redemption, and Pee. From my review:

It is often hilarious and frequently biting, especially when it comes to FOX News, the right-wing media, and the Media Action Network for Asian Americans. Silverman impressively bares all about super-personal issues. She doesn't drink alcohol but apparently smokes gobs of marijuana. She frequently goes through bouts of depression, and mostly keeps it together these days because of her Zoloft intake. She doesn't stop there. Plenty of text is given to her hairy arms and upper lip. As if that weren't enough to cripple her early confidences growing up in New Hampshire, her bedwetting well into her teens would have sealed the deal for most weaker people.

The 2010 book has been turned into a musical, which opened off-Broadway in 2022, is making a stop at Arena Stage in Washington D.C., and appearently is headed back to New York soon. Our third-row seats last night were optimally located to fully enjoy the kind of show that can help bring larger audiences back into the theater world.

The production is a proverbial kick in the nuts that zooms in on the super-personal stories from Silverman’s book rather than the anti-right-wing elements. Unlike in the book, her character remains 10 throughout, navigating a problem nobody would want to have to handle at that or any other age—wetting the bed.

I’m always skeptical about musicals, but I went into The Bedwetter feeling pretty optimistic knowing how much I like Silverman’s material and that the tunes were a collaboration with the late, great Adam Schlesinger. He was one of the first celebrity covid casualties in the early days of the pandemic and had helped lead one of my favorite bands, Fountains of Wayne, for years before his death. His collaboration with Silverman was ongoing as his condition rapidly worsened. Because Schlesinger’s songs were only half finished, Silverman has continued to refine them leading all the way up to Arena’s production, and the tunes are both great and a little Fountains of Waynesy.

There is not a stinker in the cast, led admirably by Aria Kane as little Sarah with the Mork and Mindy suspenders. Her womanizing and jeans-retailing dad (Darren Goldstein) and TV Guide-obsessed, bedridden from a broken heart mother (Shoshana Bean), older sister Laura (Avery Harris), Manhattan-swilling grandmother (Liz Larsen), Miss New Hampshire (Ashley Blanchet), and Rick Crom as the wacky Dr. Grimm, Dr. Riley, and Johnny Carson each have multiple scene steals.

The show’s pop-culture namedropping—with nods to everything from Bugs Bunny and Popeye to Cheers and One Day at a Time—adds to the enjoyment. Those are as relatable to audiences as are the more time-tested equally covered topics of depression, mental illness, guilt, divorce, and losing a baby due to a dumb crib-manufacturing mistake.

It’s a funny and lovable production that is a lot closer to what many musicals and, indeed, plays in general ought to be like.

4.5 out of 5 stars