Nice Jewish Girls Gone Bad

Ladies' tights littered the stage when the variety revue Nice Jewish Girls Gone Bad—a/k/a The Passion of the Christ Killers—filled the Cutting Room with Semites and atheists guzzling (He)brew and not feeling guilty about it in the least. The event was the best way for even a Catholic boy to spend Christmas Eve, with the sensibly named THE GODDESS PERLMAN—a plain talker who puts the whore in hora—bringing on a yenta parade of singers, strippers, hoop dancers, and a comic who poignantly wondered, "When is being Jewish gonna be hot? When's JewLo gonna be the shit?" - Village Voice

Well... I must say... hands down... funniest comedy act/show/movie I've ever seen. We were all in stitches the entire time. 6 of us gals went to see the Nice Jewish Girls Gone Bad at Downstairs Cabaret in Rochester. - Democrat and Chronicle

I thoroughly enjoyed your hilarious and entertaining show at the Creative Alliance in Baltimore.
I'll be sure to bring along some friends next time you come here to share in my enjoyment. Please make your Chanukah trip to Baltimore a "TRADITION" It'll be a Mitzvah !!! - Irv Levin

I didn't get a chance to say anything at the show tonight, but I did want to get my word of thanks and praise in for a amazing show. Definitely the most unique and hilarious show I have ever seen. Thank you very much for doing what you do and putting flare into my night/chanukah, - David Rose-Carmack

http://www.nypost.com/seven/04042008/entertainment/theater/girls_bawdy_and_nice_104870.htm

ating: stars

April 4, 2008

I'VE spent a good part of my adult life searching for "Nice Jewish Girls Gone Bad," so it wasn't hard to entice me to the Zipper for this bawdy musical revue, playing Saturday nights.

Featuring an alternating lineup of female performers delivering a mixture of comedy, music and fairly tame burlesque routines, the show is good kosher fun.

The evening is hosted by "The Goddess Perlman," whose increasingly daring outfits ("I'm bringing camel toe back") are topped only by her risqué commentary.

"I put the whore in hora," she says, before explaining that "You get dinner on JDate, but you get laid on Craigslist."

She also delivered several amusing musical numbers, including an ode to gefilte fish, which she calls " 'Fear Factor' for Jews."

At the show I caught, the acts included a trio of comediennes, including Mindy Raf, whose routine included a hilarious song delivering the female perspective during a bout of bad sex; Rena Zager, explaining that "Jews are like an emotional Weather Channel and Jessica Golden, complaining about constantly receiving pictures of her friends' babies ("I'm not sending them pictures of DUI's I've been getting").

All were very funny, even if they were thrown off their comedic rhythms by the noisy interjections of some drunken women in the front row.

Rousing musical accompaniment is delivered by a four-piece klezmer rock band cheekily dubbed the Four Skins, while the scantily clad Sister Schmaltz delivers a series of provocative dance numbers, including a Hasidic strip routine.

Admittedly not for everyone, "Nice Jewish Girls Gone Bad" has the outrageous feel of a bat mitzvah gone terribly, terribly wrong. - By FRANK SCHECK

http://www.backstage.com/bso/news_reviews/nyc/review_display.jsp?vnu_content_id=1003682057

By A.J. Mell

First, a word about the space: The Zipper Factory has, without question, the most spectacularly inviting lobby of any theatrical venue on, off, or way off Broadway, at least if your taste runs to slightly threadbare antique sofas, curious bric-a-brac, and a general aura of funkifed, shabby gentility. The avuncular bartender dispenses a full range of (alas, overpriced) adult beverages, which can be imbibed while watching the show. Leave this cabinet of wonders and enter the performance space, and you'll find an unexpectedly roomy venue fitted with plushy seats apparently salvaged from junked cars. It's a place where one can stretch out, cool one's heels, and contemplate the joys of blessed idleness. I could go on and on.

The show is swell too. Emcee Susannah Perlman presides over a bevy of bawdy, sharp-witted, often scantily clad "chosen chicks" whose comic chops are fortified with a dash of old-school burlesque. The bad attitude on display is part of a healthy, broads-telling-it-like-it-is tradition in Jewish comedy that goes back at least as far as Sophie Tucker and continues today with Sarah Silverman, among others.

As not all of the listed performers actually appeared, I assume the lineup changes from show to show. This edition featured edgy standup from Mindy Raf, Ophira Eisenberg, and Rena Zager, plus burly-Q duo Sister Schmaltz. Performance poet Vanessa Hidary offered some noncomic relief with a bracingly bitter riff on the old "You don't look Jewish" line, and Rebecca Drysdale's monologue in which a Bat Mitzvah girl says what's really on her mind, though perhaps a little "inside" for the gentiles in the audience, drew loud guffaws of recognition.

Director Michael Baron keeps things moving briskly, and the performers are all highly professional veterans of Comedy Central, Last Comic Standing, and the like, but the show never succumbs to slickness; Perlman and company see to it that a spontaneous party atmosphere prevails. House band the Four Skins provides high-voltage klezmer accompaniment.
- Backstage

Bad Girls: Burlesque Show Puts Jewish Women in the Spotlight

By Adam Wilson
Mon. Dec 24, 2007

BAGEL BEAUTIES: Nice Jewish Girls Gone Bad blend singing, dancing, and stand-up comedy.
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Jewish burlesque seems, in a way, only natural. Sex and humor are inextricably bound in Jewish culture (or at least in certain precincts of it); potty-mouthed, voluptuous women are celebrated. The burlesque tradition took root in the Yiddish theater nearly a century ago when Jewish thespians, not content to be restrained by a single medium, decided that their plays would include a bit of everything: song and dance, sentimentality and comedy, romance and raunchiness. This is precisely the logic employed by the burlesque troupe Nice Jewish Girls Gone Bad, which performed a three-week run this month at The Zipper Factory, a funky off-Broadway theater in New York City’s Hell’s Kitchen.

The Zipper Factory, one of the few off-Broadway theaters that maintains a full bar in its lobby, is the perfect venue for NJGGB. The evening’s vibe — one of communion and cleavage — was set pre-show. Performers and audience members alike congregated at the bar and drank He’Brew beer, while one of the show’s dancers, an Amy Winehouse look-alike but with fake tattoos instead of real ones, warmed up on a stripper pole in the corner.

NJGGB is the brainchild of actress/songstress/comedian Susannah Perlman, a buxom 30-something with a seasoned performer’s command of the stage. She started the group five years ago because, as she explained in her opening monologue, there’s “no shortage of Jewish women going: ‘Look at me! Look at me!’� The show’s humor is often local (“I’m glad I flier-ed [the ultra Orthodox enclave of] Boro Park�). To be a Jewish insider in New York, it seems, is also

to be a New York insider. This was fine with the audience, filled primarily with 20- to 30-year-old New York Jews, but one wonders how the material plays in other cities. A later act, Rena Zager, riffed on the differences between Manhattanites and Brooklynites — a Jewish twist on the African American “How black people are different from white people� routine.

The show — five parts standup comedy, two parts bawdy song and dance — puts a new spin on familiar themes. These are modern Jewish women who spend time not only looking for husbands on JDate but also looking for booty on Craigslist. “You get dinner on JDate and laid on Craigslist,� Perlman explained to a nodding, knowing audience.

Other recurring motifs included common Jewish physical attributes (Mindy Raf, who came off as a more mature Sarah Silverman, described her uni-brow as a “Jewni-brow�) and the loquaciousness of the Jewish people (Zager: “Jews are like an emotional weather channel — reports every 10 minutes�).

Mixed in between the standup acts were song-and-dance routines that were often led by Perlman, who made more costume changes than Britney Spears at the MTV Video Music Awards. At one point, Perlman emerged wearing a shiny, blue, low-cut, one-piece pantsuit that looked like it was left over from a 1970s Jewish-singles roller-disco. “I’m bringing camel-toe back!� Perlman proclaimed before launching into a routine involving spinning dancers dressed as dreidels.

Perlman has deep roots in the Yiddish stage — her ancestors were prewar players in Romania — and so she clearly understands the dynamism necessary in building an effective Vaudevillian show. There were a few near misses, such as an un-ironic poetry slam that seemed to belong in another show, but most of the acts gelled nicely. One dance number, a “Fiddler on the Roof� parody, involved stripping Hasidim wearing Star of David pasties beneath their tefillin; another was a song called “What’s in Gefilte Fish?� in which Perlman offered audience members spoonfuls of canned gefilte fish and declared, “It’s ‘Fear Factor’ for Jews.�

The show’s high point arrived toward the evening’s close, when Second City alum Rebecca Drysdale emerged in a red wool Santa-and-Rudolph cardigan and launched into a pitch-perfect monologue that parodied a bat mitzvah speech. Drysdale kept a remarkably straight face as she hit each note like the wobbly-voiced adolescent that she must have been. “The Torah portion I read today,� she deadpanned, “means as much to me in English as it does in the original Hebrew.� She closed her performance with an “American Idol� auditions-worthy rendering of the opening of her Haftorah, before announcing to the congregation, “Now would everyone stand for no reason.� Some audience members chose to rise — but out of appreciation rather than obligation.

The show closed with the entire cast forming a chorus line and singing songs: a Yiddish drinking song and some Hebrew school classics. Audience members were encouraged to sing along, and many could be seen mouthing the Yiddish and Hebrew words. The finale seemed to embody thespirit of the evening — a coming together of young Jews, unsure of their place in Jewish culture but having a lot of fun figuring it out.

Adam Wilson is a writer living in New York. He mainly writes about Jews and sex. - The Forward