Edinburgh Fringe 2024
Becky Goodman: The Day My Sugar Daddy Dumped Me
Becky Goodman
Venue: PBH’s Free Fringe @ Brewhouse Doghouse
Festival: Edinburgh Fringe
Low Down
Becky Goodman is caught in a pattern of dating much older men, many of whom happen to be married. Through songs, comedy, and the help of a costume resembling female anatomy, Goodman regales you with the story of the Sugar Daddy that broke her pattern, and her heart. This fantastic update of her 2023 Fringe show is a hilarious and honest tour-de-force of a comedian in her prime.
Review
Becky Goodman might like older men. Older, married men. Older married men with money. And she’s back at the Fringe to sing to you about it.
Looking like she stepped out of a Woody Allen movie (a director she also does a pretty brilliant impression of), Goodman is armed with a guitar and fifty-minutes worth of stories about the men she has dated. These include Lichael (name changed for privacy) the sixty year old she lost her virginity to at nineteen, the girl-dad who eschewed a condom during sex and then went to comfort his crying daughter, and the eponymous sugar daddy, Long Islander Sal. These anecdotes are peppered with genre-bending songs, and excellent crowd work that demand your attention, even as she slips on the ol’ vagina costume.
I do not use the F word lightly. You know the one I’m talking about. The Phoebe Waller Bridge one. Rhymes with Bleablag. It’s overused to the point of meaning nothing. And yet here I am, about to use it. Becky Goodman’s show is like if you spliced Fleabag with Steve Martin standup and then added a quality that we will only be able to refer to at future Fringes as BeckyGoodmanesque. Goodman’s voice is so fully realized, so confident in voice, that it’s impossible to feel like you’re not experiencing something special, even if you’re only one of three people in a room. Her comedy oscillates between goofy and crude, something you might expect from the Muppets if they were given an HBO slot. It’s in the newly added third act, however, where Goodman really gets to show her versatility. It is there she meets Sal, a sweet Italian-American man with a textbook mafia-movie accent, who is looking for a sugar baby who will be kind to him. Here, Goodman makes use of the storytelling sort of comedy made popular by the likes of Tig Notaro and Hannah Gadsby, allowing for the honesty of experience to become the honesty of emotion. Here, she places a sincere song to Sal, one that sounds like something from the end of a movie Burt Bacharach scored, and though she has been unabashedly looking at you right in the eye the whole time, you get a chance to finally see her.
If Becky Goodman is not one to watch, I don’t really know who is. Her songs are not only catchy, but have clear craft behind them, making their effortless sound full of intricate watch-work upon closer glance. Her storytelling is well-paced, her voice original. She’s worth whatever time, money, or distance you need to take to see her, and I promise you, at some point soon, getting a Becky Goodman ticket isn’t going to be so easy.
Becky Goodman: The Day My Sugar Daddy Dumped Me is at PBH’s Free Fringe @ Brewdog Doghouse 15-20 and 22-25 at 5pm.
