NEW YORK TIMES - STRAIGHT FOR PAY REVIEW

From the New York Times, March 26, 2024. Cara Connors is a queer millennial comic whose debut hour shifts from her divorce from a man to a very funny description of lesbian breakups (lots of gratitude in both directions). She says she’s terrified of waking up, opening her phone and seeing this news: “Elon Musk is bisexual.” Her face goes dark. “Now I have to welcome him into the community?” Then she imagines the headline with her hands: “Jeff Bezos, gender-fluid.” She erupts in a baritone: “I can’t do it.” Connors seems to search for reasons to lose her bearings. It’s where she is funniest. Bounding around the stage with “the energy of a mom at a wedding who has had too much to drink,” she offers some dutiful jokes (like the Standup 101 opening analogy of how she appears to others: “I know I look like if they let Timothée Chalamet start eating again”) and a couple that peter out when they should build. But she makes up for the rawness of joke writing with a frenetic charm and a powerhouse voice that shifts from giggly to laid-back to demonic in a flash. It’s a promising debut. ~Jason Zinoman