'This Is My Favorite Song' review — Francesca D’Uva hits notes of comedy and grief
Read our review of This Is My Favorite Song off Broadway, a solo stand-up and musical comedy show by Francesca D'Uva at Playwrights Horizons through December 8.
It's the story of many a solo show: A comedian processes the death of their father through a mix of stand-up and musical comedy, mainly at the insistence of their talent representation. They do it anyway, flanked by blinding lights and intermittent fog machine magic. By the end, after processing grief for spectators, they and the audience find closure.
This is Francesca D’Uva’s This Is My Favorite Song in a nutshell. She talks of her father’s passing of Covid in 2021 and ruminates on the impact he, who is never named, had on her.
Almost all the musical comedy bits feature D’Uva’s excellent impression of Colombian pop star Shakira. In these song and dance sequences, D’Uva wears a deadpan expression while muscling through choreography with the enthusiasm of a standup comedian who wants to supplement their writing with a bonus attraction, regardless of its actual coherence to the show.
D’Uva tells us she attended music school (no elaboration), and her parodies and tracks are energetic, if comedically inconsistent. Is she playing a character who can’t really sing but is doing it anyway to portray other characters? Or is her warbly voice, manipulated for character and color as dynamically as a Playmobil set, just what she’s got? It’s difficult to discern.
That inconsistency characterizes much of the show, which noodles around ideas about grief and absence, often meandering its way to the laugh lines. D'Uva occasionally lands excellent punchlines and even funnier tags (her swim coach cried at her awards ceremony because “[her coach] was a lesbian”) with verve. One of the best bits involves a song where D’Uva imagines marrying formerly closeted Bachelor alum Colton Underwood. But though the two bits are supposed to be connected to D’Uva’s considerations of her own queerness and how the absence of her father made her feel vulnerable in the world, they feel adrift from one another in style and tone.
If the show feels piecemeal at times, could that be explained by the first song, where she says, “I don’t want to do this show”? D’Uva’s nods to her agent strong-arming her into making a show about death opens up rich questions about the artist/audience relationship. There’s even an underexploited thread about falling out of love with performing and trying, via an Elizabeth Gilbert book, to rediscover the magic she once felt. (We never learn why she was drawn to it in the first place.)
A better show would have deconstructed solo-show cliches, but This Is My Favorite Song remains mired in them, complete with a (to its credit, impressive and moving) penultimate musical number that addresses grief head-on. A show could have been built around that song, which contains a level of nuance, tenderness, and openness the rest of the show lacks. Instead, it’s 80 minutes of decent material that doesn't elaborate on most of its best ideas.
This Is My Favorite Song summary
Comedian Francesca D’Uva has been performing in Brooklyn for years with shows at bars like C’mon Everybody and Baby’s All Right, and was featured as one of Vulture’s Comedians You Should and Will Know for 2024. She brings some of her older material to Playwrights Horizons and weaves it together with newer jokes and bits to make a show about the loss of her father from Covid.
What to expect at This Is My Favorite Song
The show is 80 minutes, which breaks down as an approximate hour of standup and 20 minutes of musical comedy. D’Uva tells stories about her swim team, the strange things people say to her after learning of her father’s death, and her search for a good urn.
What audiences are saying about This Is My Favorite Song
This Is My Favorite Song has only on audience review on Show-Score at the time of publication.
- "Funny and heartfelt one woman show that touches on grief in a way that is relatable, moving, and doesn't wallow. Great lighting design- tons of fun moving lights like a big concert that made it feel very theatrical and more elevated than a lot of solo/ stand up comedy shows." - Show-Score user Shelley 4325
Read more audience reviews of This Is My Favorite Song on Show-Score.
Who should see This Is My Favorite Song
- Fans of Shakira will will be glad to hear D’Uva’s impression several times.
- Fans of D’Uva’s will see some of her best-known bits in This Is My Favorite Song, including a Mary Poppins parody song about being a nanny.
- The second-to-last song in the show, worthy of being its closer, explores the nauseating return to normalcy everyone has to make after a loved one dies, which people who have been through the same experience will relate to.
Learn more about This Is My Favorite Song
Francesca D’Uva is a skilled performer, writer, and composer with an amusingly strange sensibility and style. She can craft a subversive solo show, critiquing or parodying the many other solo shows about grief and what audiences expect from them. But This Is My Favorite Song remains too vague and inconsistent to merit a spot on a Spotify playlist.
Photo credit: This Is My Favorite Song. (Photos by Valerie Terranova)
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