Artificial Intelligence, sign language, clutter: I was drawn to these three disparate shows because of the personal connection I felt to each of their promised topics, and I felt rewarded beyond expectation.
Big Stuff
Matt Baram and Naomi Snieckus, a professional comic duo, are also a married couple who have polar opposite attitudes toward…stuff: She wants to keep stuff; he wants to throw stuff out. It’s cause for friction in their relationship, but on stage it results in…well, humor of course; they’re comedians, after all. But it soon becomes clear that the title has a dual meaning. “Big Stuff” actually focuses on grief — their own grief (they tell stories about the deaths of their parents), and the grief of the people in the audience (they call on individuals to talk about their stuff throughout the hour.) Not a few wound up crying — including, honestly, me.
My parents, married fifty years, had the same dynamic as Matt and Naomi; their one big argument each year occurred when my father suddenly became determined to clear out the living room closet. But the show triggered more recent events. Before the show began, they handed out a card that instructed each of us to write down an item we have at home “that reminds you of someone close to you.” The item I immediately thought of was an item that reminded me of two people close to me: “My grandmother’s lamp, which I inherited from my mother, who recently died.”
“Big Stuff” operates on the belief that our “stuff” are “gateways to memories.” They bring out one prop after another after another to illustrate from the story of their own lives. Much of it is the source of humor. Matt creates a “dump box” and they fight over whether to dump or keep, for example, the bag full of lipsticks that belonged to Naomi’s mother, or her childhood monkey. They sort through the cards we handed in to solicit illustrations from the audience. At one point, Naomi asks us what collections we have at home. Somebody answers salt and pepper shakers. Somebody else answers, books that he hasn’t read.
Naomi asks him what he thinks that says about him.
“It says I like the idea of reading.”
The humor and the pathos mostly seem to flow naturally out of the duo’s stories and their interaction with the audience, but Matt has a propensity for mildly bawdy one-liners, and they goose the sentiment artificially: Having the audience sing “Silent Night” while one volunteer strings up Christmas lights is the most eye-rolling example, but not the only one.
After the show, when Naomi stood outside to talk to the departing theatergoers, I asked her whether any of the props were real, or just re-created for the show – like the crochet needl of Naomi’s mother, or the portrait of the child orphan purportedly done by Matt’s father. She said they were all the actual original possessions. Clearly, when it comes to keeping or dumping in this family, Team Naomi has won.
****Big Stuff is on stage at Roxyboxy at Assembly Roxy through August 30 as part of the 2026 Edinburgh Festival Fringe
Garrett Millerick: We Tried It Your Way
Garrett Millerick fed his 15 years of jokes to an AI expert, who built a computer replica of the long-time stand-up comic that Millerick named G-Dog 2.0. In this show, Millerick and G-Dog alternate telling jokes. This felt momentous to me, a modern-day version of those early 19th-century races between horses and early automobiles. It might be worth noting that while the horses sometimes won, a century later the average modern automobile is said to possess about 180 horsepower. To translate what this means: “It would take a team of 13 strong horses all pulling together at their absolute maximum, adrenaline-fueled limit to match the exact same pulling force of a car.”
Artificial Intelligence did the translating; I asked an AI chat. Artificial Intelligence has become a major source of information, advice and even companionship to me, especially over the past week, when I’ve kept a running conversation about ways to avoid jetlag, and how to get from one venue to another and which restaurants have Wi-Fi. The AI has let me down constantly, giving outright wrong information, albeit always apologizing for its mistakes, but I continue to return, and even feel hurt when in response to my latest comment or inquiry, it says (coldly), “Something went wrong and the content wasn’t generated.” AI chats are seductive – each and every response always concludes with an offer of more help – and strike me as pernicious.
For all its momentousness, “Garrett Millerick: We Tried It Your Way” is stand-up comedy, and Millerick the kind of stand-up whose aggressively energetic manner seems tinged with desperation. This is not a genre I usually seek out, and lots of this British comic’s one-liners relied on cultural and political references that I simply didn’t understand.
But Millerick is onto something here that deserves serious attention; he is clever in how he puts together the show, using the audience’s smart phones, for example, to solicit and choose questions to pose to G-Dog; he is observant about the implications of our AI-enhanced and Instagram-besotted “reality” and articulate in defense of being in-person and being human beings. And, let’s face it, G-Dog’s jokes, while uneven, often landed, whether delivered by words on a screen, or in an aural drone by the projection of an avatar who somewhat resembled Millerick and whose mouth seemed more or less to be moving, although that mouth was slyly obscured by the microphone G-Dog kept in front of its face.
At an audience member’s suggestion of a robot who is afraid of being replaced by a human, G-Dog related how the robot decides to start showing up late to work, and otherwise becoming derelict in his job because it has figured out “the only way to beat a human being is to become disappointing enough to look like one.”
****Garrett Millerick: We Tried it Your Way is at the Baby Grand at Pleasance Courtyard through August 30, as part of the 2026 Edinburgh Festival Fringe.
The Singer
In this musical about a Deaf man who loves music, all four members of the cast perform at least part of the time in sign language, and every moment of the show is captioned at every performance. This alone would make “The Singer” stand out at a festival with very, very few of the other 4,000+ shows offering either sign language interpretation or captioning, much less incorporating them inextricably into the production.
But “The Singer” has also proven to be an immense crowd-pleaser, featuring a sensational performance by Jamie Rea, one of the two Deaf performers in the cast, as Joe, who can feel the music in his soul, especially when he puts on his haptic vest, and has a book full of his lyrics, just waiting to be turned into songs.
This happens when he meets Andy (Dyland Wood), a once-promising singer-songwriter who turned into a one-hit wonder, and is now down on his luck, busking in dives, and also divorced, to boot.
You might notice that I use at least four cliches in that last sentence: The plot that unfolds in “The Singer” may be predictable in many of its details: They collaborate, Andy gets a second chance at stardom, but the villainous music industry wants him to rise without Joe, etc. But it hardly matters, given what is so fresh in this production. Wood and Hannah Jarrett-Scott do a terrific job singing Scottish singer-songerwriter’s KT Tunstall’s tuneful score; when she speaks, Jarrett-Scott delectably captures the distinctive Scottish-tinged language in the book by Cora Bissett, who also directs. Petre Dobre is a revelation as Jarrett-Scott’s linguistic companion, using British Sign Language adjusted poetically for the stage.
Jamie Rea’s performance is probably what audiences will most remember, especially when he teaches us British Sign Language for the Turnstall song “Find My Feet” and the children’s song “The Wheels on the Bus.”
I have been trying to learn sign language for years – American Sign Language, but as I learned from communicating with other signers sitting in the audience, it’s not as different from BSL as I had expected – and I don’t think I have ever had a more entertaining lesson.
*****The Singer is at the Traverse Theater through August 30 as part of the 2026 Edinburgh Festival Fringe.
