Cynthia Silver wants to be famous, but more importantly, she wants you to like her. To really, really like her. As a struggling, underemployed actress longing for the big time (i.e., a seat on Oprah’s white couch for a cuddly girl-chat with Jennifer Aniston), she opens her one-woman show Bridezilla Strikes Back! by recounting just how hard she hustled for a part in a British documentary on Manhattan brides. Trailed by a film crew through every detail of her $100K wedding (her stepfather footed the bill), Silver’s in wannabe heaven, judging the hors d’oeuvres by the standards of her imaginary celebrity best friends and dismissing a stack of bridal books with a determination to play the kooky, downtown bride. Then Fox buys the footage, re-edits it into the snarky reality special Bridezillas and 11 million people watch her whiny meltdowns leading one Knot.com poster to dub her “bitchzilla.” And so on and so on for ninety self-absorbed minutes. While the material is intermittently amusing, Silver’s jittery, needy persona is so annoyingly, vacuously self-involved that you want to smack her over the head with her microphone or a bouquet long before she gets to the altar.
Bridezilla Strikes Back!
By Cynthia Silver and Kenny Finkle
The Flea Theater (upstairs)
Sat, Aug 13 at 2:45 p.m.; Tue, Aug 16 at 9 p.m.; Sat, Aug 20 at 8:30 p.m.; Tue, Aug 23 at 4 p.m.; Thu, Aug 25 at 9 p.m.; Fri, Aug 26 at 6 p.m.