Review by Steve Bennett

With such a high-profile TV career and a personal life lived in the public glare, from her divorce to her stomach stapling, Roseanne Barr performing two rare – if not unprecedented - British dates as part of the Leicester Comedy Festival was always going to be a big deal.

Her recent return to her stand-up roots has come after, three TV ideas were vetoed by the networks - as she herself laughs. Displaying a self-deprecating sense of humour from the beginning, she took to the De Montfort Hall stage wearing hair mussed up into an untidy pineapple, a leopard-print dressing gown and fluffy slippers and flippantly justified her appearance with the typically barbed comment: ‘Well you’ve already read about it all in the papers so why should I bother getting ready.’

But she clearly had bothered, as ready on stage was her keyboardist and overhead projector, which decorated the show with gentle musical accompaniment and well-timed pictures respectively.

The show itself proved tightly scripted and brutally honest. She began by bemoaning, with a smile, her life in the years since 1999: of menopause, divorce and an ill advised fake reality TV show which did little to reveal her real daily life of ‘spending all day checking her moles against the cancerous ones in books and watching the Hitler channel’.

She moved on to ridicule her Jewish upbringing in the Mormon-populated Salt Lake City, a city so repressed by religion the bars boasted ‘bonnet-less dancers’.

But alhough the routines displayed her trademark caustic wit and some perfectly-crafted lines, the early parts of this show lacked the sparky energy of her earlier stand-up work and groundbreaking sitcom.

She rounded off her material by proving why she’s been warming up for Michael Moore with an attack on the Bush administration. Hardly the most original of targets, but at least this rant showed genuine passion.

The real Roseanne displayed herself – quite literally - at the finale, when she cast off her flannelette animal print gown to tap dance in a tightly-bound black corset; tattoos and cellulite bouncing for all to see, jiggling with pride and a unique sense of fun.

A shame, then, that just as she got going, she was gone.

Marissa Burgess
Leicester Comedy Festval
February 10, 2006

Review date: 1 Jan 2006
Reviewed by: Steve Bennett