by ***1/2 (out of 5)
Maggie Crane is just the type of Masshole to make her older brother’s death all about her.
But at least she’s self-aware enough to acknowledge and question it during her Edinburgh Fringe debut, which takes its name from the pre-school program she attended with her brother in Massachusetts, where she found herself shaped by the developmentally and physically disabled kids around her, including her older brother, who spent his entire life in a wheelchair before dying at age 14. She was 12 then. She jokes about how she initially found solace and escape upon discovering the music of Panic! At The Disco, later cringing at her first crush in Brandon Urie, and then much later shellshocked to find herself waiting on him and his family as a waitress, and much more recently just now being able to not only cringe and laugh at herself over all of it, but also realize the significance of her crush and his music in allowing her to heal, all these years later.
Crane also notes wryly how building a comedy career out of existing in the shadows of a dead brother means one thing in the New York City comedy club scene where she’s a unicorn, and yet another at the Fringe where she’s competing with all of the other dead-relative one-handers.
While she may joke about the young women of her comedy generation all imitating Cat Cohen (a recent Fringe Best Newcomer winner), Crane has the voice and vibe that recalls a comic more like her Irish Catholic self in Megan Gailey. And that’s not a bad path to follow in comedy, either.
Maggie Crane: Side By Side runs through Aug. 28 at Underbelly Bristo Square, Dexter
