by ****1/2 (out of 5)
A former Best Newcomer nominee, Janine Harouni returns to the Fringe with a new hour so polished and timely, she jokes it may just reproduce this year’s Best Newcomer, too. Because Harouni arrived in Edinburgh more than eight months pregnant. Her due date is early September. But who knows?!?
Harouni is a transplant from Trump country, specifically Staten Island (New York City’s most New Jersey borough). Though she’s a relative unknown in the States, Harouni is enjoying success in the UK via the ITV2 sitcom Buffering and her own Amazon Prime special. Her pregnancy prompts her to question and investigate the unknowns about her own relatives. It’s got her thinking about her grandmother, a classical Arabic singer who could’ve been famous (one of her backup singers indeed went on to global fame), and wondering whether she gave that all up to become a wife and mother. She hopes getting her father to take a DNA test may uncover even more details. Pregnancy includes mood swings, too, and this show will have you crying laughing one moment, then flat-out crying the next. Harouni has plenty of top-notch jokes about her husband’s participation, or lack thereof, in the process. Among them: “Pregnancy is like a school science project, where I do all the work but my husband gets the same grade because he brought the pen.”
There’s also the added unpredictability of due dates: “If I have the baby here, it might win Best Newcomer.” And Harouni just might win Best Show. In part because it’s so timely, so poignant. The weight of her jokes land so much harder since she’s in her final month of her final trimester, since we learn how much she went through to get here, and since her director (the late Adam Brace, who died this spring) can’t be there. Brace may not have had any children, but she and we learn how much of a father figure he proved to be for so many comedians. And Harouni knows she’ll make a great mother. Just ask her dog.
Janine Harouni: Man’oushe runs through Aug. 25 at Pleasance Courtyard Beneath
