If Jackie Hoffman ever finds true happiness, she’ll be in trouble.
Because then she won’t have an act.
Until then, the consummate curmudgeon continues to vent her spleen, to the delight of her audiences. New Yorkers who share her loathing of endless bike lanes and the passel of pan-handling Elmos in Times Square will find plenty to relate to in “Old Woman, New Material,” her new show at 54 Below.
Not that there’s any particular theme here, she cautions.
“You want a theme?” she asks. “There’s no work, and I need the money. That’s the theme!”
Even the timing of her show — Sunday nights through July, at 9:30 — is in itself a matter of consternation, since that’s when most of her target audience will be returning from weekends at Fire Island or the Berkshires.
“I’m amazed that even I showed up,” she says.
She’s on familiar funny ground when discussing her family’s foibles — “The women in my family forget everything but grudges” — and does a hilarious few minutes on the trials of taking her 91-year-old mother to see the sexually explicit film “The Sessions.”
“When she dies,” she says, “I’ll have no material.”
And don’t even get her started about the mass invasion of children on Broadway. Singing Miss Hannigan’s “Little Girls” from “Annie” with a venom that would have made W.C. Fields proud, she bitterly points out that “I couldn’t even get an audition for this.” Her rendition of Stephen Sondheim’s classic “I’m Still Here” is delivered from the perspective of a little girl, complete with hilariously scatological lyrics.
“What a season on Broadway I’m not in,” she laments. And with that she recounts, for our amusement, every perceived slight from the theatrical community, from not being hired by the Roundabout to getting the cold shoulder from Sondheim. While some of this material isn’t her sharpest — she’s still bitching about being overshadowed by Patti LuPone as the club’s opening performer, a major element of Hoffman’s show last summer — her opening-night, showbiz-savvy audience ate it up.
Accompanied by pianist Will Van Dyke, she also sings several original satirical numbers, including comic odes to the iPhone and plastic surgery. But the song “The Times We Had,” about being ignored by the Gray Lady, is too inside-baseball for its own good.
Granted, it’s been great seeing Hoffman succeed in reaching bigger crowds, whether in Broadway’s “Hairspray” and “The Addams Family” or TV’s “The New Normal.”
But for those who flock to her cabaret shows, it’s even more fun when she doesn’t.