Review Roundup: Critics Weigh In On Phoebe Waller-Bridge's FLEABAG At Soho Playhouse

After its sold-out run in London, Phoebe Waller-Bridge's award-winning comedic play, comes to New York for 5 weeks only.

The play that inspired the hit television series, FLEABAG is a rip-roaring look at some sort of woman living her sort of life. Fleabag may seem oversexed, emotionally unfiltered and self-obsessed, but that's just the tip of the iceberg. With family and friendships under strain and a guinea pig café struggling to keep afloat, Fleabag suddenly finds herself with nothing to lose.

FLEABAG was adapted into a BBC Television series in partnership with Amazon Prime in 2016 and earned Phoebe a BAFTA Award for Best Female Comedy Performance. The series was also nominated for a Gotham Independent Film Award, Television Critics Association Award and Critics Choice TV Award, among other accolades. The BBC and Amazon renewed the series for a second season, which will premiere in 2019.

Tickets are available now via www.FleabagNYC.com, by calling 212-691-1555 or at SoHo Playhouse Box Office (15 Vandam St., between Varick St. and 6th Ave). Ticket prices will start at $49.

Let's see what the critics had to say!

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Ben Brantley, The New York Times: More than any current work of theater I can think of, "Fleabag" operates on the principle that no emotion is pure and simple. Society and sanity demand that we not acknowledge this in our daily interactions, and we do our best to adhere to a formula of true or false, thumbs up or thumbs down. In contrast, "Fleabag" keeps all contradictory shards and shades of feeling in play at the same time. That's why it's so gloriously disruptive.

Alexis Soloski, The Guardian: Comedy as provocation and ambush, Fleabag's material will be familiar, and possibly thinner, to anyone who has seen the television series. Still, Fleabag live offers Waller-Bridge in all her mesmeric, rubber-faced glory. And someday you can tell your kids that you were only feet away (the Soho Playhouse is very, very small) when she briefly flashed her lacy black bra.

David Rooney, The Hollywood Reporter: Anyone who ever suffered through a navel-gazing solo show by a writer-performer with no perspective needs to have their faith in theater restored by catching this slyly brilliant character study.

Thom Geier, TheWrap: What centers Waller-Bridge's show is not only her razor-sharp wit, and her gift for narrative and comedic surprise, but also her performance. She sprinkles her monologue with the voices of other characters, delivered both by her and in offstage recordings, and she maintains a presence on stage that is rivetingly authentic in its bundle of contradictions - gawky and sexy, insecure and poised, old-fashioned (in its harkening-back to classic screwball comedies) and utterly modern.

Leah Greenblatt, Entertainment Weekly: If this Fleabag sometimes feels a little like it's all happening in air quotes, it's still a brisk (only 65 minutes!), clever, and indisputably engaging evening of theater, performed at a level of intimacy that most Phoebe Waller-Bridge fans - now legion - can only dream of in 2019.

Barbara Schuler, Newsday: Before BBC and Amazon turned it into a cult hit with a rabid fan base - making writer-star Phoebe Waller-Bridge a media sensation in the process - "Fleabag" was an intense, very funny 65-minute mashup of pleasure and pathos.

David Finkle, New York Stage Review: The same might be said of Fleabag in its entirety: genuinely funny when it wants to be-and obviously intended to be. All the same, it's about someone who, at her distressed core and at the end of the day, is living a life not so darn funny.

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