Francesca D’Uva moved across the rehearsal room, singing and dancing, making the space her playground.
Her voice jumped from a guttural, emo-metal drone to a high-pitched, almost operatic belt to a soft serenade. She played a surreal cast of characters: a sexy nurse from a Wii game she used to play; British children looking for the nanny of their dreams; Shakira.
The show was an emotional pinball machine, seeming to invite laughter and tears. In one scene, she conjured the memory of her kindergarten Nativity play in which she was cast as a cow.
“Everybody’s laughing at me, everybody’s mooing at me,” she sang.
A familiar face in New York’s alternative comedy scene, Ms. D’Uva, 30, performs regularly at venues around the city and has appeared on television in “Three Busy Debras” and “Fantasmas.” Vulture named her a “Comedian You Should and Will Know” in 2024.
With the Off Broadway premiere this week of “This Is My Favorite Song,” her solo show at Playwrights Horizons in Midtown Manhattan, she takes her genre-defying act to a new arena.
The show, a mix of original songs and stretches of stand-up, deals centrally with the death of her father, an immigration lawyer, from Covid-19 in June 2020. She touches on moments in her life before and after his death, like coming out to her parents, calling a psychic medium to try to reach her father and helping her mother move out of her childhood home.
Growing up in Livingston, N.J., Ms. D’Uva played piano and wrote songs from a young age. On her mother’s side, her grandparents were professional musicians who played in a band together, and her grandfather taught her how to play the guitar.
If there were a sign that she would grow up to be a comedian, it might have been the fact that she tended to act “super weird” around her family, doing voices and “crazy dances,” she said.
“I wasn’t someone who was like, I’m going to make my family do a play,” Ms. D’Uva said. “It was like, I’m just acting insane.”
In her sophomore year at the Peabody Institute at Johns Hopkins University, where she studied computer music, she joined the school’s sketch comedy group. At first, she was just going to write. She didn’t want to perform.
But then, for a festival, she co-wrote a sketch about threesomes. “It was all physical comedy, and I was like, I think I should be in this,” she recalled. She did it and found that performing comedy came easily to her — and felt good.
For a music student, she was spending a lot of time writing jokes. “My dad would be like, Great, another sketch comedy show when you’re in school for music,” she said, laughing. But she loved it.
And that threesome sketch? “It killed.”
After graduating from college in 2016, she moved back home to New Jersey, heading into Brooklyn for an improv class at the Annoyance Theater in Williamsburg. In summer 2017, she moved to New York.
Soon after, she did her first stand-up set at a show organized by an improv classmate, and she started going to more and more comedy shows. She met friends who ushered her into the world of experimental Brooklyn comedy, and she started getting booked on shows, including that of Patti Harrison, one of her musical comedy inspirations.
According to Sam Max, director of “This is My Favorite Song,” what distinguishes Ms. D’Uva’s style is her sincerity. While she does act out heightened, absurd comedic scenarios, there is an earnestness at the heart of her work.
“She’s not playing tricks on you,” Mr. Max said. “She’s able to be extremely funny while also being extremely sincere.”
With that sincerity comes honesty about Ms. D’Uva’s complex feelings about doing a show based on personal trauma. In “I Don’t Want to Do This Show,” the song that inspired the entire show, Ms. D’Uva sings about her struggle to return to comedy after her father’s death, and about the pressure she felt to perform.
“I had this feeling like nothing was that funny,” she said. In the face of all the death, sickness and suffering of the pandemic, she felt as if “we shouldn’t be laughing.”
That feeling has returned lately, she said, as she prepares to bring her show to a new audience. Ms. D’Uva said she was grappling with what it means to perform a show about her own grief at a moment when images and videos online showing suffering in Gaza seem to demand a more serious response.
“It feels stupid to be performing,” she said, adding, “I have questions about the role that a comedian plays, in the grand scheme of things.”
Still, even amid that uncertainty, Ms. D’Uva said she felt lucky to have the opportunity to perform on this new stage.
Natalie Rotter-Laitman, a stand-up comedian and writer who hosted a monthly show with Ms. D’Uva called “Elsa and Elphaba,” said that Ms. D’Uva is unique because of her musical prowess and fresh, original voice. Her songs can veer into “genre parody,” creating catchy tunes that also point out “the things that are funny about pop songs,” Ms. Rotter-Laitman said.
As you find yourself imitating a Britney Spears-inflected whine of a kindergartner playing the Virgin Mary, you have to marvel at the strange, vivid musical world that Ms. D’Uva has crafted.
“You want to listen to it over and over again, like you would any song on the radio,” Ms. Rotter-Laitman said.
On Tuesday night, Ms. D’Uva took the stage for her first performance for a paying Off Broadway audience. She began with crowd work, leading the audience in a facial exercise of sorts. The collective sound of gum-smacking grins filled the air.
“Ha!” she said. “Tricked you and made you all smile.”
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