Rachel Bloom's show on grief and love at Moontower Comedy Festival is stunning

Rachel Bloom's "Death, Let Me Do My Show" is a piece about grief, the COVID pandemic and how we love. It is stunning.

Bloom, an actress, comedian, writer, singer and more, brought her one-woman show to State Theatre Wednesday night, the first night of Moontower Comedy Festival. Bloom was set to perform her third and final Moontower set this past Friday night.

Bloom's show starts like most: She comes out, tells some jokes, and, in Bloom's case, sings a song or two. (Bloom, who created and starred in "Crazy Ex-Girlfriend," uses song, often in showtunes form, in her act.) But an intruder causes her show to go awry and she's forced to confront parts of her past she'd much rather not.

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"The show starts with me saying that I am about to do a show that I wrote in 2019," Bloom told The American-Statesman ahead of her performance. "I was working on a stand-up special that would have been filmed in 2020. And then, obviously, the pandemic happened and a bunch of (expletive) in my life happened."

What follows is equal parts musical, classic stand-up and poignant storytelling. The show made me emotional and is the first time I've enjoyed listening to anyone talk about the coronavirus pandemic. The pandemic is a topic we'd all much rather keep buried down inside, but as Bloom poured out intimate details of her experiences in 2020, I realized I could listen forever.

She is known for using song in her comedy. Her show "Crazy Ex-Girlfriend" used musical comedy to explain a mental health diagnosis throughout its four-season run. And Bloom has a perfect explanation for it.

"When the emotion is too strong to speak, you sing, and when the emotion is too strong to sing, you dance, which is kind of a general mantra of musical theater," Bloom said.

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But the show is not full of ballads that are just emotional. They're also a bit silly. At one point, Bloom sings about being a dog. That may sound wacky, but by that point in the show, I couldn't help but tear up at the notion.

"There was always this duality in musicals and in singing for me in general, of both something very emotional, but also very, very silly," she said.

Bloom was raised on silly musicals, especially those from the '50s. They had an inherent escapism to them, but also an inherent darkness, she said.

"That's also the way I kind of am in my life. There's a side of me that's very bubbly and optimistic and personable and then there's a side of me that has a real darkness. So, that kind of duality always felt very natural to me," she said.

Bloom's duality absolutely pays off in "Death, Let Me Do My Show." I wish I could see it again and again.

This article originally appeared on Austin American-Statesman: Rachel Bloom's one-woman act wows at Moontower Comedy Festival