Cho turns public pains into gains at Majestic Theatre

03/05/2000

By Tom Sime / The Dallas Morning News
 

Margaret Cho’s solo show I’m the One That I Want is a lot like Julia Sweeney’s God Said “Ha!”—a comedy act that builds itself around a near tragedy and almost turns into a play. But while cancer struck Ms. Sweeney, Ms. Cho developed a sitcom.  Her experience with 1994’s All-American Girl was crushing, but the deeper insight it has brought to her comedy has elevated Ms. Cho from the likes of the Improv to the Majestic Theatre, where she performed Saturday night.  The humiliations and compromises that went into the making of the short-lived All-American Girl are the foundation of I’m the One That I Want. She was told she was too fat to be on television, dieted to the brink of death, then was canceled and replaced by Drew Carey.  But his weight is not the reason Ms. Cho can’t bear to see Mr. Carey’s program. It’s because he got her show’s old furniture. “I’ll be watching, and I’ll go, ‘Hey, that’s my lamp.’ ” As the star of the first Asian-American sitcom on national television, Ms. Cho, a Korean-American, was pulled in many directions. When she didn’t “test Asian enough,” an “Asian consultant” was brought in to introduce her to origami and the abacus.  After her high-profile failure, she went on a tailspin of drinking, drugs and promiscuity, feeling like “a Frankenstein monster made of bits and pieces of my old stand-up act and focus-group opinions.”  Those bits and pieces make up much of her howlingly funny new show, which has had a hit run in New York and, like Ms. Sweeney’s, has been made into a film. But Ms. Sweeney’s show was more tightly focused on her medical ordeal. Much of Ms. Cho’s will be familiar to her longtime fans.  The well-trod, if still effective, topics include her eccentric mother, sexual problems and lifelong relationship with gay men: “Some people are raised by wolves. I was raised by drag queens.”  Her sexual humor is devastatingly funny, and Ms. Cho loves to follow up an outrageously coarse punch line with a Shirley Temple grin. But her best gimmick is flashing her battle scars and proving she can laugh at them.  Ms. Cho describes her then-boyfriend Quentin Tarantino reacting with dismay to the premiere of All-American Girl. “Don’t let them take away your voice!” he implored. At the time, she could only respond, “But I’m a size 4!” It took a few years, but she’s got her voice back. And the ordeal has only made the instrument ring more true.