The musical numbers, the phone conversations allowing Ott to transition from one character to another, the poignancy in both the writing and the performance.
What I didn't like
N/A
My overall impression
It is one of the great Cliches of Creativity that “comedy is derived from tragedy.” However, it remains a cliche because it is very frequently true. Make a list of your favorite comedians, actors or performers and there is likely a tumultuous soil of traumatic experiences through which the seeds of their genius grew into irreverent or hilarious insights about human behavior.
That was a long-winded way of establishing why Callie Ott’s one-woman-show “Final Girl” is brilliant, deeply sad, hilarious and an absolute must-watch if you have the opportunity to do so. Through the course of an hour, she rips the bandages off of emotional wounds for our entertainment (and reflection) through song, dance, rap and multiple character portrayals that end up being much more poignant to the overall story and message than you’ll initially expect. (I’m specifically thinking about a 9-1-1 Operator who I expected to be a one-skit side character that becomes one of the emotional anchors of the entire show for reasons I obviously won’t disclose.)
When I talk about “characters,” every one of them is played by Ott with emotional honesty, tremendous charisma and dialogue that swings between laugh-out-loud zingers and self-reflective questioning of the nature of love, relationships and the sense-of-self. By filtering her real-life stories through the lens of horror movie tropes and then adding song-and-dance numbers, it would have been easy for the tone of the show to feel uneven or for the moment-to-moment narrative to lack cohesion, but Callie has the dramatic chops, the comedic timing and the writing skill (she wrote the show herself with Tyler Hansen directing and both Tony Gonzalez and Rob Zaleski arranging and producing the musical numbers respectively) to ensure that the entirety of “Final Girl” is even greater than the sum of its already brilliant parts.
This is a special, moving and entertaining romp through the horrors of abuse, suicide and sexual trauma with an end-message of hope, compassion and the importance of friendship. That may sound cheesy, but “Final Girl” certainly isn’t and Callie Ott is a Final Girl you’ll be rooting for all the way through.