Review: #1 Son – Natasha Mercado

LA-based clown Natasha Mercado's original show about religion and longing brims with ideas and a heart below all the silliness. 

We are greeted by Mercado, donned in a priest garb and painted-on beard as she invites her congregation to her first mass. She delivers her sermon 90s boy-band style, in chains and in trills, and it somehow never gets old, the audience hanging onto her every lyric. The mass is interspersed with Mercado’s characters being taken over by her inner demon, a character with a penchant for kleptomania. The audience is very game for Mercado stealing their shoes, a testament to the clown's cheeky but nice demeanour. 

There are some very funny sequences, like Mercado’s character recounting her love affair with Satan. Along with the chaos, the show is also somehow tender, something that marks out #1 Son from other shows about Catholicism, or Catholic guilt, that seem to be in healthy numbers here. Mercado cleverly pokes fun from the inside and never tears Catholicism to shreds, in a warm, fatherly but ultimately ridiculously funny hour of clowning.