The Tamarie Cooper Show

Tamarie Cooper is back, and this time she’s married. In her previous Tamalalia series of autobiographical mega-musicals, Cooper covered such diverse topics as love, drugs, sex, bacon and her ass. But as her musical world premiere The Tamarie Cooper Show makes clear, things are different now. Oh, she’s still singing and dancing, but this time around, she’s 37, married and thinking of having a baby.

“With the birth of our new theater company [Catastrophic Theatre],” says Cooper, “I found myself looking to create a new musical and realized so much had happened to me in the last three years, there was a whole other show there. At this point, I’m embarking on a different adventure than I was in my twenties. So, this is about the crazy, intimate, often humiliating things that are happening to me now.

“One of the things that happened with my domestication is that I’m certainly not out partying it up, sitting on a bar stool looking for love. It seems that as we get older, we substitute ways to get that fix. So now, instead of getting wasted, I go shopping at Target, and there’s a song in the show that’s sort of an ode to Target. There’s a number that I’ve been calling ‘The Angry Baby Song,’ which is a nightmare of what would happen if I went to a fertility doctor and then gave birth to 16 babies. There’s a number about the battle of the moms, stay-at-home moms vs. working moms. Then the men, of course, answer back with their number about how much you need a man, all the reasons that you need men,” Cooper says with a little laugh.

With its world premiere on Thursday, June 19, The Tamarie Cooper Show runs at 8 p.m. Thursdays, Fridays, and Saturdays, through July 19. Stages Repertory Theatre, 3201 Allen Parkway. For information, call 713-527-0123 or visit www.stagestheatre.com. $20 to $25.
Thursdays-Saturdays, 8 p.m. Starts: June 19. Continues through July 19, 2008