Review: Maggie Winters: Marguerite
An earnest yet disjointed performance
Maggie Winters | Image courtesy of Multitude Media
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Published 11 Aug 2024
With respect to Maggie Winters, an otherwise committed performer trying her best, she comes across as a dilettante, insufficiently practised in the art of stand-up, struggling to convey any kind of credibility from the beginning of her late-night show. Clearly, there's a therapeutic aspect to being on stage for the proud Irish-American, which is fine. But it transmits itself too nakedly and desperately for the audience to ever feel comfortable.
Dividing her hour into three largely meaningless sections, Live, Laugh, Love, a cursory attempt at structure, she delivers a rambling account of her life, growing up in Illinois, moving to France and Orlando, before settling back in Chicago. Her observational insight from this journey is minimal and superficial. Yet there's a recurring theme of body insecurity, which she uses comedy as a crutch for, settling into a confessional mode that's candid but light on laughs. Too often she relies on pre-filmed video inserts as filler, emphasising just how American-Irish her family is on St Patrick's Day; some inexplicable sketches with a friend that she neglects to introduce and most head-scratching of all, a roving report asking her fellow Chicagoans what they find funny, an outsourcing of her comedic responsibility that yields zero responses of any value. Only Winters' winsomeness and desire to entertain retrieves Marguerite at all.