Rachel Bloom Finds a New Kind of Funny on Broadway in The Imaginary Invalid

Rachel Bloom has spent plenty of time making audiences laugh from their couches, and now she’s getting the reaction in real time. The Crazy Ex-Girlfriend co-creator and star makes her Broadway debut as Toinette in The Imaginary Invalid, Molière’s centuries-old comedy about hypochondria, questionable medicine and the lengths people will go to feel better. Bloom sat down with The Broadway Show host Tamsen Fadal to talk about the thrill of performing live, why the play feels unexpectedly modern and what Broadway is teaching her about the art of simply doing the work.

For Bloom, one of the biggest joys of The Imaginary Invalid is that once the performance starts, there’s nowhere to hide. The 90-minute play unfolds in real time without an intermission, giving her the chance to live inside Toinette’s journey from beginning to end. “For acting, there's kind of nothing better,” she says. “It's a roller coaster.” The format also happens to suit Bloom’s taste as a viewer. “Get me in, tell me a good story, get me out.”

At the center of that story is Toinette, a maid in a 17th-century Parisian household who takes it upon herself to straighten out the chaos around her. “She has made it her mission to fix this man's life and fix the lives of the people around him, and I think she succeeds,” Bloom says. The man in question is Argan, a hypochondriac surrounded by doctors offering bloodletting, enemas and other treatments that haven’t exactly stood the test of time.

Despite its powdered-wig origins, the play’s fixation on dubious cures feels strikingly current to Bloom. She sees a clear connection between Molière’s medical skepticism and the modern world of wellness hacks, supplements and internet experts. “I think it's also critical thinking,” she says. “Take a moment. Is this actually making you feel better? The experts in your life, where are they getting their information?” For Bloom, that questioning spirit creates a surprising kinship across the centuries. “Molière was a skeptic in a way that I feel that I'm a skeptic now,” she says.

That discovery extends to Bloom’s first experience as a Broadway performer, where she has found herself surrounded by a company she describes as unusually generous. “I don't know if this is all of the time what Broadway's like or if I just got lucky,” she says, praising director Brandon J. Dirden, adapter and star Bill Irwin and the rest of the cast as “the kindest, most trusting, willing to be vulnerable, sweetest group of people.”

After years in television and film, Bloom is also savoring something a screen simply can’t provide: an audience sitting a few feet away. “There's nothing that compares to doing stuff live in front of an audience,” she says. “It's real-time feedback.” That relationship changes the performance every night, making the crowd an active part of the show. As Bloom puts it, “The audience is your final cast member because every night they set the vibe, they set the tone, you don't know where they're going to laugh.”

Bloom’s Broadway milestone arrives after a period that drove home how much of an artist’s career never reaches an audience. She recently shared publicly that a television project she created with her husband would not be moving forward after two and a half years of development, an experience that sharpened her perspective on an industry obsessed with visible success. “At the end of the day, work is work,” she says, noting that the glamorous moments are far outnumbered by writing, rewriting, rejection and starting again.

That cycle has led Bloom to adopt a fittingly theatrical image for her own career. “I see myself as just a little art peddler,” she says. “I go from town to town with my little wares and I go, ‘Would you like it?’ And they sometimes go, ‘Yes,’ and they sometimes go, ‘No.’ And then I take my cart to the next town.” For now, Bloom’s cart has landed on Broadway, where audiences are in the market for those wares.

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