Jamie Shriner

She starts behind the microphone with the bright, upright posture of a show choir soloist who arrived early to warm up. The smile stays wide and frozen while she slides into a melody, only for the lyric to veer immediately into an ear infection, an awkward hookup, or roadkill by the side of a highway. If a joke clips an audience member the wrong way, she doesn’t backpedal. She belts the next bar louder, leaning over the stand until the crowd catches up.

Shriner came up in Chicago, bouncing between weekends at Zanies and sticky basement stages. Musical comics often get stranded in an odd middle tier, too theatrical for late-night club bills and too filthy for cabaret rooms, but she works both sides by treating the music as an accelerator rather than a novelty.

Her hour Corn Baby showed how easily she can pivot from talking about partial deafness to full-lung anthems about cows and Midwestern boredom. The songs can occasionally suffer when they try to pack in too much narrative exposition at the expense of punchlines.

She is at her best when the musical theater veneer breaks down and gives way to pure irritation.

That tension comes directly from where she started. Raised in conservative Indiana before moving to Chicago, she spent years in musical theater before swapping auditions for open mics. Her hearing loss and her divorce supply the bulk of her sharpest material, giving the big vocals a grounded, bitter spine.