Performer-playwright Nicole Travolta is dazzling in Nicole Travolta Is Doing Alright, her autobiographical one-woman play, cowritten with Paula Christensen, that transforms her personal trials of credit card debt and compulsive shopping into a comic meditation on identity, resilience, and reinvention.
In Nicole Travolta Is Doing Alright, a one-woman play by performer Nicole Travolta (cowritten with Paula Christensen), the star delivers a dazzling, deeply felt turn that fuses stand-up, confessional storytelling, and incisive character work into an evening of theatrical vitality, fluidly staged by directors Margarett Perry and Paula Christensen. With razor-sharp wit, Travolta transforms her trials of credit card debt and compulsive shopping into a bold, laugh-out-loud meditation on identity, resilience, and reinvention.
Travolta talks with disarming candor about the peculiar pressures of carrying a famous surname as the niece of John Travolta.
Promoted with the cheeky tagline “bad with money, great with a spray gun,” Doing Alright arrives at its SoHo Playhouse encore with the momentum of a crowd-pleaser, following an international tour and a warmly received run at the 2023 Edinburgh Fringe Festival. Much of its appeal lies in Travolta’s disarming candor about the pressures of carrying a famous surname—she is the niece of John Travolta—yet she deftly undercuts any notion that legacy alone can secure her footing as a performer. With precision and bite she punctures the myth of easy access to success, wryly observing, “And I know what you guys are thinking, so let’s talk about it. ‘Nicole, you’re a Travolta—cash in on that last name.’ Let me say this as diplomatically as possible: a nepo niece is not the same as a nepo baby.”
From the moment she appears, Travolta proves an immensely likable guide through her own misadventures. She enters by walking down the theater aisle before bounding onto the stage to introduce herself, instantly collapsing the distance between performer and audience. Dressed simply in camel-colored slacks and a white top, she projects an easy, unvarnished authenticity. Yet the stage tells another story: a cluster of shopping bags emblazoned with luxury names—Neiman Marcus, Yves Saint Laurent, Chanel, and more—serves as a sly visual overture, hinting at the excess and hard-earned lessons she will unpack, piece by piece, over the course of the 80-minute show.
“From the moment she appears, Travolta proves an immensely likable guide through her own misadventures.”
Structured as a brisk sequence of 24 scenes, the show charts Travolta’s journey from her childhood in Los Angeles to her teenage years in Florida, and into her twenties, when she meets future husband Matthew Laurenzo, co-founder of Renew Vitality, and returns to Los Angeles for a lavish wedding and the promise of a stable future. Once there, she cobbles together a life through waitressing and office work while landing small acting roles on television, including appearances on Two and a Half Men and Anger Management, both opposite Charlie Sheen.
Yet beneath this veneer of upward mobility, the cracks begin to show: living beyond her means, Travolta quietly amasses $45,000 in credit card debt—hidden, at first, from her husband until a fateful credit check exposes the truth. What follows is a swift unraveling, as her marriage collapses, creditors close in with lawsuits, and a nascent television career slips out of reach.
Travolta uses wit and theatrical flair to reframe a painful chapter of her life. Photographs by Joan Marcus.
Travolta pivots from collapse to recalibration with a transparency that is both disarming and self-aware. Rather than succumbing to shame, she seizes on the wisdom of motivational speaker Mel Robbins—“Confidence isn’t a feeling. It’s built”—as a springboard for reinvention. With her best friend’s wedding looming and determined not to appear “like the dead corpse that I was,” she delivers one of the show’s sharpest turns: a mirror-bound epiphany distilled into, “I need a spray tan.” The punchline becomes a pivot, and a surprisingly moving one, as her longtime tanner not only obliges but offers her a job—setting Travolta on a new path grounded in both humility and hard-earned purpose.
Rather than merely describing her clientele, Travolta embodies them, heightening both comedy and stakes. Slipping on heels from one of the shopping bags, she channels Carrie Bradshaw—a device that reframes a painful chapter with wit and theatrical flair. In this persona, the salon becomes “a wild place,” its unpredictable energy captured in brisk strokes: a space where one must brace for whoever walks through the door. The antics escalate further on house calls—her “crème de la crème” jobs—where the clientele grows even more unruly, absurd, and unexpectedly revealing.
For all the comic flourish, Travolta is clear-eyed about the lifeline that helped her regain control: JG Wentworth, the debt-relief service that silenced her creditors. The terms were steep—$1,500 up front and $600 monthly—but she recounts the experience with pride, underscoring that she followed through without defaulting.
By the show’s end, Travolta emerges as a figure of hard-won resilience, transforming missteps into material and self-reckoning into art. Like a phoenix rising from its ashes, she reclaims her story with humor, grit, and a renewed sense of control. If this solo turn is any indication, her next act—onstage and beyond—feels not only possible, but promising.
Nicole Travolta Is Doing Alright plays through May 10 at SoHo Playhouse (15 Vandam St.). Evening performances are at 5 p.m. Sunday and at 7 p.m. Wednesday through Saturday. For more information, visit sohoplayhouse.com.
Playwrights: Nicole Travolta & Paula Christensen
Directors: Margarett Perry & Paula Christensen
Lighting & Sound Design: Scott Bogle
