The Helan Gardiner Phelan Playhouse is a large Victorian house tucked behind the University of Toronto Drama building on St. George. I went on Saturday to watch a sketch comedy show called Two Weird Ladies Bomb The Fringe.
Two Weird Ladies were Laura Salvas, short and dark-haired, and her sketch partner, Mandy Sellers, tall and lanky. They took the audience through a number of skits that tended to proceed from relative normalcy to over-the-top outrageousness (organic egg sellers one-upping each other) or expose the characters to absurd situations (office drones deciding to ditch it all for Broadway.) Opening the show with a birthday celebration for a 90-year-old nana that deteriorated into inappropriate songs from her grand-kids (sample lyric "When there's a will there's a way; When there's a way, nana where's the will?"), the ladies were consistently funny. I didn't have any major belly laughs, but I was entertained the entire 60 minutes.
Specializing in "female situations", they played insecure double blind-daters whose critique of their own failings grew ever more hyperbolic; wedding guests that alternated between sweet congratulations and nasty comments about the bride; and blue-haired matrons delighting in revealing shocking secrets to each other. Though they played various characters, Mandy tended to portray out-going, confident, and oblivious doofuses while Laura gravitated toward manic, uptight rule followers. This also applied when they "played themselves" a couple of times in the show.
What made the show worked well was its pacing. Every sketch ran without flubs, transitions were smooth and natural, and often included small throwaway scenes to segue between the main skits. It was like watching a well-edited television broadcast with seamless changes and excised bloopers as opposed to a typical live show with forgotten lines, missed cues, or overlong pauses. At the end, they earned some well-deserved cheers by reprising all of their sketch characters in a musical about, per the title, a bomb that was about to blow up the theatre.
Monday, July 16, 2012
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