A Bit Sketchy

The Toronto Fringe Festival expanded this year to include The Theatre Centre, The Great Hall, and several site-specific locations. I only had a chance to see one show this year, an early afternoon spot at the Phelan Playhouse with sketch troupe Life's A Betch. As a play on the title (ie, beach), a soft instrumental version of Girl From Ipanema played before the show. The foursome began by walking down the center aisle as chanting monks. But as it was a Michael Jackson pop song, one of them eventually sang out the words, breaking their vows of silence. This gag would return several times throughout the set. Another one involved oblivious elites blithely going on with their meal on the sinking Titanic. Yet another had a video "unboxer" attempting to open a new iPhone.

Unfortunately, both the recurring sketches and most of the one-offs were generally weak. There were two stand-outs for me. The first was an awkward funeral scene, the awkwardness being that mom didn't actually die, leading to increasingly absurd encounters with grieving visitors. The second was a community production of Grease, where the director's attempt to try and get the performers to ad-lib/scat over some shoo-be-dos and ram-a-lams resulted in some worrisome Freudian slips.