Earlier that evening I had seen Sharon perform her day job, street performer. Her persona was a loud, arrogant, nationalistic Canadian, failing to convince the audience that Canadians are self effacing and reserved while she juggled fire torches and bullied some male audience members into compromising positions. I was fascinated and curious about how her 11pm stand up show was going to go. She promoted it during her daytime show, but I don’t think it would have made me want to come. Sure enough, though maybe it was the late hour, 11pm on a Sunday night, Sharon didn’t have much of an audience and had to go out just before 11 to reel in a few punters. They were mostly pretty obnoxiously drunk and I was a bit worried, but having seen her earlier, that’s one thing I shouldn’t have worried about. This lady knows how to handle a tough crowd.
Sharon also had to deal with some serious noise from outside the tent, from the circus in the next tent and the ferris wheel. A fairly rough situation considering she was trying to do a fairly serious story type show. There were three main topics to the show. The loss of her father, that she was unable to find much humour in, her Crohn’s disease, that provided a couple of good laughs and her adored Aunt going strong at 99 years. This show needed someone from the outside to help her edit the show and find the funny angles. Perhaps, it is that she is just not experienced enough at stand up or perhaps these subjects were too close to her to develop into comedy. Or perhaps the subject matter just wasn’t strong enough for a comedy show.
She is obviously a talented performer, she eventually won over the crowd, even the girl who spent ½ of it rifling through her bag putting on her makeup, chatting to her boyfriend and generally ignoring that there was a show was going on. More theatre than comedy, if you feel like hearing some late night family stories, this is quite a pleasant way to kill an hour.
Visit the Fringe Website for booking details.