Spotlight at The Second City: Solo Review

I was a little worried about this month’s Spotlight at the Second City series. Rather than feature two up-and-coming sketch troupes each doing half an hour of material, producers/hosts Taylor Hreljac and Gabe Meacher programmed four emerging solo sketch acts each doing 20 minutes. 

Solo sketch can be difficult to master, and it’s tough for a performer who isn’t Jon Blair or Cam Wyllie to hold an audience’s attention. 

Thankfully, all four of the acts in the October Spotlight series have a distinct voice and comic point of view.

The first performer, Kara Austria, is a charismatic, self-professed “recovering theatre kid,” and she leaned into that throughout her set, solemnly crouched over in a chair before breaking out into a song and dance routine, complete with a dance break from A Chorus Line.

She showed some range riffing on Asian food trends and — even though she’s Filipino on both sides — Hudson Williams and “Waysian representation.” Her sketch about an app that tracks your period could use editing.

She wisely ended with her strongest bit, in which she played Bruce, the shark from Jaws, who thought that film was going to lead to bigger things but became disillusioned with the business after her work mostly got edited out. And in true theatre kid fashion, she ended with a killer homage to Gypsy. 

Next up was Taelor Lewis-Joseph, whose vocal clarity and brash, cocky stage presence made all of her material — even some sketches that needed finessing — memorable. 

In her first sketch, she played a high-maintenance shopper at the produce section of a grocery store. While her observations were predictable, her blow line was dead-on. 

She showed off her improv skills in an uneven sketch about an overly confident dude selling his silly concept about holiday songs to the Dragon’s Den folks. And she showed range and physicality by playing a small girl in a big city (I will never tap my card on the TTC in the same way again) and an ingrown hair that decides, thanks to an empowering song, to “come out.” 

But her strongest sketch showed her being a bossy 11-year-old girl performing a complicated dance routine for her family with her 8-year-old cousin. The way she staged her micro-managing critiques to her little cuz — the scenes lit red to illustrate her fury — was brilliant. 

After intermission and the amiable banter between the hosts came Ryan Sheedy in what was clearly the most polished set of the night. He presented excerpts from his show Still Obsessed, which chronicles his experiences living with OCD. 

His opening number was a lively song about simply leaving the house and then returning multiple times to see if he had forgotten to… you name it. The lyrics were clever, the diction immaculate, and the insights were brutally honest and funny. 

Another clever sketch found him playing a scanner at the No Frills self-checkout section. The observations were dead-on, and the blackout line — about waiting for the attendant — inspired. 

In his most ambitious sketch, he played a robot going on dates with various audience members and collecting data about us. Here, he showed off his first-rate improv skills and an uncanny physicality to ground each interaction. 

His final sketch, about someone who sees his high-intensity interval class instructor on the Ossington bus was funny and (as usual) beautifully observed, but I wish Sheedy had chosen something else to end his set. 

I guess I’ll just have to watch all of Still Obsessed to see a more artful and satisfying finale. 

Speaking of finales, the program ended with a 20-minute set by Ada Nicolle, whose “Bags of Ice” video alone has accumulated over 2.5 million views on Instagram and TikTok. 

In her videos, Nicolle is able to edit and insert graphics in a way that adds to their novelty. She can’t rely on those things when performing live. But she makes up for that with a frazzled energy and off-kilter POV that is fascinating to watch — and is possibly divisive (not everyone “got” her material). 

I appreciated her big swings, whether presenting a bisexual skeleton named Dave attempting to eat soup, singing about old mattresses found on front lawns or coming out as a woman who’s recently had her teeth covered with bright white veneers. 

As I wrote in my notes: “Wow, she really goes for it.” 

In my books, that’s always better than playing it safe and boring. 

Spotlight at The Second City returns tonight at 7:30pm and returns in November.