JFL Toronto Review: Sarah Millican - "Late Bloomer"
Filed under: Reviews, Festivals
When I heard Sarah Millican's Late Bloomer tour was going to make a stop in Toronto as part of the revived Just for Laughs Toronto, I was delighted. When I heard it would be literally a five minute walk from my house, I knew there was no way I could miss that. So Saturday, September 20, I sat down in Toronto's Meridian Hall looking forward to Sarah welcoming her second sold out audience and was not disappointed.
Sarah opened the evening by doing a quick five minutes of hosting duties, gently warming the audience before bringing out UK stand-up Sally-Anne Hayward. She got the crowd roaring with laughter, dropping a terrific set of rapid fire jokes about sex, drugs, and aging that had the crowd in stitches before bringing Sarah back to the stage.
Sarah's cheery energy was immediately felt by the enthusiastic audience, a very different crowd from the usual Just for Laughs audience. This was as much fans of comedy as fans of Sarah Millican herself. Sarah's one of the wave of British stand-ups regularly featured on UK panel shows that have found an increased interest in North America on YouTube. For its many failings, one of the gifts of the internet is an increased awareness of talented comedians from around the world.
Sarah lit up the stage with an exploration of growing up and her journey from a shy introverted 12 year old who sat next to her bully scowling on a field trip to France afraid to stand up for herself, all the way to the open and hilarious performer she is today. A storytelling set built for the kinds of shows put on at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival, it was amazingly joke dense. Storytelling comedy is some of my favourite, but it often comes in a slightly less joke-dense format. Not here. The audience was kept in stitches the entire 2 hours from when Sally-Anne hit the stage to when Sarah let us know about all the merch options (and is one of the few performers thoughtful enough to add a local storefront where her merch is manufactured in the destination country to keep costs down).
Sarah's jokes touched on topics ranging from that quiet and timid youth to her outspoken new voice, her private parts, and her experimentation with drugs whilst visiting Toronto with its legal dispensaries on a prior tour. While the material is clearly geared towards women of a certain age, there is something for every fan of comedy to be found in this fast-paced show. One of my favourite parts was that she tailored the show to the local audience, talking about things like her journey to finding the right replacement word for fanny (which has a very different meaning in the UK), call outs to Canadian cities like Regina (as tied to the prior topic), and just a general awareness of the audience. Personally not a fan of crowd work, this was one of the few instances where I genuinely enjoyed it. Sarah knows how to control a crowd and keep something that could be easily derailed by a well-meaning audience member on track and funny the whole time.
The biggest joy of comedy is it opens your eyes to the lived experiences of others, their views of the world, and how you intersect with their lives. This works like a mirror because you get to see how they see you and understand how you fit into the tapestry of society together. Sarah's comedy is perfect for this, with jokes for perimenopausal women, jokes about sex and aging, and observations of life in general, so there's literally something for any audience member (as long as you can take a good bit of Geordie cheek).
Tags: JFL Toronto, Sarah Millican, Sally-Anne Hayward, Just For Laughs, Late Bloomer
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