The stage is dark on yet another Best of the Best SketchFest, which celebrated its fifth year this past weekend.
The SketchFest Seattle Party Posse was only able to attend the second of the two nights, so our report is a bit stunted. However, the digest of our sister fest to the south is this:
With the exception of LA’s KARLA – whose smart, poignant and magical comedy we simply can’t get enough of – Saturday night’s line-up was a sort of call-to-arms for wayward Portland comedians. The night began with The Dark-Eyed Strangers, marking the return of former The 3rd Floor alumni Tony St. Clair and Brandon Campbell with their new four-person project out of Chicago.
After KARLA came The Weekly Armenian, the one-man sketch show by 3rd Floor alumn turned LA-dwelling “Sneezy Juror on an episode of Monk” Brian Coffee. Brian’s been absent from, at least, our particular neck of the sketchfest circuit since his previous group, The Class Project, attended from ’00 – ’02. It was fun seeing his new show, which uses a minimalist, zero costume change, zero recorded effects, zero lighting change form that emphasizes his ability to paint a scene purely through performance.
The evening concluded with what has become a sort of tradition at the BotBSF: the gratuitously long The 3rd Floor end-of-festival blow-out and reunion show. This year the number of reunited cast members was so large that they barely all fit on stage for the closing musical number.
As the cost of touring increases, along with the number of points a troupe can tour to, it appears that some groups are travelling to fewer festivals this year, as evidenced by the invite-only BotBSF line-up of only seven acts (down from the eleven-group line-ups of the past two years). This didn’t hinder the fest though, and the more relaxed, shorter evenings relieved some of the pressure that comes with other fests that cram as many as nine acts in a single evening.
