The Toronto Fringe Review: Aliyah Bourgeault and Emmet Logue turn the story of Sodom into one of Fringe’s funniest, smartest, and most inventive audience-driven comedies.
By Ross
Finishing my journey through TO Live‘s Best of Fringe celebration with Perchance Productions‘s God Save the Sodomites felt like ending a remarkable weekend with one final surprise. After the heartfelt nostalgia of CAMP! and the emotional generosity of DADS, I wasn’t expecting the last show to have me laughing quite so hard while quietly nudging me toward some unexpectedly thoughtful questions. Aliyah Bourgeault and Emmet Logue have created one of the smartest comedies I encountered during this year’s Toronto Fringe Festival, taking one of the Bible’s strangest stories and gleefully turning it into an inventive, audience-driven exploration of morality, empathy, and whether any of us are quite as good as we would like to believe.
Directed with infectious energy by Jack Davidson, the play opens with one of its funniest inventions: God herself, whose layered, delightfully imperious voice immediately establishes that this is a biblical universe operating on its own wonderfully ridiculous wavelength. She dispatches her two most talkative angels, Af (Aliyah Bourgeault) and Barbiel (Emmet Logue), to Sodom and Gomorrah to carry out a long overdue smiting. After Af unexpectedly challenges the plan (and God), their mission shifts from a quick smiting (after saving Lot) to a task that seems simple enough on paper. Find five genuinely good people and perhaps the city could be spared. Naturally, nothing unfolds as expected. A missing glove conundrum becomes the unlikely thread holding the evening together while moral debates and voting with raised hands spiral into wonderfully ridiculous territory. Bourgeault and Logue share a rapid-fire chemistry that gives every exchange the buoyant rhythm of instinctive performers who know where the next joke is hiding. Kaleb Piper is equally outstanding as an exquisitely irritating Lot, creating exactly the kind of character audiences delight in collectively rolling their eyes at. The trio works with effortless confidence, making even the show’s most absurd turns feel completely earned.
One of the production’s most inspired ideas sneaks in before the play has properly begun. Audience members are invited to write down one good thing and one bad thing they have done, and those anonymous confessions are miraculously woven directly into the game. Rather than feeling like a novelty, the device becomes central to the evening’s argument about how impossible it is to separate virtue from failure. The improvisational freedom keeps every performance unique while allowing the actors to respond with remarkable wit and generosity. The simple staging keeps the focus exactly where it belongs: on the actors, the audience, and the constantly shifting debate over who deserves grace and a reprieve from divine smiting.. By the time the evening was over, this heathen found himself wanting to revisit the biblical story of Lot, if only to discover just how gleefully Bourgeault and Logue had twisted it into something entirely their own.
For all its gleeful biblical chaos, God Save the Sodomites succeeds because it never chases the easy punchline, but approaches its central question with a strong undercurrent of care and compassion. Beneath the unleavened bread, celestial bureaucracy, and screwball energy is an honest curiosity about how people judge one another and themselves. Bourgeault and Logue understand that comedy often opens doors serious conversations struggle to unlock, and by inviting the audience into that conversation, they create an experience that feels genuinely communal. I arrived expecting a clever biblical farce. I left still laughing, oddly curious to revisit the story of Lot for myself, and grateful that one of the funniest productions of this year’s Fringe also proved to be one of its most unexpectedly humane.
