Edinburgh Fringe comedy review

Reminiscent of an American James Corden or even John Candy perhaps, Los Angeles comic Kenny Gray reveals an impressively diverse repertoire of performance skills in his tightly packaged, one-man sketch show.

Kenny Goes To Sleep exploits the non-sequiturs and bizarre logic of dreams for ten or so disparate skits, the simple but effective framing device of him flitting about in his subconscious acknowledged with a cheeky initial nod, but thereafter all but ignored, a canny decision for momentum's sake.

His opener is unremarkable, a slightly camp, airline staff member breezily struggling to cram too many passengers onto a plane, taking a garbled tannoy system and huge cargo of iguanas in his stride, his cheery professionalism and efficiency blatantly coming at the expense of his customers' comfort. The laughs are consistent but low-level, with appreciation for the rat-a-tat breathlessness of the script. But already Gray is displaying a deft physicality for a bigger man.

Also vaguely familiar is the high school orchestra Conductor taking his role far too seriously, a furiously intense authority figure with ambitions way above his station. Recalling JK Simmons' Oscar-winning sadistic turn in Whiplash, Gray's maestro directs his frustrations at his charges, yet he feels them most in his challenged body, transported into paroxysms of pain as he strives to wring every ounce of musicality from a competition winning performance. Unlike Simmons' monster, however, Gray internalises his suffering and comports himself in clownish, melodramatic agony. 

Straight afterwards, the status is flipped, as Gray reappears as the only boy in a kids' tap dancing class, mocked by the intimidating girls but driven to succeed out of some Oedipal desire to please his mother. Broadway-style singing as he taps, absolutely in concert with his backing track, you belatedly comprehend how attuned Gray is with his sound cues, never missing a single one, despite the expressive mania of many of the sketches.

Similarly, it also belatedly dawns on you that the amusing little jingles facilitating his scene and rapid costume changes are witty postscripts to the action just passed, again sung by himself.

If Kenny Goes to Sleep is anything, though, it's an audition tape for Saturday Night Live. And that's never more apparent than in a mash-up of Dan Ackyrod's most famous roles, a Blues Brother-garbed hepcat exorcising ghosts with his saxophone, barking jazz patter and snatches of alto at his unseen, spectral assailants. With the strong implication that the character is conning his terrified customers, his own loud, animated presence more intimidating than any ghost, the skit takes a neat sidestep when the saxophonist encounters a phantom that enjoys the musicality.

The best and most contained piece is him as a Heinz ketchup bottle, flirtatiously inviting diners to enjoy his service, the script and performance a perfectly synergised dollop of saucy innuendo and puns that he can't match elsewhere.

But he's also good fun as an ageing fridge turned into a taunting supervillain; an upstart, rapping TikTok priest with designs on turning Jesus into an MCU-style franchise; and a hotel receptionist taking flouncy outrage against the infidelity he perceives taking place under his nose.

In fact, the only sketch that doesn't properly work is that of a flash, 1960s Hollywood producer being interviewed by his grandson for a school project, the inappropriateness of his memories and shameless name-dropping working against each other as a mixture of the real and fictional.

Given the big, vivid physicality of the characters and the force of Gray's performance in his poky little room – he ends with the show's sole nightmare, an improvised, inexplicably blue dye-stained creature that amuses with his entreaties to the audience for understanding of his twisted need to act out – it feels a little churlish to criticise the skits for routinely failing to end with a punchline, but there's definitely room for improvement there.

Otherwise, though, this is an energetic and stagey display of comic talent in an unfashionable venue off the beaten track, well worth not sleeping on if you've got some free time late afternoon.
 

Review date: 17 Aug 2024
Reviewed by: Jay Richardson
Reviewed at: Greenside @ Riddles Court