A play of many sketches

It is not too often that one gets the opportunity to see a devil in a lungi on stage, making small talk with the audiences in an exaggerated Malayalam accent.Nicholas Productions’ first comedy venture, An Evening of Funny Ones, on Friday evening at the Sivagami Petachi Auditorium, certainly made an apt first impression; as His Royal Darkness (The West coast devil) put it, it was ‘informal as well as infernal’.In fact, this was followed by a tap on his notepad and a roll call dividing members of the audience into various segments — rapists on one side, murderers on another, and so on. This came with a strict one-line disclaimer, he warned, “There are no toilets in hell, it’s damnation ‘without relief’.” Starkly different from this round of role play, came ‘The Orient Experience’, a sketch that perhaps tried a touch too hard at humour with overlapping puns and word play that were just one too many.One sketch that did in fact make an impression, albeit overly perverse, was ‘Dogs in the Park’. Here, a couple of dogs talk shop by hurling insults at their owners.Prince Abraham does a fine job, playing an adorable pup on stage, and might have even wooed a few dog lovers in the audience to adopt him, if only the two-legged prancing hadn’t given him away.Definitely the highlight of the evening was, ‘An elementary guide to dating’, a Rowan Atkinson sketch, narrated by director, Denver Anthony Nicholas and mimed by co-director Yohan Chacko. With some hilarious dance moves, not to mention a preamble of what not to do during a seduction, this vignette no doubt, stole the show.Yohan does a splendid impression on everyone’s favourite British comedian on television. Another memorable short piece (also Rowan Atkinson inspired) was that of a Bible reading gone wrong. Not getting into the details, it would suffice to say that Houdini might have learnt a lot from the lesson, comic one-liners included.As a showcase to their next production, I Wanna Be MJ, there were also a few songs of the King of Pop performed in between acts. However, high expectations fell to an abrupt halt with the group’s poor ‘sway and finger-snap’ rendition of Blood on the Dance Floor. Someone yell, bloody murder!