After a short exile in France, Mehdi Bousaidan returns to Quebec with Sheep, a new show which unfortunately badly needs a common thread. Because as charismatic as he is, the comedian ends up losing us on stage. He is visibly tempted to try different registers, but none really suits him. You would think he was still searching for himself artistically. That’s the problem, one man show sorely lacking in incarnation.
The sheep is Mehdi Bousaidan’s favorite animal, because like him, it is “curly and eats grass”. It is also the animal sacrificed during the Muslim festival of Eid, a rite which traumatized the comedian of Algerian origin during his childhood. But once that is said, this show has little to do with what one might be tempted to equate to “ethnic humor”.
Cultural differences are sometimes amusing, especially those between the French and the Quebecois. The passage where he reflects on his stay in France is perhaps the most successful, as he wonders how the Parisian metro, crowded at all hours of the day, will be able to “support the Olympic Games when it is not even capable of to endure a Thursday.”
For the rest, Mehdi Bousaidan says very little. However, there are many things that must have happened between today and the release, in 2019, of his first show, Tomorrow. We at least know that he recently got married. That he moved to the countryside. But he doesn’t express himself much more in this new show.
The comedian fully inhabits the stage with the energy and confidence he exudes. He gives himself, but what’s the point, because he doesn’t give himself up. This is what makes this one man show so bland, so generic, at times. Most of the jokes in this show fall flat, make you smile at most, because they could be told by any other comedian. They are not drawn from any experience.
He’s sometimes saucy like Mike Ward when he talks about how difficult it is to masturbate while watching porn on a smart watch. He advances in the right-thinking stature of Louis T. by ironizing about the $870 million that we are preparing to invest in the roof of the Olympic Stadium, while the teachers are underpaid. Then, Mehdi Bousaidan surprises, and almost sounds like Guy Nantel by tackling head-on the thorny debate around trans women who compete in women’s sports categories.
This show ultimately seems to be a collection of numbers which could exist separately, but which have nothing to do with each other. Numbers which, even taken individually, would not break the house either, that said.
Perhaps it is to mask the weakness of the lyrics that Mehdi Bousaiden is so expressive on stage, multiplying the antics, imitating the accents of the whole world, and even Stephen Hawking, the man “half chair, half pancake”.
Sheep wants to be more refined than Tomorrow, which incorporated different technical elements. A more sophisticated staging would perhaps have raised the level.