A Love Unbecoming at the 35th Montreal FRINGE Festival

A dream team of seasoned festival pros has assembled to bring Montreal audiences a hilarious, fast-paced, classic-but-new farce at the 2025 Fringe Fest. If there was ever such a thing as “a sure bet” at this festival of wild experimentation, it’s probably this.

A witty, absurd look behind the scenes of a 1940s wartime British radio show…

Clashing egos! Love triangles! Too many sound effects!

Can these performers survive their personal drama while keeping their live broadcast from going off the rails?

A Love Unbecoming is a one-act comedy written by Dan Jeannotte, directed by Heidi Hawkins, starring Holly Gauthier-Frankel, Mike Hughes and Matt Enos – an award-winning quintet of festival veterans.

Jeannotte and Hughes are well-known to audiences as members of Fringe faves Uncalled For. The long-running improv & sketch comedy troupe were two-time winners of the Just For Laughs Best Comedy Award, as well as multiply-nominated for Canadian Comedy Awards. Uncalled For popularized the Fringe’s infamous cabaret dance party The 13th Hour, producing and hosting the nightly 1 AM show for 7 years running.

Hughes performed for years as a Cirque du Soleil clown; he’s now a full-time teacher in the theatre department at Dawson College. Gauthier-Frankel is a local darling, a celebrated singer and voice actress much loved at the Fringe and beyond for her burlesque alter-ego Miss Sugarpuss; she won Theatre’s Best of Fringe Award for her solo show Miss Sugarpuss Must Die! And Enos, also a Dawson theatre teacher, is an improv & sketch vet who has played the Fringe with his blues-rock band The RiverMen, and acted in 2023’s Best English Production winner, Caught.

Writer/producer Jeannotte was also a founding member of comedy-dance act Dance Animal, another winner of the Best Comedy Award. Now a busy screen actor, he would have performed in his play himself, except he’ll be filming the 4th season of the hit TV series Star Trek: Strange New Worlds, in which he plays Lt. Sam Kirk, brother of the iconic James T. Kirk.

Director Hawkins just helmed a sold-out run of The Game’s Afoot at Hudson Village Theatre. Her directing credits include The Real Inspector Hound, Danny and the Deep Blue Sea and, at the Fringe, Hot Pink (runner-up, Mainline’s Next Stage Award) and Let’s Start a Country! (nominee, Best Comedy and Best Original Production).

“We tried to do the math!” says Jeannotte. “It looks like, in total, the 5 of us have been involved in over 235 performances at the Montreal Fringe, of at least 25 different shows, since 2003.”

And now these old pros have returned, with a show both timeless and somehow timely. “On one level, this is a very silly British farce, full of chaos and banter, funny voices and sound effects… It’s pure entertainment, which really appeals to me,” says Hawkins. “On another level, it’s a wartime story about performers trying to keep the show going in a world gone mad… which is pretty relatable, isn’t it?”

A Love Unbecoming at the 35th Montreal Fringe Festival

Venue #6: MainLine Theatre, 3997 Boul. St-Laurent
Box office: 514-849-FEST / montrealfringe.ca
Tickets: $15 + $4 service fee

SHOWTIMES!

June 5th 5:15 PM
June 7th 7 PM
June 9th 5:15 PM
June 11th 9 PM
June 12th 7 PM
June 14th 2:15 PM

BUY YOUR TICKETS HERE!