The land acknowledgment that kicked off Balcony Scene was not the usual kind. The announcer said what everyone already knows but rarely says out loud: that a land acknowledgment, on its own, is not enough, and there is far more work to be done before any of us can feel good about reconciliation. In a sixty-minute show full of scattered thoughts and things that were genuinely hard to categorize, that opening turned out to be the clearest and most confident statement, which may make you curious about what followed.

Written by Leslie Beedell, Francesca Esguerra, and, credit where it is due, William Shakespeare, and directed by Andrew Camerone, Balcony Scene bills itself as a genre-bending Fringe production about two former classmates attempting, in real time, to redeem their catastrophically botched high school performance of Romeo and Juliet. The packed, sold-out Plateau studio audience laughed from almost the very beginning, though the line between laughing with the performers and laughing at them stays a bit blurred.

The performance opens with the two protagonists launching into Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet, stumbling over it and launching again. This cycle repeats itself a few times in the first ten minutes alone, with much talk of timelines and finishing within the hour, none of which materializes as intended. Instead, the show keeps diving sideways into something else entirely: high school stories, failed romances, personal traumas, and the uncanny admission that neither of them ever quite became the actors they had aspired to be. They are still trying, and still not quite pulling it off, which might be the whole point of the production: a show about unfulfilled dreams, performed by people still living on the fringe of it.

But I kept wondering: Is this satire or parody? Or, perhaps a modern comedy of errors? It is perhaps all of these things partially and none of them completely, which is either the most interesting thing about the show or the most frustrating. Sounds a bit oxymoronic, eh? But then, there are some moments of genuine creativity, particularly when audience members are dragged into the action. And I say dragged because I was one of them, handed a page of dialogue and asked to play their old drama teacher reprimanding the two performers for not being good enough. The final line I was given to deliver was: "This feels like masturbation on stage." Honestly, as a piece of accidental criticism handed to an unsuspecting volunteer, that line actually summed up the entire evening for me.

I must admit, though, a rehearsed trainwreck is considerably harder to pull off than it looks, and Balcony Scene does a decent job trying to pull it off. It reminded me of ‘The Play That Goes Wrong’, which operates in similar territory and does it with more structural precision. But Balcony Scene is working on the fringes of theatre, perhaps less interested in technical perfection and trying to explore the messy, uncomfortable truth of people chasing a dream they never quite caught. The crowd it was performed for, the artistic and convention-bending Plateau residents who show up to Fringe precisely because they want to see something that confounds them, found what they came for and seemed happy about it.

I laughed, I rolled my eyes, and I yawned. Perhaps I wanted more, but I was not entirely sure what more would even look like. Maybe the roughness around the edges is enough for a Fringe show. Maybe it is not. You decide.

Balcony Scene, written by Leslie Beedell and Francesca Esguerra, with material from William Shakespeare, and directed by Andrew Camerone, is playing at O Patro Výš as part of the Montreal Fringe Festival's 2026 programming. As of this review's publication, the show has two performances remaining: Friday, 19th June at 18:00 and Sunday, 21st June at 13:45. Find more information and tickets on the FringeMTL website.