Here's how it usually goes:

One is rich, one is poor. There is love at first sight. Great difficulty ensues in the form of disapproving family members, abusive bosses, long lost siblings, love triangles and rectangles, car crashes that kill your family and erase your memory, clones of a younger and hotter version of you, and loads and loads of misunderstandings. Then, about 400 episodes later, everyone makes up, villains are either dead, excommunicated or redeemed, and the lovers marry and have many kids. El fin!

Be it a telenovela, the classic Latin American genre of soap operas, or a Turkish drama, these types of complicated love stories with predictable arcs have loads of fans across the globe.

Diane Jorge has now brought this televised form onto the stages of the Montreal Fringe Festival. She has toured her solo improv show, Solovela: An Improvised Solo Telenovela, across the US for six years now. The premise is simple: she chooses some audience members based on their “energy,” asks them questions about their personal lives, and then, with the help of a shelf full of props and a very attentive board operator, Matti McLean, turns their story into a telenovela episode.

The night I went, Diane interviewed two married audience members who met at a festival in Brazil, moved to Canada, got married, and then had twins. The telenovela wrote itself! Diane dubbed their story “The Festival of Love,” and the audience had the privilege to watch its one and only episode. Ending on a cliffhanger, of course.

The show, and the telenovela as a form, is in line with the true Fringe spirit: it responds to its audience’s desire for drama, romance, and comedy. It’s lighthearted and simple, chaotic and full of twists, and, in the case of Solovela, humble in its design.

While Diane weaves political discourse into her improv (“I think I just solved racism with my full-body orgasm!” exclaimed one of her characters), she keeps it light and quick. Similarly, telenovelas usually tackle big issues such as poverty, class conflict, sexism, and domestic violence in the background of their main plot of love, betrayal, and familial bonds. In “The Festival of Love,” Diane brought in discourses of racism and immigration as off-hand comments, giving us a glimpse of her own values as an artist, and an homage to the sometimes unacknowledged political potential of telenovelas.

Of course, as it is with improv, there are dead moments as Diane tries to figure out what to do next. While she is quick on her feet (literally and figuratively) and full of wit, she spends more and more time clearing the stage and untangling her costumes as time goes on. Too many props, inadequate space to store them properly, many overlapping sound effects, and character changes that happen too quickly leave her running after the plot, and us waiting for it to happen. With six years of experience under her belt, I expected to see a more skillful handling of such challenges. Although, sometimes, these mishaps, paired with Diane’s on point comedic timing, have their own charm.

Solovela: An Improvised Solo Telenovela by Diane Jorge is playing at Mission Santa Cruz as part of Montreal Fringe Festival’s 2026 programming. As of this review’s publication, they have 3 shows left: Thursday June 18 at 18:00, Friday June 19 at 17:15, and Saturday June 20 at 20:45.
Find more information and tickets on the FringeMTL website.