HINPROV performing at the Ottawa Improv Festival | Photo by Danika Lange
Presented by Hinprov
D.E.I. Another Day (clever title) is a pretty standard sketch comedy/genre mash-up premise that is going to tickle the right folks, but was just a little too messy and awkward for my taste. Right at the top, the noir homage (The Godfather) is made pretty clear when an Italian mob boss is gunned down, leaving his pack of goons (Gunjan, Shreya Parasha, Sachin Sharma and Vinay Sagar) left to find the son he’s just revealed to them.
The goons find the son, Amit (Jeff Fernandes), graduating Humber College, where all his ambitions and hopes for the future involve a fairer, more sustainable and equitable society. He takes those ideas with him into his new role as leader of this killing and money-collecting gang as his father’s successor. Under his noble yet ill-considered D.E.I. tenets, he recruits an unlikely POC threesome—an accountant, a fitness trainer, and a doctor—who fumble about at first, but eventually find their individual, situational super powers!
Noir-ish gangster antics unfold, bursting with woke language, cultural confusion, melodrama and romance. Hilarity—a brand of it, anyway—ensues.
Director Seann Murray hasn’t quite honed the acting, wrangled the clumsy scrambling about, nor maintained a consistently engaging momentum, but there is some sense of style to all this. Lighting designer Tushar Dalvi works in some moody visuals so it’s not just a generic wash. There is a very hokey yet cinematic background score and fun needle drops. A few haphazard Bollywood dance numbers pop up.
Though the tech and blocking could be tightened up considerably, the dress-up and go for it aesthetic is solid enough for the format, with our South Asian troupe suited up with fedoras, false moustaches and pumping their shoulders with cartoonish mafioso intensity. There is a plot that holds together well enough for the silly premise, but as a structured show it’s a bit gawky.
They aren’t especially good actors, but I sense this ensemble is milking the amateurish delivery as part of the schtick. In this respect, Sharma (as a right hand man turned antagonist), is a standout. There is something undeniably endearing about his lanky frame and stilted delivery—an ethos that transcends the clunkiness of this affair.
I mean, they all have moments where they get to be quite adorable. I didn’t laugh much—it’s not my jam—but I mostly enjoyed myself and wanted to know what was going to happen! I know that sounds like I’m damning it with faint praise, but prompting curiosity and investment is significant, especially if the execution made me cringe more often than not. This troupe also knows how to work with the unexpected and some of my favourites bits were them dealing with a broken chair, a moustache falling off and the like.
D.E.I. Another Day
@ Toronto Fringe Festival
running June 30 to July 12, 2026
Soulpepper Theatre’s Weyni Mengesha Theatre
(50 Tank House Lane)
55 minutes
