Theater Review: ‘Sardines’ Packs in the Impossible: Death and Laughs

Sardines is a comedy show about death.

A 60-minute one-man show, comedian Chris Grace presents a compelling autobiographical monologue about life and death. He shares his personal experiences with grief, deftly swerving from high-energy moments to vulnerably, sharing about losing family members, as well as his husband and Sardines director Eric Michaud’s cancer experience. These well-executed emotional fluctuations included Grace orchestrating an audience a cappella rendition of Rihanna’s “Please Don’t Stop the Music” only to take a hard turn into quietly, seriously asking the audience why the music (of living) stops.

Grace gracefully pulls the audience from light, flippant comedy bits into the deep of existential issues. Then, he often graciously tosses a comedic life buoy out of the existential dread that starts to collectively settle in the audience after the trenchant questions he raises about life after the death of loved ones. A retrospective of some of Grace’s hardest moments in life and a view into how one comedian makes sense of it, Sardines connects childhood memories with adult experiences in a compelling circular telling of life time.

Sardines first had a sold-out run at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival in 2024. Huntington Theater Artistic Director Loretta Greco saw it there, loved it, and brought it to Boston, where it ran at the Huntington from September 30 to Nov. 16. Grace brings to the play format of Sardines tools that have served him well in the comedy space: a penchant for truth-telling that brings others in, while using humor to keep people engaged. In an interview with Huntington Associate Director of Artistic Programming and Activation Kevin Becerra, Grace affirmed that art can help us talk about hard things: “But you can’t just talk about the hard things, you have to also be entertaining and ‘not boring’ so people don’t find reasons to go to the bathroom and never come back.”

Sardines was definitely not boring. I enjoyed the storytelling, including Grace’s discussion of his experience as a gay man who came out to his parents, which contributes to the world of queer Asian storytelling in playwriting.

However, despite an earnest script and Grace’s sincerity, is it possible that I saw a deep tiredness in his eyes? Perhaps not a general sense of being tired, as Grace is surely full of vigor and talent, but tiredness of telling the story of Sardines (a comedy about death). Running for six weeks at the Huntington, and for many weeks before that at the Edinburgh Fringe in 2024 and 2025, Grace tells the story of his and his family’s pain to ever-rotating new audiences night after night. Night after night there is self-exposure, waiting for jokes to land, and looking out at glaring lights and a dark mass of bodies happily singing Rihanna back to him while he prepares to reveal the personal tragedies that for the audience are surprising, but for Grace have already had multiple half-lives since their real occurrence and their many retellings via Sardines. The onus and opportunity to narrate your most personal, brutal losses every night must fall for many somewhere on the spectrum between personal hell and personal catharsis, and I wonder what Grace felt that night as he delivered his show in a sincere, yet somewhat worn-out manner.

Grace has strong improv skills and seems to adapt the show slightly each night. He joked about audience reactions on previous nights and praised the vigor of our a cappella rendition compared with all those who have come before us. These meta comments from Grace about how his show yesterday went reminded me that Sardines is a comedy show/play in which Grace is performing, and not a confessional; this doesn’t make the substance less true or earnest, but it strengthened my sense (perhaps only my projection) of Grace’s tiredness from performing his comedy show about death.