Or Be Eaten by Silent Protagonist is an “urban fairy tale” in the Fringe Festival that uses mask, puppetry and clown. It tells the story of Ash, a homeless man who journeys under the city through abandoned subway tunnels trying to find a utopian Toronto neighbourhood where no one ever goes hungry.
Scott Garland, Amy Marie Wallace and Graeme Black Robinson take on the variety of theatre forms with gusto and it all melded together charmingly. A curtained rack is the main set piece and serves many purposes.
When Ash encounters goblins who plan to eat him for dinner, the rack hides the performer’s bodies as they manipulate the goblin puppets above. Later it becomes a weapon that Ash uses against the crow Cordivia, who also intends to eat him. Even later the curtain itself becomes a rock-and-concrete monster who is trying –you guessed it! – to eat Ash. Continue reading Or Be Eaten (Silent Protagonist) 2013 Toronto Fringe Review→
Weaksauce (Sam S. Mulllins) is a sweet coming-of-age story about a teenage boy’s first love and though it is not in the Fringe program, it is definitely playing at the Toronto Fringe Festival.
Sam S. Mullins is vulnerable and lovely as he tells us about the summer he turned sixteen and traveled across the country to work at a hockey camp in Guelph. At camp, he meets a charming and charismatic Brit who he hates immediately in an irrational, jealous schoolboy way.
My friend Dick Valentine from Electric Six once told me that rock and roll without fun and danger is pointless. I think the people responsible for Kill, Sister, Kill got expelled from the same school of thought, because their Fringe play is like a big old Cadillac, barrelling down the interstate, with a jet engine bolted to the trunk. These people like fun and high-voltage danger. These are my kind of people. Continue reading Kill, Sister, Kill (Kid Switchblade) 2013 Toronto Fringe Review→
The Adversary, written and performed by Andrew Bailey as part of the Toronto Fringe Festival, is an autobiographical one-man show about Bailey’s experiences as a church caretaker in Vancouver’s notorious lower east side. A part of his job is to deal with the local street addicts, a task he takes on with compassion but which also requires some self-preservation, and this is the context where he wrestles with his faith and his relationship with God.
This sounds like a show that could be horrible, but it’s really not. It’s quite good and it made me feel an immense respect for Bailey. It also helped me feel some appreciation for people like the church’s tattooed priest, Max. I don’t always have a very positive view of religion and anything associated with it, so this was very good for me. Continue reading The Adversary (Andrew Bailey) 2013 Toronto Fringe Review→
If you’ve ever seen the movie Midnight Express and thought to yourself “what if the lead character were Canadian, instead of American?” then Kuwaiti Moonshine is the Fringe play for you.
The movie almost literally destroyed Turkish tourism. Kuwaiti Moonshine, on the other hand, might encourage a few brave, rich Canadians to visit Kuwait. Both involve stories of North Americans partaking of banned substances in very foreign countries. Both men serve time in prison.
