Mina Samuels calls New York City home, and Toronto is fortunate to have her as a visitor for this year’s Fringe. She performs her fascinating one-woman show Hazards at The Helen Gardiner Phelan Playhouse, and you should go see it.

Hazards is sort of two plays in one. The first half is very absurdist. Samuels literally crawls onto the stage, eventually becoming upright and walking. She points an imaginary gun at her head and shoots herself. Then things get really interesting.

Continue reading Hazards (LifeWorks) 2013 Toronto Fringe Review →

Lorenzo Pagnotta’s Making Love With Espresso is a solo piece about being Italian and being gay and reconciling the two. Pagnotta wrote and performed the piece and Tony Babcock directed.

His story is interesting. He grew up in Edmonton in a large traditional Italian family. Not a lot of role models for a gay kid. Continue reading Making Love With Espresso (Kith as Kin) 2013 Toronto Fringe Review →

One of the many joys of watching a Fringe show is that there are so many new and innovative ways a performance is presented to us. How to become a Spinster by Peppermill Productions comes in the form of a seminar. The result is a lively, hilarious and interactive take on the subject of being single, which gets much deserved spotlight instead of the oh so clichéd quest for love.

Diana Galligan and Wanda Carroll start the show energetically, throwing questions into the audience. “What does a spinster mean to you?” they ask. “Fun,” says an audience member. A simple, but most perfect word to describe the show. They take us through ten practical and amusing steps towards achieving lifelong spinsterhood and thus happiness and fulfillment. Each of these steps is a comic sketch that had the audience doubling over with laughter.

Continue reading How to become a Spinster (Peppermill Productions) 2013 Toronto Fringe Review →

Once again The Soaps! delivered. I saw them last year at Fringe and loved them. I was really looking forward to seeing them this year.

The Soaps! didn’t disappoint. They took on the ‘dirty underbelly’ of City Hall in Utopia. Not surprisingly Utopia city government looks a lot like Toronto’s and provides just as many laughs. The cast just makes it up as they go along – which sounds familiar. I think that happens at City Hall in Toronto too. Continue reading The Soaps! A Live Improvised Soap Opera (The Soaps) 2013 Toronto Fringe Review →