Settle This Thing (bick/antzis) 2018 Toronto Fringe Review

Tamara Bick and Drew Antzis from "Settle This Thing"Settle This Thing (playing at the 2018 Toronto Fringe Festival) proposes a revolution in relationship therapy. Here’s the model: marriage is a trap, affection is just chemicals, everything’s about sex (until the sex disappears), and arguing just doesn’t work.

But if arguing doesn’t work, we need a new tiebreaker: a way to Settle This Thing. So on your way in the door, you’ll be presented with a voting paddle, and the show repeatedly asks you to pass judgement. Who won the argument? Who’s in the right? And who has to apologise?

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Restless Spirit (Lago di Lupi Productions) 2018 Toronto Fringe Review

Photo of Catherine Meyer and Nicole Marie McCafferty in Restless SpiritThe Toronto Fringe Festival has offered up a real gem with Restless Spirit, produced by Lago di Lupi Productions,  playing at Theatre Passe Muraille – Mainspace.

Restless Spirit explores the question of whether or not ghosts exist, and if those who claim to communicate with them are all frauds, bent on exploiting the bereaved.

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RAGE AGAINST The Inferno (Jerusalem) (Sketch Platform Productions) 2018 Fringe Review

RAGE AGAINST The Inferno (Jerusalem), playing at the 2018 Toronto Fringe Festival.RAGE AGAINST The Inferno (Jerusalem), a Toronto Fringe Festival show put on by Sketch Platform Productions–currently playing at the Robert Gill Theatre–is an unsettling play.

The audience is taken into a complex realm of dreams and nightmares, where reality blurs and questions of morality take on an importance impossible to handle, to a place where certainty is impossible. The haunting intensity of RAGE AGAINST The Inferno (Jerusalem) makes this show worthy of attention.

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The Truth* (A Muse Zoo) 2018 Toronto Fringe Review

Cast photo of "The Truth*" by Michael Bryant.

The Truth* (playing at the 2018 Toronto Fringe Festival) is a clown play about colonialism. A vast new territory opens up, rich in resources and readily-accessible. We meet the rulers of the four nations jockeying for position, and we explore their motivations and histories, and we get to see what happens when these interests collide.

The result is genre-straddling, drawing on tropes from children’s theatre, melodrama, propaganda and patriotic history in order to suggest new perspectives on old stories.

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One Left Hour: The Life and Work of Daniil Kharms (Good Old Neon) 2018 Toronto Fringe Review

Photo of Jack Comerford in ONE LEFT HOUR: THE LIFE AND WORK OF DANIIL KHARMS by Nicole Wilson

I don’t know what I was expecting when I first read the description of One Left Hour: The Life and Work of Daniil Kharms, playing as part of the 2018 Toronto Fringe Festival. The description says “a battle between absurdity and realism” and really, this show is exactly that. Maybe somehow I expected more realism than abstract and absurdity. I was wrong. Continue reading One Left Hour: The Life and Work of Daniil Kharms (Good Old Neon) 2018 Toronto Fringe Review