In Fire In The Meth Lab, playing at St. Vladimirs during the 2016 Toronto Fringe Festival, I finally found my first real pleasure of the Fringe this year – a title with which I could answer the classic Fringe query: “Have you seen anything great?” I have now; it’s Fire In The Meth Lab. It’s just great.
Continue reading Fire In The Meth Lab (2Hoots Productions) 2016 Toronto Fringe Festival Review
Here’s what I can say about How May I Mate You? (at Theatre Passe Muraille Mainspace 2016 Toronto Theatre Festival) — the group of sixteen-year-olds beside me LOVED it. They laughed at all the jokes, and left the theatre chattering happily about how much they’d liked it. Maybe I’m just too old for this show, but I never really got any better than “mildly amused” during this hour-long performance.
Continue reading How May I Mate You? (The Poorhouse Players) 2016 Toronto Fringe Review
There’s a pun in the title of my silly yum!, also at George Ignatieff Theatre for Toronto Fringe Festival 2016, but it took until hearing someone say it out loud at the very end of the show to hear it. By that point we had seen the tiny, 30-minute show – all little puppets and felted mushrooms and Sims-style noises that sounded like language but were mostly just nonsense, and that, unfortunately, we never really got.
Continue reading my silly yum! (jot and tittle) 2016 Toronto Fringe Review
Waiting to see Pirates Don’t Babysit at George Ignatieff Theatre for Toronto Fringe 2016, I enjoyed the wash of that familiar Fringe feeling for the first time this year — a line, a line speech, being dunned for a button and so on. Then we entered the darkened theatre, me and my kid companions, and set sail on an imaginative (and fairly charming) pirate adventure.
Continue reading Pirates Don’t Babysit (Black Sea Theatre) 2016 Toronto Fringe Review
Monumental was a cacophonous movement and sound theatre piece as part of Luminato TorontoThe Hearn is imposing even from a distance, and Monumental even more so within the space. Even when you are not sure how to get there, you can see the giant smoke stack stabbing into the sky. It is the perfect place to be washed in the music of post-rockers Godspeed You! Black Emperor, entranced and horrified by the movements of Holy Body Tattoo, and lost in consideration of the text that appears on three large screens that frame the stage. This is an immersive experience. You are small, and the industrial world is in decay. It is a terrible, and beautiful, and profoundly bodily experience.