For years, I’ve heard raves about jem rolls at the Fringe, and so I eagerly selected jem rolls one-man traffic jam as one of my Toronto Fringe Festival picks for this year, and I was clearly not alone in my excitement. The house at Tarragon Extraspace was packed at 3pm on a Friday, everyone enthusiastic about the “Godfather of Scottish poetry.” I wish I felt as enthusiastic afterwards as I did beforehand.
Continue reading jem rolls ONE-MAN TRAFFIC JAM (jem rolls) 2014 Toronto Fringe Review
Queued at Palmerston Library for A Quest of Character, my four-year-old son Stanley – my regular Kid + 1 Toronto Fringe Festival review partner – asked whether this show would have singing? Yes, I replied. And dancing too? Yes. Would there be puppets? Why yes, yes there would. Confidently he declared “Then I will like it!” And indeed, he mostly did, and mostly so did I.
Continue reading A Quest of Character (Kid Safe Productions) 2014 Toronto Fringe Review
Marilla Wex, actor and storyteller, wants to tell you how she – a Nice Girl from Warwickshire – ended up wedding and bedding Jews until she catches up with the present day, in which she finds herself married to a real Yiddish maven (who was two seats over when I saw the opening night of Lost and Found at Theatre Passe Muraille). After this performance I am fairly certain that I would pay money to hear Marilla Wex discuss a trip to the dry cleaners. Four shows into his year’s Toronto Fringe Festival, I finally found a show I unabashedly loved.
Continue reading Lost and Found (Lost and Found) 2014 Toronto Fringe Review
Bringing global issues into specific relief, What Mama Said About “Down There” at the Fringe has an important message behind its interesting concept: when women are able to talk frankly about their bodies and sexuality, they are safer and more well. I saw the show with a smattering of early theatregoers at the Robert Gill Theatre, and I came away more sorry than anything. There is some very promising work here, and I found it badly in need of a good director, or perhaps a director with more distance from the material. I fear that the best stuff – and there is some real talent here – gets lost amid some questionable theatrical choices. Continue reading What Mama Said About “Down There” (Global Women Intact) 2014 Fringe Review
It’s a little unfair for a seasoned comedian, writer and performer like Briane Nasimok to have his show Confessions of an Operatic Mute in the Toronto Fringe Festival, along with every other schmendrik in Toronto who woke up one morning and thought perhaps they had a show in them and $742 to spend.
The cavernous George Ignatieff Theatre was more than half full for the opening on a Wednesday, no doubt filled by fans and friends of Nasimok who arrived to hear stories of wordlessness and wooing among the supernumeraries of the Canadian Opera Company for most of the 1970s.