When leaving the theatre after seeing Murder In The Cottonwoods, I had stuck in my head a line from Rocky Horror that I think perfectly summed up my experience of the show; “a mental mind-f*ck can be nice.” A bizarre tale of murder set in a town that could be 1950s middle America if it weren’t for the Seinfeld references, Murder In The Cottonwoods may be the strangest show you’ll see at this year’s Fringe Festival. If you are a fan of David Lynch, then this show is for you: it’s Twin Peaks meets Pleasantville in this surreal “romantic nightmare.”
All Things Need Saying is playing at Factory Studio as part of the Toronto Fringe Festival 2017. Written by Gregg Hebert, it’s a story about a mother’s relationship with her adult son and daughter, following the death of their father.
Lantern Tales from the Ottawa Valley produced by Tales from the Four Winds and playing at the Toronto Fringe Festival is an hour of storytelling and fiddling. The show opens on a blank stage holding a table, two chairs, and two mugs. A fiddle starts to play a folk tune and then Norman Perrin and the fiddler, Dr. Tom Hamilton, enter. Perrin invites the audience to join him for a cup of tea while he spins yarns inspired by the lives of his ancestors in rural Ontario.
Featuring four actors (Karres Vroom, Chris Bautista, Matthew Krist, and Alina Kouvchinova), the play invites us into the psyche of a woman named Alice, in the form of a storage room that houses all of her thoughts, emotions, and memories, hoarding all the things she has not said.
It’s the silences, the unarticulated and the unspoken, and the what-ifs and could-be’s that move Tides & Tales’ 