A collection of everything to do with the Toronto Fringe Festival, including reviews, features, press releases etc.
She Grew Funny at 2017 Toronto Fringe Festival is the work of a comedian and television writer working in a new idiom, and that’s more or less my favorite thing about Fringe. I like when talented people take risks. I like seeing the new, fresh things they make while they’re still wobbly and damp as colts, though I know they may be uneven. This was, but I still found it worthwhile.
And then it happened… (playing at the Toronto Fringe Festival) is a sketch comedy collaboration between two friends and a director, Kris Siddiqi. Despite getting the worst possible time slot for their opening (midday on a rainy Friday), these two performers (Zohaib Khan & Anesti Danelis) made the most of a lousy house and got off to a pretty good start.
Continue reading And then it happened… (Aspiring Landlords) 2017 Toronto Fringe Review
Interstellar Elder, produced by Ingrid Hansen and SNAFU, playing at the Toronto Fringe Festival, could be considered a very tenuous sequel to Hansen’s 2014 Fringe smash, Kitt & Jane: An Interactive Survival Guide to the Near-Post Apocalyptic Future. Kitt & Jane explored the destruction of our natural environment through the lens of two precocious and imaginative children on the verge of adolescence, and I loved its sparkling wit and touching character interaction.
In Interstellar Elder, Kit Peterson is back, but instead of being a small child, she winds up hundreds of years old in the semi-distant future, the only unfrozen passenger on a ship set to repopulate the earth after an actual natural disaster has made it uninhabitable. Despite the thematic connection, this is an incredibly different show, nearly silent and solo. However, Hansen manages to say a surprising amount about the human condition anyway; the incredibly aged Kitt still has that spark.
Continue reading Interstellar Elder (Ingrid Hansen, SNAFU) 2017 Toronto Fringe Review
Picaza is a contemporary dance performance by The Inamorata Dance Collective as part of this year’s Toronto Fringe Festival. I’ll be honest, when I first selected this production to be part of my Fringe experience this year, I did not know it was a dance show. I was drawn to the description on the Fringe site — the story of a young woman’s journey to self awareness, through the metaphor of a magpie (‘picaza‘ in Spanish) the one bird who can recognize their own reflection.
But the dance element makes me nervous. I don’t have a dance background, often I’ve left a dance experience feeling like I just didn’t get what I just saw. Most of the language of dance is lost on me so I approached Picaza with distinct apprehension. And though I still may not have fully “got it”, I can happily say that I enjoyed it.
Continue reading Picaza (Inamorata Dance Collective) 2017 Toronto Fringe Review
When Happy Birthday Benjamin Holloway opened at the Toronto Fringe Festival , we saw the titular character sitting behind the piano, playing what sounds more like a melancholic tune and less like a celebratory sing-along, and things became somber, unsettling, and a little off-key.
Continue reading Happy Birthday Benjamin Holloway (Up the Wooden Hill) 2017 Toronto Fringe Festival