Eli inherited his father’s grocery store, the titular Happy Foods. He’s not happy, but that isn’t the point; Eli lives a life of overlapping and interconnected obligations (to his family, to his community, to his employees…) and his father’s legacy is just one component. As the people in his orbit begin to find their own legs and pull in new directions, Eli’s way of life — and the assumptions he’s made about the way the world works — will come under threat. This Toronto Fringe Festival show explores the agony, the debris, and the aftermath of his new normal.

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It’s a hell of a thing to wind up on the front page of the Toronto Sun with the words “DEVIL” and “TERRORIST” printed under your face…especially if you’ve got a job interview later that day.  But Lwam Ghebrehariat has a knack for turning pitfalls into upsides, or at the very least getting a good laugh out of them.

Lwam is Eritrea’s Greatest Hockey Player is the true story, told in stand-up comedy at the Toronto Fringe Festival, of one man’s journey through the not-so post-racial wonderland of Canada, a journey that took him from his childhood home in Alberta to the Tarragon Theatre Solo Room. Continue reading Lwam is Eritrea’s Greatest Hockey Player (Lwam Ghebrehariat) 2014 Toronto Fringe Review →

For me lab le jeu inc’s production of Tikva’s Orchestra playing at Toronto Fringe Festival had a dreamlike quality which stayed with me after I left the theatre. I think it was my brain’s way of letting me appreciate the incredible beauty of the piece without being emotionally flattened by the story, which is harrowing.

Tikva is a Jewish cellist in Germany. She tries to save her fellow orchestra members from the Nazis.

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Never Swim Alone is emerGENcee’s Toronto Fringe Festival rendition of the 1991 classic that portrays the bitter rivalry between two longtime friends and their failed pursuit of some sweet summer loving. It opens light-hearted and charismatic, with most of its lines delivered in unison, and some of the best, most intelligent one-liners I’ve heard in years (one example: “If shit had a brain, it would quote Nietzche”).

And then things get real. Oh, how things get real. If ever a play were to capture the rude awakening of adult life, where friends become enemies and spouses cuckolds; where friendly competition becomes bloody contest; if ever anything were to convey how time and age bloody us with a brutal, sudden, merciless reality, it is Never Swim Alone.

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