If you’re looking for genuine fun at the Toronto Fringe Festival this year, you’ll find it in Toy Box Production’s How I Lost One Pound: The Musical. The Fringe is always a crap shoot when it comes to finding gems, so the best thing for any company is to drum up some good buzz to get the curiosity flowing and the audience filling. Only three days into the festival, and Lesley Carlsberg’s offering already had some great buzz zipping past my ears while I was waiting to walk into the AC’d Passe Muraille theatre.
Towards the end of the set, he promises the audience that it gets better: it’s always kind of frantic and weird towards the start of the run, and if we come back later on, it’ll be more settled, more mellowed… essentially, better. I’m not so sure.
With a name like Eat, Poo, Love (Squint & Grunt Productions), I have to admit it was hard for me NOT to see this Fringe 2012 show. The synopsis for this show read “this true story is full of shit.” And full of shit it was…literally.
I first encountered William Shakespeare’s The Tempest in a survey course in university. The nuances evaded me and the plot and intrigue were overwhelming. All that has become clear now that I have experienced The Tempest … A Puppet Epic! at Palmerston Library Theatre, part of FringeKids! at the Toronto Fringe Festival.
Most Fringe shows have two problems: a weak script and a lack of polish. It’s to be expected– the Toronto Fringe Festival is as much about workshopping pieces and developing talent as it is performance–but it’s often disappointing when promising ideas or actors end up stuck in a show that isn’t very well-written or wasted in one with poor execution.
