Be Kind, Rewind is the latest collaboration between perennial Toronto Fringe Festival favourites Edge of the Sky and the musical writing duo Barbara Johnston and Suzy Wilde (Summerland, One Small Step). Their new show is a coming-of-age musical centred on a misfit teen’s attempt to re-invent herself while working at a video rental store/bait shop in a Northern Ontario cottage town in the summer of 1995.
My nine-year-old companion and I arrived excited to Boy vs Fly, our first show of the 2019 Toronto Fringe Festival, deep in discussion about whether the performance would feature real flies (we disagreed; I suspected no but he thought certainly yes). Turns out that while there were no live flies, there was certainly a lot of buzzing about.
The Ballad of Frank Allen is playing at the Toronto Fringe Festival and it’s a zany, musical funhouse. The premise, which concerns what happens when one man lives in another man’s beard, zigzags into unexpected — but wonderful — territory. It’s a story of a science experiment gone astray, of boy meets girl, of heartbreak and struggle, and ultimately, of learning to lean on our friends through the hairy parts of life.
I read the info for Personal Demon Hunter on the Toronto Fringe Festival site and expected the kind of show that really does a send up of motivational speaking. Something that was irreverent, funny, self-aware, and ready to make fun of the whole enterprise. That is not what I got at all, and I think that was a very good thing. Instead, Personal Demon Hunter is a very sincere walk down Velvet Duke’s PATH(c) to fight both his and your personal demons.