Jem Rolls is a pretty dynamic man. He would have to be, to captivate an audience for a full hour with only his voice, his stories, his poems. Some people have this quality where they needn’t do much and people will enjoy watching them. Jem is one such lucky folk.
Not to suggest he isn’t talented. He’s a spoken word/performance poetry artist and his show jem rolls ATTACKS THE SILENCE, part of this year’s Fringe Festival, is clever, quick, teeming with wit. His delivery is theatrical and captivating. He has all the right measures of provocative bravado and norm-subversion that you’d expect from spoken word.
For my last show of the evening, I went to the Tarragon Solo Room to catch a performance of Adopt This! written and performed by Dan Bingham. Expecting to see his usual style of comedy (which is hilarious), I was pleasantly surprised by the level of honesty and rawness in this production.
Adopt This! is a hilarious and reflective look at growing up adopted. Raised by a strict Irish Catholic mother, Dan Bingham recounts his troubled youth as he recalls the painful abuse of his mother’s boyfriend and his reunion with his rowdy biological Scottish family.
Yesterday evening I saw the opening performance of Yarn by Acky-Made at Majlis Multidisciplinary Arts. This was, first off, one of the coolest venues I’ve ever been to. It’s one of the the site-specifc venues in the Fringe Festival. Everything is outdoors with cute little cushions on your seats. There were candles and rope lights everywhere with tons of greenery and the smell of citronella was in the air. It was the perfect setting for a summer night at the theatre.
Most people hear clichés like “No pain, no gain “and “Work hard and you’ll get ahead” all the time. Most of us take this advice with a grain of salt. Jonah Allison, performing his one-person Fringe show Network 54: Sports R4U, reminds us that in the world of junior hockey in Canada, words like these aren’t adages- they are gospel.
Allison’s show is being performed at a temple where The Toronto Maple Leafs used to play, Maple Leaf Gardens. If there is a more storied venue in Canada, I’ve never heard of it. If there is something more intrinsic to Canadians than hockey, and trying to be good parents, I’m oblivious to it. So when I first looked at the Fringe schedule and saw the blurb for this play, I immediately knew that it was “game on”!
For my last show of the evening, I went to the 
