A few years ago, I saw Jon Bennet’s Fire In The Meth Lab and quite liked it, so when I saw his name again in the 2019 Toronto Fringe program, I clicked on My Dad’s Deaths: A Comedy. I expected tenderness, nuance, hilarity and a few of the kind of cheap jokes where you know it’s not kind to laugh but it’s still really funny. Though this is billed as a comedy, I was ultimately underwhelmed.
Continue reading My Dad’s Deaths: A Comedy (A Mulled Whine) 2019 Toronto Fringe Review
The Weight Of It All, a show about weight and diet culture at this year’s Toronto Fringe, attempts to combine a critique of diet culture, a body-positive message, modern dance, original music, sensitive discussion of infertility, and much more to the stage. So much more, in fact, that I felt it didn’t quite stand up under the weight. Continue reading The Weight Of It All (Haggard B) 2019 Toronto Fringe Review
In the new Fringe venue at Streetcar Crowsnest, in the east end (!!), I caught Drink Of Choice, the last show of my day at the Toronto Fringe Festival. Everyone hopes to end on a good note, and my wishes were granted – this lively, well-crafted solo show was an absolute blast.
Continue reading Drink of Choice (HollyWould Productions) 2019 Toronto Fringe Review
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.
Continue reading Boy vs Fly (A Dean Bean Adventure) 2019 Toronto Fringe Review
Luminato presents Canadian Ronnie Burkett’s allegory about love, loss, and longing in TorontoThis year’s Luminato Festival, under the curatorial direction of Naomi Campbell, has collected any number of sharp, new takes on concepts that seem perhaps done – from love to climate change – but even among these Forget Me Not stands out. A new work from Canadian magic-maker Ronnie Burkett, Forget Me Not is an allegory about love, loss, longing and language that spans… well, it spans many distances.