All posts by Randy McDonald

OCD — Obsessive Compulsive Darryl (A Pring Thing) 2015 Toronto Fringe Review

OCD - Obsessive Compulsive Darryl with Darryl Pring

One play making its appearance in this year’s Toronto Fringe is OCD – Obsessive Compulsive Darryl. The latest staging of the one-man show performed by comedian Darryl Pring in the Robert Gill Theatre, OCD portrays Pring’s struggles with mental illness. What were these struggles? Did Pring recover, and if so, how? What does it mean to be “crazy”? With a guitar, a nifty video projector, and his own charisma as a performer, Pring answers these shows and others, making OCD a show that informs and delights.

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Licking Knives (Headstrong Collective) 2014 Toronto Fringe Festival

Photo of Melanie Hrymak by Lauren Vanderbrook.Licking Knives, is the first  Toronto Fringe Festival show by Headstrong Collective. It is a very controlled, and self-contained show. In the space of 45 minutes, actor Melanie Hrymak stands on the stage in the Theatre Passe Muraille‘s Backspace and tells her audience about her character’s life. That short space of time contains as perfect and as powerful a theatrical performance as anyone is likely to see at Fringe.

“These things are more romantic when you are not living them,” Hrymak says at one point in Licking Knives. “These things” are the key events in the life story of a stylish Parisian woman of the mid-20th century who, as it happens, managed to escape Ukraine alive during the worst period in Ukraine’s history.

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Group Therapy (Giggling Aristophanes Productions) 2014 Toronto Fringe Festival

Photo of cast of Group Therapy, Luisa Alvarez, Elizabeth Rose Morris, Callie Presniak, Elizabeth Stuart-Morriss, and Bryn Orth-Lashley. Photo by Trevor Koroll.

Group Therapy is the first production of new Toronto company Giggling Aristophanes Productions. This play, a ninety minutes long musical drama written and directed by company co-founder Marina Moreira, takes a seriously funny look at mental health through the persons of six therapy patients. Group Therapy is a great show promising great things to come for the company that produced it.

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Arabian Nights: A Belly Dance Spectacular (Sisters of Salome) 2014 Toronto Fringe Festival

Photo of Sarah Skinner, Amoura, Balkis Catelin, Sahar, and Zoe Smith by Kevin Fox.

Arabian Nights: A Belly Dance Spectacular is the second show mounted by local belly dance troupe Sisters of Salome in the Toronto Fringe Festival. This show, a retelling through dance of the classic collection One Thousand and One Nights, is a tour de force, and a stirring demonstration of the remarkable performing skills of the troupe members. Arabian Nights is an innovative new take on some very old stories that works wonderfully.

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Kitt & Jane: A Guide to the Future (SNAFU Dance Theatre) 2014 Toronto Fringe Review

Photo of Kitt and Jane performers, (L-R) Rod Peter Jr and Ingrid Hansen. Photo by Jam Hamidi.

The SNAFU Dance Theatre‘s Toronto Fringe Festival show Kitt & Jane: An Interactive Survival Guide to the Near-Post-Apocalyptic Future is a theatrical mashup of two very different kinds of plays. Some dramas take a serious look at the environmental problems we face in our world now and the challenges we might have to overcome. Other dramas take differently but equally serious looks at the struggles of adolescence. It’s the genius of this show and its performers that it easily combines these two very different kinds of theatre into one zany, oddly serious, and very compelling show.

Continue reading Kitt & Jane: A Guide to the Future (SNAFU Dance Theatre) 2014 Toronto Fringe Review