Golvareh’s UnTuned (playing now at the Toronto Fringe Festival) is a compelling character study of a 40-year-old Iranian-Canadian music teacher struggling with his fears of inadequacy during the COVID-19 pandemic. On his 40th birthday, Massoud (Amirhosein Taheri) takes phone calls with six different women and each phone call gives the audience a little more insight into his life. (It’s kind of like a more realistic version of Fellini’s 8 ½ and Arthur Kopit’s Nine). The seemingly improvised dialogue and fantastic performances from the whole ensemble cast make watching this intimate portrait of a man a really enjoyable experience.
“No-one gets to see the real me until I remember breathing,” says drag queen Selena Vyle (She’s So Vyle) in a raw line from her song cycle Broken Hearted Girl, now playing at the Virtual 2021 Toronto Fringe Festival. A series of connected songs about three romantic relationships over the past decade that shaped and changed Vyle via their painful endings, Broken Hearted Girl embraces the digital medium with a beautifully-shot tour through Toronto. At its centre is Vyle, who shines brightly in her outfits and awesome coifs, sharing entertaining and sometimes moving lyrical observations about the ones who got away.
Talking, sentient birds are a staple of children’s entertainment, from Big Bird to Foghorn Leghorn to Aladdin’s Iago. Because we can teach some birds to speak, there’s always that added sense of wonderment: what if they had more to say? In Arthur J. Peabody, a new comedy from Amanda Dempsey-Laughlin now playing at the Virtual 2021 Toronto Fringe Festival, the titular talking bird (Desmond Baxter) tells his story of imprisonment and escape to a wide-eyed child.
The show is earnest and sweet, but the content is pitched to a younger audience, and the script could use some plucking.
Swallow This Skin by the Unhushed Theatre Collective, currently playing as part of this year’s Digital Fringe Festival, currently exists as an audio play. It details the life of the dancers at a run-down Toronto strip club in the few hours before they open for another night.
Stylized similarly to The Vagina Monologues, this audio play is peppered with provocative monologues that touch on topics from racial fetishization and sexuality to reproductive health and religion. When a former dancer returns to the stage and a customer lingers around after last call, this night spirals far from being an average night at the club.
Golvareh’s UnTuned (playing now at the Toronto Fringe Festival) is a compelling character study of a 40-year-old Iranian-Canadian music teacher struggling with his fears of inadequacy during the COVID-19 pandemic. On his 40th birthday, Massoud (Amirhosein Taheri) takes phone calls with six different women and each phone call gives the audience a little more insight into his life. (It’s kind of like a more realistic version of Fellini’s 8 ½ and Arthur Kopit’s Nine). The seemingly improvised dialogue and fantastic performances from the whole ensemble cast make watching this intimate portrait of a man a really enjoyable experience.
