Runaway Hotel Kollective presents Sarah and Lucy now playing at the Toronto Fringe. Sarah and Lucy is based on Trailer Park Boys, narrowing its focus on the two titular characters. As a card-carrying fan of the series, I was excited to see this show. In the same vein as the creators of this piece, I agree that Sarah and Lucy are (Sarah) and were (Lucy) criminally underused characters, often being used to move the story along rather than being properly developed.
Radioactive Spyder at KidsFest at Toronto Fringe Festival is a musical developed in part by the grade 5 and 6 students of Equinox Holistic Alternative School, and performed by performers 10 – 15 years old from Spyder Theatre Company. It was an hour of 15 incredibly talented kids singing and dancing and having a blast. It was an hour well-spent.
In Pack Animals (playing at the Toronto Fringe Festival), an unlikely pair of scouts get cut off from Camp Oyster Bay, and have to rely on each other (and the magic of the forest!) to make it out alive. But it’s not as dark as it sounds: sit by the campfire, eat some snacks, sing some songs, and put those merit badges to good use.
It’s the thing at the back of Tracey Erin Smith’s throat that’s going to kill her, warns her healer. Those stuck half-sentences: what she can’t say. THE BIG HOUSE, presented at the2019 Toronto Fringe Festival, asks the question, “When you’re a little kid and your Dad goes to jail, does a part of you go with?” Fringe darling Smith has created smash hits from The Burning Bush to The Clergy Project with her story-based Soulo Theatre, which deals in well-crafted, heartfelt confessionals and autofiction. In 2012, Smith covered the effects of her father’s suicide in Snug Harbor. It’s something even older, though, that forms the source of the blockage: her father’s imprisonment in 1977 for fraud, when Smith was a young child.
In 