Christine Birch and Rhonda Baker get saturated in everything in moderation. Two shows under their belts and here’s a little interview with Christine to tempt you into a seat for the remaining shows. If you’re reading this on Sunday – their next show is at 1:15pm today, so read the interview later and head on out to the show!
Swoon! might not make you fall in love, but it will certainly keep you entertained for an hour.
The show is a collective creation from artists like Alisa Palmer, Jason Maghanoy and Haley McGee that examines swooning, that moment when our heart gives itself over to someone for the first time. I was a bit worried that I would be in for 60 minutes of adorable “meet-cutes” but Swoon! does delve a bit deeper than that, giving us a peek at not just the first swoon but what happens afterward too. Continue reading Swoon! (The Nation of Brohams) 2011 Toronto Fringe Review
One of the pitfalls of living in such close proximity to so many people in an urban setting is that it can make you a bit callous to the human condition. I recall this time last year when I was in a hurry to get somewhere and couldn’t use the subway because there was an indefinite delay due to “injury at track level”.
Out of frustration my immediate thought was, “Ugh, the bastard jumper couldn’t have offed himself in a way that doesn’t inconvenience me personally?” Right away, I was taken aback at the callousness of my own thought. Continue reading Mister Baxter (The Quickening Theatre Company) 2011 Toronto Fringe Review
Michael Hughes is a musical theatre performer, cabaret singer and lifelong devotee of Judy Garland. As a kid, Michael’s burgeoning obsession with musicals, Judy Garland and cross-dressing worried his parents to the point where they sent him to a psychiatrist.
Twenty years later, that psychiatrist wanted to talk to him again. Michael agreed on the condition that the psychiatrist would relinquish photocopies of all the charts from his childhood analyses to him. Those charts are incorporated into Mickey & Judy, a musical revue and “pseudo-memoir” of Hughes’ childhood. Continue reading Mickey & Judy (Random Hero Entertainment) 2011 Toronto Fringe Review
What can be said about National Theatre of the World’s Toronto Fringe Fundraising show The Soaps that hasn’t already been said? Great characters + hilariously relatable premise + 8 of the wittiest people working in theatre, film and TV = either Pi or The Soaps. Either way the talent is infinite. This round is set in the theatre town of “Shawford” (sound familiar?) behind the scenes of the latest show which, of course, is fraught with drama, conflict and intrigue. The audience laughed from the first sentence until the lights went down at the Bathurst St Theatre.