Hungry, presented by JJ Money Productions, is playing now as part of this year’s Toronto Fringe Festival FringeKids! lineup. The audience was fairly sparse for the opening show on Thursday, but the people who were there seemed to thoroughly enjoy it and the performers still gave it their all. The puppets are impressive even in their simplicity, and the bright colours and different personalities that the puppeteers bring out in each of them really make the show worth seeing.
It is a turbulent time in Moscow. It is the age of Putin, the days of the Sochi Olympics, against the backdrop of growing LGBT visibility worldwide. And for sixty minutes during the Toronto Fringe Festival, the Helen Gardiner Phelan Playhouse becomes a window into the heart of a faraway place that is nevertheless very much like home, as it is transformed into a communal apartment in Moscow populated by seven disparate, dangerous, and delightful people, brought to life by Hooligans Theatre: a Komunka.
There is only one question that needs to be answered in the premiere of Monster Theatre’sWho Killed Gertrude Crump? at the Toronto Fringe Festival, and I’m sure we can all guess what that is. Speaking from beyond the grave, puppet master Agatha Christie, played with delightful madness by Tara Travis, unravels an unpublished murder mystery from her early days.
I’m a huge fan of apocalyptic and dystopian fiction. So when I heard about Here After, playing at the Toronto Fringe Festival, I thought the show would be right up my alley. I couldn’t have been more right.
The show, presented by Upstart Theatre, imagines a world in which human bodies can never die. Minds, on the other hand stop thinking for more than a few seconds, and they go completely blank.
