Mike was that kid who walked into the high school stage crew booth, saw the lighting board, and went ooooooooooooh. Now that he’s (mostly) all grown up, Mike keeps his foot in the door as a community-theatre producer, stage manager and administrator. In the audience, he’s a tremendous sucker for satire and parody, for improvisational and sketch-driven comedy, for farce and pantomime, and for cabaret of all types. His happiest Toronto theatrical memory is (re) Birth: E. E. Cummings in Song.
Gwen is dead, and three loved ones — her sister, best friend, and girlfriend — mourn her. Drawing inspiration from imagery of waterfalls, A Drop of Water conjures forth parallels and convergences between these three women, and knits them together through monologues to tell a story of grief, memory, and the bonds which tie us together. It’s heavy stuff for a Toronto Fringe Festival show, and while the performance is watchable, the chosen devices can’t quite bear the strain of this ambitious project.
If you’re a theatre fan, pool (no water) is RENT on downers. In this Toronto Fringe show, an artist hits the big time and abandons the bohemian city for splendid isolation in the tropics. A decade later, she invites four former collaborators to join her for a spell and relive the good old days: wine, art, drugs, skinny-dipping… but something goes very, very wrong — and now her “friends” have their chance at a peculiar sort of revenge.
How’s your Fringe been so far, Toronto? I won’t lie, I’ve had a mixed bag myself: some great pieces of theatre, a couple of clunkers. But that’s the thing with Fringe! Tickets are only $10, shows only run an hour, and even if what you’ve just seen something dreadful, there’s always a better show just around the corner!
But with Fringe for Free, we do even better: we’ve got free tickets for you. All you’ve gotta do is send us an email and we’ll draw a winner for each of five shows. So click “Read More”, and let me introduce you to the 5 shows we’re raffling off on Monday, July 6th!
I brought a friend to Uncle Tommy’s Campfire, and she was a little miffed: we’re sitting in the backyard of some dinky café and this weird guy tells us stories? That’s it? We paid $10 for this? But as soon as the show began — and it’s the most original beginning you’ll see at a Toronto Fringe Festival show this season — she was hooked, and it was all downhill from there. Man, what a night.
How’s your 