Honeymoon: Played Out, produced by Ok, theatre and now playing in the 2021 Virtual Toronto Fringe Festival, bills itself as a “curated arts spree featuring over a dozen new and exciting young artists.” This is its second installment, the first being a live event in 2019 before the world shut down.

As the company title’s sly reference to the “Ok, boomer” meme suggests, this is a show filled with young talents hoping to blast their way past the establishment into recognition. As its previous live incarnation suggests, it closely resembles a chill night at a trendy, grooving open mic in a downtown warehouse, but with better transitions. While it loses some of its vibe in the digital translation, it’s funky fresh enough.

Continue reading Honeymoon: Played Out (Ok, theatre) 2021 Toronto Fringe Review →

Cree playwright Kenneth T. Williams’ Bannock Republic comes to the Toronto Fringe Festival with the Centre for Indigenous Theatre. Written in 2010, the production feels as if it could have been written this month as the characters reveal the devastation of the generational trauma caused by the Residential School System. Continue reading Bannock Republic (Centre for Indigenous Theatre) 2021 Toronto Fringe Review →

We Knew Each Other Once Before (now playing at the Toronto Fringe Festival) is a collection of experimental, abstract videos curated by Dante Green and created as part of a 3 week collaboration undertaken by Green and the students of Sheridan College’s Musical Theatre class of 2022. Each of the videos has some sort of tangential relationship to the theme of connection, which is the thread that ties them together. Taken as a whole, I found the experience to be like scrolling through an Instagram feed, filled with beautiful images focused on aesthetic, pretty little ukulele ditties, and slam poetry-style reflections on missed connections. If you like those things, you’ll enjoy the show. Continue reading We Knew Each Other Once Before (Sheridan College and Open Door Theatre Collective) 2021 Toronto Fringe Review →

“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.

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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.

Continue reading Arthur J. Peabody (Amanda Dempsey-Laughlin) 2021 Toronto Fringe Review →