Jam-packed with funny characterizations, party music and entertaining videos, Buy Me Dinner First is an all-around good time. 

This sketch comedy show performed by a tight troupe of actors is uproariously funny and fun. If you’re looking to laugh, search no further. The actors work well together and really know how to connect to the audience to take us along with them. Actor/creator/writer Dylan Archambault, in particular, has a huge and captivating presence and knows how to bring it. The house was packed when I went, and the audience was in stitches throughout the show. 

Buy Me Dinner First is...

LOCO + HERO + JOE tells the story of local (local = LOCO > LOCOOOOOOOL > LOCAAALLLL, see?) hero Joe Fortes.

The production tells the story with three characters. Surprisingly not Loco, Hero, and Joe, as I had surmised. (When I first heard the title I thought the show would be a comedy set in the Old West.) The cast was comprised of a young woman with an interest in history (played by Jina Anika) who took notes while talking to a lady who was a little girl in Joe's time (played by Sue Sparlin) and Joe himself (played...

Playwright Kenneth Brown plays Nelson, the father of Augusta (Candice Fiorentino). Augusta arrives at her parents' house and is faced with her inner emptiness and confusion expressed through irritation at all the imbalances in her life.

Expository dialogues on the phone to her grandma, spouse, and mother, and by texts or thoughts shared with her father, are cleverly intertwined to unravel the issues that make her life difficult.

How life's storms will need to be navigated with a sea...

Folk singer and storyteller Corin Raymond brings warmth and wit to his autobiographical one-man show The Great Canadian Tire Money Caper, which tells the true story of how he paid for the making of his 2013 album Paper Nickels with Canadian Tire Money.  Right off the bat, Raymond sets up the casual, folksy charm that largely defines the show. From his blue jeans and slightly-ruffled-rolled-up-to the-elbows-dress-shirt to his off the cuff...

If you like symbolist, Artaudian, avant-garde, experimental theatre, I would recommend making the trek out to the Firehall because there aren’t many shows like this at the Vancouver Fringe Festival.  

But if you don’t, then don’t waste your time with this show.  

I don’t like this type of theatre. But that’s just me. Objectively, Pipef@%! is a well-oiled assembly line of activity that is passively interesting but produces no clear messages or story in its 60 minutes on stage. 

...

District 13’s large cast for this production (over a dozen) pumps a lot of energy, talent and celebration into the thin, but iconic, love and resistance story that is The Hunger Games. Laced through this musical production are references to pop singers (Taylor Swift) and local culture (Tim Horton’s) but if you aren’t particularly tuned in to these, you’ll still enjoy this show if you like well-performed musical comedy.

The production I attended was sold out — lots of...

The program description for Olya the Child is brief. The venue is a parkade and I knew that meant uncomfortable chairs. The show is only 35 minutes. Not that one chooses art by the cost per minute but... 

So, Thursday night, I dashed from the Waterfront where I had the pleasure of seeing “Bear Dreams” and managed to slip in just in time to get one of the last two seats. 

I do like attending site-specific shows at the Fringe – I've seen some amazing ones (Greenland, Eidola and Felon come to mind) and others that I won't...