Vancouver

Sharing an audience with Stuart MacLean's Vinyl Cafe crowd, Elliott's homage to a semi-rural Ontario childhood nostalgia-fest is a sure-fire crowd pleaser for anyone from the generation prior to the last three letters of the alphabet. This musical and moving image performance is a confident, well performed and very personal visit to a past that is comforting to the intended audience and likely quite foreign to anyone born after 1970. The subject matter and imagery described and shown is both familiar and nostalgic. The reminiscences are important to recognize, as history informs who we are, even as emotionally reliving...

Maybe it's just luck. This year's Fringe has settled into an overall thematic arc for me about substance abuse and bad decision making. Temptation in this case comes from spirits, and not just the spirit of adventure. We know there is ego involved, as well as power and control. Who has it, and who wants it?

Temptation, history, short term choices balancing long term preferences. Albee and Pinter might nod at the homage. The audience responded well to the continuous reveals, and the plot thickened nicely as the temperature was raised through reluctant alcohol-fuelled reveals.

The simple, functional set...

When your mentor is Yoda and your friends are Sam and Frodo, you need nothing more than the script in your head to live the life you want. Especially when you have the Wolverine three pronged plan and your cactus at your side.

William vs. the World is a stream of pop culture references mostly for boys of the 90s with song and real stories from the geek front lines interweaved throughout. We watch William recount the pain of childhood, construct a carefully planned sanctuary underground, and then navigate through the early stages of adulthood determined to protect...

When rabbit comes hopping out in her bunny suit, one might suppose these two forest creatures are all cute and fluffy. They do seem so on the surface with the soft coats and noses twitching. Are these wild creatures or creatures of comfort looking for their square of land in the high priced land of luxury?

Mika Laulainen has written a clever mix of slapstick comedy and dark statements on environmental profit-mongering all wrapped up in cute fluffy animal costumes.

There are two pieces in this performance set at different speeds. Rabbit and Raccoon find themselves at odds...

Usually stories take a particular path to reach a particular conclusion. We have been lead to believe that order in a story is important to its outcome. We believe that even a collection of stories has an order that is preordained. Jem Rolls has pushed that concept off the back of the train as he tells tales of his travels in seemingly random order.

The order of the stories told in GET LOST Jem Rolls is random. Decided by pink cards distributed throughout the audience, shuffled and reordered with each show, no one, not the storyteller nor the...

The first time I saw Robert Plant walk on stage I screamed like the fan girl I was. When John Bonham died, I cried. So when Stadium Tour brought Zeppelin was a Cover Band to Vancouver Fringe this year, I was curious to say the least.  

Part dinner conversation, part documentary, and part rock concert, Stefan Cedilot takes the audience from Africa to the Mississippi Delta and Chicago to England where the four members of Led Zeppelin got together and became one of the greatest bands of all time. From session musician to the genius behind their...

There’s an obvious choice of word that comes to mind when you hear “the F word”.

It’s the polite stand-in for an expression of profanity, although the full range of this word’s meanings and uses are substantially more diverse. As far as connotations of the word go, it’s very useful. But it’s far from being the most expressive, exciting, or meaningful "F" word in the English vocabulary. Through well-integrated and interspersed PowerPoint slides, playwright and performer Yvette Dudley-Neuman introduces and unravels the definitions of some of the more overlooked "F" words, exploring their significance through the life of...

Hands Around by Arthur Schnitzler, translated by A. Koren, adapted by Dylan Coulter, is disturbing because, though first read aloud in 1900, it is relevant today in its far too realistic account of the messy, gory, sinister assortment that is love.

Set in 1980, Vienna, the story follows ten individuals as they power-play each other in the name of love. As Hands Around progresses, lips are kissed, promises are broken and betrayal becomes expected. There is not simply one perspective of love. One man believes that "all men, really, become disgusted by love." A married man admits to his...

Curious Creations brings the anticipated Waiting For Garbo to the Vancouver Fringe Festival of 2016. Writer and Director team Dawn Moore and Desmond Price worked together to create a play focused on recycling and its message is seen, first and foremost, in its content. What makes Waiting For Garbo stand out is its method of recycling dialogue, images, songs and characters, and piecing them together throughout the play. As you watch, a familiar melody will echo through the theatre, reinvented. You will recognize a retelling of a story, repurposed for this play. Bits of public lectures, video and script...

Great Day For Up was written and performed by Jonathan Young while he was a student at Studio 58 in 1996 and the version presented in the 2016 Vancouver Fringe Festival is an evolution of that student project. Using the lighting, sound and space of theatre, Young presents a homunculus who struggles with angst and self-doubt to finally have an epiphany.

I am so relieved that they provided an afterward in the program to Great Day For Up. After the 30-minute show I left the theatre confused and disoriented. To provide some context, I like shows that have a...

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