I tend to veer away from Fringe shows that promise heavier emotional fare, but for some reason I found myself drawn to Doghouse Riley Productions’ staging of Israel Horowitz’s *The Indian Wants the Bronx*. It may be because I’m a sucker for a creative use of venue space, and the alleyway behind Honest Ed’s offered an excellent setting for the visceral one-act play.
The creators of previous Fringe hits _The Bible (Abridged)_ and _The Movies (Abridged)_ are back, this time minus their usual parenthetical. Despite it’s critical acclaim last year I was disappointed with _The Movies_, having found the abridged cinema spoofs to be generally flat and earnest. I thought I’d give the group a second chance with *Killing Kevin Spacey*, based on the assumption that this year they were creating a narrative themselves, rather than just finding excuses to reenact their favourite cinematic moments.
After a hugely successful run with Blastback Babyzap in last year’s Fringe and winning the title of Best of the Fest at the Toronto Sketch Comedy Festival in December, Uncalled For returns to defend its status as one of the most innovative and reliable sketch troupes in the country with *Today Is All Your Birthdays*.
This quirky navel-gazing comedy from writer/director Maya Rabinovitch profiles an ensemble of neurotic characters using the stresses of air travel as a catalyst to extract their inner secrets and demons.
This "Bard on the Beach":http://www2.bardonthebeach.org/index.html production of *The Comedy of Errors* is polished, breezy, and shamelessly anachronistic – in fact it is larded with unauthorized gags designed to provoke the audience to easy laughter.
Ryan Beil and Shawn Macdonald, make 'em laugh, make 'em laugh
If the title of Sean Cullen’s mini-tour smacks of straight-faced obviousness, it should. Unlike some star-driven one man shows, there is no hokey pretense on which his presentation hangs, only an opening voice over that is as dramatic as it is obtuse: a fair description of most of Cullen’s material.
This is the poster that was on paper for the man who is human who put on a show
One of Shakespeare's earliest (and shortest) works, The Comedy of Errors as performed by "Bard on the Beach":http://bardonthebeach.org/ is just a lot of fun. The carnival atmosphere of the Bard Village and the buzz of opening night set the tone perfectly for this comedy directed by David MacKay.
Putting ideas ahead of aesthetics when making art can be an interesting exercise. This kind of conceptual art tends to provoke questions about the nature of art, about what makes for good art, and about the boundaries of form and genre. But, if the resulting artwork doesn’t come up with many good answers to the questions it asks, then one has to ask what the point of the exercise is. If an artist isn’t in it for the aesthetics, and doesn’t do a great job of addressing the big questions either, then what is the value of such art? This...
On Saturday, June 6, *Skin Divers* & *Carmen* brought sexuality to the Four Seasons stage to rival the hottest bedroom. Skin Divers opens the senses to the body’s power to remember, and the mind continues to process it long after curtain. While this multimedia piece is sophisticated and stimulating, Carmen overwhelms audiences during the second half of the evening. This provocative interpretation of the famed opera is an eruption of passions so powerful they cannot be processed, simply absorbed.
There's a surprising theme that links this year’s mainstage shows at "Bard on the Beach":http://www.bardonthebeach.org/: twins. They feature in The Comedy of Errors, which opens next week. They also, perhaps unexpectedly, make an appearance in their sleek production of *Othello* directed by Dean Paul Gibson.
Twin Set: Michael Blake and Bob Frazer from Othello, photo by David Blue
