This show is only half an hour long. It makes for a quick, light, and fun revitalization between your various Fringe activities.

Harken back on what you’ve been told about going on dates or interviews – when meeting someone for the first time, what do you say about yourself? And what do the things you don’t say, say about you? I’m talking about body language. Body language is just as important as (if not more important than) what you wear or what you say. This show takes body language as its medium and its message in the context of...

I mistakenly thought that The Lion, The Bitch and The Wardrobe would be some kind of C.S. Lewis parody, but things are not what they seem at The Vancouver Fringe Festival. The lion in this story is not some omnipotent God-like figure, but Sharon Mahoney’s crippling anxiety. Mahoney shares her own battles with anxiety and panic attacks in her hilarious and deeply personal show The Lion, The Bitch and The Wardrobe. She honestly discusses the stigma around mental health and that no matter how creatively talented, no one is immune to mental illness.

I do not usually enjoy street...

This production begins with a rousing welcome from a large ensemble of singers. Two-thirds of the-way through, marking a passenger revolt, the talented ensemble is turned loose again and the production bristles with energy. Much of this energy is sustained to the happy, and open, ending.

The first two-thirds of the production are necessarily quieter as we are introduced to a series of characters, mostly in pairs so that the relationships between them and the dysfunctions within them can be unfurled. I found all of these paired performances to be engaging, though quiet and sometimes a bit sketchy,...

What I expected was stand-up, with a definite nod to the 12 steps of recovery, as so many comics before have been through. What I didn’t expect was original songs, wrenched from the gut slam poetry forged in bodily fluids and the feverish imaginings of a person scraping through the mud, and tales of comrades on the same campaign, struggling with the same demons, searching for those angels of their better nature. Richard Lett has been a moderately successful stand-up comic for several decades, but like so many performers, courage, creativity and reactions came supercharged from external chemical changes. Not...