Click Here and Here to listen to our Fringe Audio Preview. Click Here to find our Fringe Landing Page where reviews will be posted throughout the festival. My Own Private Shakespeare (A-) I loved this unassuming solo show that seamlessly weaves Shakespearean text into a personal story that wields its unadorned realism strongly enough […]
Welcome to our landing page for the 2026 Toronto Fringe Festival. Over the next ten days, three of our writers will be reviewing as much as we’re able. Below is a preliminary list* of everything we were able to work into our schedule, in alphabetical order. As our reviews go live, these listings will […]
Prolific Toronto musical theatre writer Andrew Seok has a signature style- all heart, total sincerity, soaring ballads with big ensemble harmonies. Your mileage may vary. The unrelenting prettiness of his work is a pro for me, though it can get repetitive, so it’s nice to see him stretch a bit with his latest piece. […]
The latest from Toronto drag icon Pearle Harbour is a sad, wild, itty bitty little tragicomedy staged in a hidden bar in the swanky Royal York hotel that is barely big enough to walk through. It’s surreal, it’s uncomfortable, it’s wacky, it’s depressing. It may be a masterpiece. Justin Miller’s alter ego is so […]
Critic’s Note: The performance reviewed was the June 12th preview. Experimental writing and the plays that come with it is tough. The art of saying something while sometimes saying nothing. The art of nothing happening but saying a lot in that nothing. Samuel Beckett made a career of it; Seinfeld ran on it. It […]
A lack of professional polish hinders this ambitious but frustrating new work from By the Word Productions currently playing in the Crows Studio Theatre. In the tradition of Schiller’s Mary Stuart or Stetson’s The Meeting, playwright Franca Miraglia imagines a fictional meeting between non-fiction characters. The jumping off point is a passage from Arthur […]
Next to Normal is a polarizing show that beautifully humanizes and trickily simplifies mental illness. Tom Kitt’s rock score demands big vocals and complex harmonies with extremely careful dynamic calibration as the characters lash out and collapse inward. These thematic musical extremeties lead to some really distracting sound balance issues in the intimate Aki Studio […]
A clear feeling of community joy permeated the packed lobby of Toronto’s historic Elgin Theatre this week as the Harold Green Jewish Theatre Company’s latest production opened with great fanfare. The ambitious undertaking is a transplant of National Yiddish Theatre Folksbiene’s hit New York staging using a Yiddish translation of Fiddler on the Roof that […]