This year my husband Rich and I are traveling to
Scotland for vacation, and specifically to Edinburgh to catch the tail end of the
Edinburgh Fringe Festival, which is the largest and oldest festival, originating in 1947. To prepare for this experience, we decided to attend this year’s version of the
Toronto Fringe Festival, which has starting to grow again after its pandemic pause. This season, the festival hosted over 100 shows at 22 venues, which is almost a 30% increase from 2024. It maintains its mandate of selecting shows by lottery as opposed to juried selection and provides an open, accessible, and largely uncensored platform for artists to present original, diverse and possibly unconventional works of live theatre. Despite this, at least for the ones that we selected, it feels like many of the Fringe shows are more professional productions with more professional casts. We look to our theatre experiences as a happy reprieve from all the turmoil and tragedy happening in the world today, so we selected
five shows that are musicals or comedies (or better yet, musical comedies).
We got off to a great start with our first show “
Almost Ever After” by composer and actor
Andrew Seok who is a well-known name at Toronto Fringe after several years of his musicals being included in the festival. This year’s submission has been advertised as “Love Actually” set to music with an intersection of five overlapping love stories that deal with meet-cute scenarios, a love triangle, a potential unexpected pregnancy, finding new love after loss and exploring the old adage “is it better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all”? The stories ranged from humorous to poignant as they explored the trials and tribulations both of falling in and out of love.
This show was notable for the impressive acting credentials of the cast which included
Julia Pulo (who starred in the musicals Six, Wizard of Oz, and Life After for Mirvish Productions),
Kimberly-Ann Truong (Miss Saigon on Broadway and the TV series Kim’s Convenience and Run the Burbs),
Kelly Holiff (Rent at Stratford Festival) and other actors with various theatre or TV credits. The twelve main characters in the show play archetypes including the Cynic, the Hopeful, the Romantic, the Dreamer, the Charmer, etc. The show had so much buzz that the entire run was sold out by the time the Fringe started. While my favourite segment involves the couple trapped in separate elevators who bond over the intercom, my favourite song is from the pregnancy storyline. The lyrics featured repeated counting of “One, Two, Three” where those numbers took on so many meanings including the three minutes to wait for the pregnancy test results and the implications of the number of lines revealed on the test.
Held in an “alternative space” called the Artist’s Play on 388 Carlaw Ave, Almost Ever After was staged more like a concert than a full musical with no set pieces, a slightly raised platform and no stadium seating. Various actors come on and off stage to advance their storylines, singing in front of a series of microphones. I would love to see this musical again if it ever got further developed, or as a movie since I heard on a podcast interview with Seok that he originally wrote this to be filmed as a movie called “What Am I Without You” which is one of the songs in the show. He mentioned that there are actually 8 storylines in the movie script but that would be too much to incorporate on a live stage. As it is, the current show features twelve main actors and 10+ background chorus/musicians.
Our next two shows were staged at the slightly larger and more traditional Passe Muraille Theatre which has multiple rows of floor seating followed by a series of raised stadium seats and a small wrap-around balcony all facing a wide raised stage. There are also two catwalk platforms on either side above the stage that were used by both shows as extra performance spaces.
The first show at Passe Muraille was once again not a traditional book musical but rather a “song-cycle” titled “
People Suck: A Musical Airing of Grievances”. A song-cycle involves a series of unrelated vignettes and songs that reflect a central theme (in this case, that people are awful) but do not form a conventional, unified plot. This show first played at Minnesota Fringe in 2014 and debuted at Toronto Fringe in 2015. The musical has returned multiple times to Toronto as it has continually been updated and revised since “people continue to find astounding new ways to suck”, as noted in the program.
We arrived at the theatre 30 minutes ahead of showtime and 15 minutes prior to the doors opening to find that there was already a large lineup. This was the case with our previous show as well so I wonder what time people start to line up. While the forecast indicated no rain in sight, the single dark cloud directly above us had different ideas and we were showered on multiple times. Not expecting inclement weather, we were getting wet so I made use of the Fringe Festival program guide for a bit of shelter. The items at concession stand for People Suck was a harbinger of the cheeky irreverence that we would be in for. I was really tempted by the orange boxer shorts for Rich, but I knew that he would never wear them.
After being seated inside the theatre, we waited over 10 minutes past the start time for the show to begin, which is unusual since the Fringe shows run on a very tight schedule. When it finally did, the keyboardist/narrator broke the fourth wall with an impromptu statement. He explained that on top of all the topics named in the show, the TTC sucks! Delays caused one of their male lead performers to be late. Rather than hold up the show any longer, he would be replaced by a female swing, which was fine for the first skit but would have become increasingly more difficult based on the male-centric roles of future scenes. Luckily, half-way through that first segment, we saw the actor duck in and run backstage so that by the next song, he was ready to go. Ironically and hilariously, the first line of his song talked about being late for work, causing the audience to chuckle. This actor turned out to be David Silvestri, whose impressive body of work includes roles in Come From Away, Kinky Boots and Les Misérables with Mirvish Productions, 42nd Street and Pirates of Penzance at Stratford, as well as appearances on Broadway. I’m really glad that he made it to this performance, albeit slightly late.
We were treated to 15 songs describing different ways that people suck, with some of them fitting the theme better than others. The first few songs were quite effective and humorous including a Kindergarten teacher who advises her pupils that “
Everybody is an Asshole”, followed by a country “hoe-down” styled song about “
The Man They Call the Flake”, and then a generic airing of grievances against people acting like idiots and lamenting “
Where the Hell is Darwin When You Need Him”. No topic was off limits as the show mocked manglers of grammar, toxic masculinity, dysfunctional marriages and office cultures, extremists and even religion before ending on a hopeful note with a reprise by the Kindergarten teacher where she instructs that we can all try to be less of an asshole. It was impressive how many scenarios were depicted by the talented and versatile comedic troupe through the use of just a chair and a long table as props. It was also interesting to search on Youtube for songs from previous versions of this show to see how the references and topics changed over the years.
The show
Ctrl Alt Delete: An Alphabetical Musical has a very clever premise. The 26 letters of the alphabet work for a corporation that wants to downsize and expel one letter from the English Language. Seven letters (F, K, Q, S, W, X and Z) have been chosen as candidates for elimination, based on the premise that other letter combinations can be used to make the same phonetic sounds. Members of the audience were chosen to sit on stage (off to the side) to represent the letters J,U,R and Y, forming the jury who will vote on which letter to get rid of. Meanwhile the various letters try to justify their importance by singing about what would be missing from the vocabulary without them. “Z” starts off with a rousing song about Pizza while passing around (plastic?) pizza slices to the other letters. “F” sings a funny song about Fun and Family while misunderstanding references to the infamous “F***” word. “Q” sings about his affinity to the letter “U” and pulls the corresponding audience member from the jury for a quick dance. The letters “K” and “X” sing the most poignant songs about the word “Knowing” while staying silent since the “K” is not pronounced and “Expectations” that cannot be lived up to. A white screen at the back of the stage often depicts the word being sung about for extra emphasis. At the end of the show, the jury needs to pick which letter is to be eliminated. Presumably a different letter could be picked at each show and that letter gets a goodbye song before the grand finale.
The seven letters each wear an office access badge with their photo and their name (i.e.letter) emblazed on it. At the beginning of the show, this helped us remember which letter was which. As we had seats in the second row for this performance, we had a really good view of the actors and marveled at how much the one playing “Z” looked and sounded like Adele while the one playing letter “Q” resembled the star of the Toronto production of Strange Loop. As a fun fact to add to the show program, each actor plus the writer and production staff named their favourite “weird” word. These included gobbledygook, onomatopoeia, kerfuffle and shenanigans. We found this amusing since Rich and I also have favourite words, so we totally relate. His is defenestration (the act of throwing someone out of a window) while mine is Entlistungsfreude (a German word for the feeling of joy and satisfaction when crossing completed items off of a list).
Our final two shows were being held at Soulpepper’s Michael Young Theatre in the Distillery District which has been added to the list of Toronto Fringe Festival venues for the first time as part of a Soulpepper Theatre Hub. With just over 200 seats, Michael Young Theatre has the largest capacity, which is probably why the shows selected for the “Next Stage Series” were all slotted here. While most of the shows at Fringe are chosen by lottery, the Next Stage Series consists of a few curated shows selected by experienced Fringe Festival producers that were selected by a panel of Toronto Fringe staff and invited industry professionals.
Our first show at the Michael Young Theatre was selected as part of the Next Stage Series. “
Songs by a Wannabe” is a one-woman musical performed by
Barbara (aka Babz) Johnston as a semi-autobiographical account of her decade portraying
Ginger Spice as part of the Spice Girl tribute band Wannabe (named after the group’s most famous song). We selected this show that was co-written by Johnston with her frequent collaborators and good friends
Anika Johnson and Suzy Wilde because we have watched shows by various combinations of these artists in the past and really enjoyed their work. We saw Barbara and Anika’s musical Blood Ties (featured in Orphan Black) and Summerland in previous Fringe years as well as Dr. Silver’s Celebration of Life which they wrote with Anika’s sister Britta Johnson. Suzy Wilde also worked on Summerland and we recently watched her show After the Rain which played as part of our Off Mirvish subscription series. It turns out that Anika and Suzy are also part of Wannabe, playing
Sporty Spice and Posh Spice respectively. Wannabe continues to be active to this day with most of its original members and have shows booked through the rest of 2025. The three had met in high school and performed together as the indie-pop band Stonefox through their university days.
Using true stories from their life on the road augmented with fictionalized situations added for dramatic purposes, Songs by a Wannabe depicts of the group’s final days after a lengthy, arduous North American “tour from hell”. The musical is set backstage during one of their final performances. Babz is on her last straw and ready to call it quits. She recounts how she first got involved with starting a Spice Girls tribute band after limited success auditioning for acting roles, how the group gained traction and started selling out shows before being derailed by the pandemic, how she started losing band members to pregnancy and other priorities (fictional), how she re-grouped by finding replacements for the band and finally how this new group set out on the grueling tour by driving across Canada and the U.S. in a recreational vehicle (RV).
Decked out in an orangey “Ginger-styled wig” and constantly changing costumes from the clothes rack on stage, Babz is mesmerizing as she relates her tales of woe through exposition interlaced with original pop songs that are influenced by the Spice Girls, including one slower ballad where she uses the lyrics “what I want .. what I really want” as a direct reference to the song Wannabe. She describes situations of show stops in small cities in such detail that you feel these snippets must be true. One story involves a man watching the show while clutching Spice Girl dolls which he said belonged to his recently deceased sister and then presented the dolls to the group. Babz uses the dolls and a miniature model of an RV to visually illustrate their travels including various mechanical issues. When the RV finally breaks down for good and they need to abandon it, she lifts off the back end to reveal a smaller vehicle that represents the rental car they group switched to. This innovative way of conveying the plot was very unique and entertaining. While we are usually wary of one-woman shows, this one was spectacular and we were spell-bounded and captivated throughout. This turned out to be my favourite show of this Toronto Fringe season, which is saying a lot since the previous shows were excellent as well.
Unfortunately, I did not like our last show, “
Emilo’s A Million Chameleons”. We picked it because it starred the talented puppeteer
Adam Francis Proulx who we watched in 2023 in his Fringe show “The Family Crow: A Murder Mystery”. In that show, Proulx played all the parts and provided all the voices in a clever murder mystery where all the suspects and the detective were crow puppets. We enjoyed that show so much that we decided to give his new one a try. But while that show was entertaining for both kids and adults, I felt that his new show was totally catered towards young children. It involves Emilio Jr. who runs a chameleon circus where he boasts “a million” chameleons are behind a curtain and he would bring some out to perform various variety acts including singing, dancing and juggling. There was no real plot and the gags did not land for me. He used colour-changing sequin material to alter colours on the chameleon puppets and to reveal an image of his father Emilio Sr. There was audience participation when he brought up a shy little girl to interact with a chameleon, and then he tossed giant inflated dice into the audience for people to bat around in order to generate a number that would represent which of the “million” chameleons would perform next. It was lots of fun for the kids and their parents but just wasn’t what I was looking for.
Given the lottery nature of Fringe festivals, we always assume that any show we pick is a gamble despite our developing strategies over the years that allow us to better identify the shows that we would probably like. So, having an 80% success rate is pretty good. I just wish we could have ended on a high note.
