As Aaron Burr famously said: “There’s nothing like summer in the city.” The Hamilton he was singing about wasn’t the city in Ontario, but after a few days at Hamilton Fringe, he might as well have been.
Every July for 11 days, the city’s downtown transforms into a theatre district, with audiences hopping between churches, studios, and black-box theatres in search of their next show. With more than 50 lottery-selected productions spread across a dozen venues, the festival offers enough variety that no two nights have to look the same.
For this collection of reviews, I set out to discover as much of the Fringe as possible. From intimate performances and new dramas to musical comedies and experimental collaborations, these shows offer a glimpse into the many strange, funny, moving, and unexpected stories being told across Hamilton this summer.
Icarus is Falling (The Players’ Guild of Hamilton)
The myth of Icarus has been retold countless times, usually as a warning against ambition or hubris. Icarus is Falling, winner of the Hamilton Fringe’s 2026 New Play Contest, takes a different route. Rather than asking why the mythological figure flew too close to the sun, writers Brianna Russell and Owen Carter ask what might compel someone to risk everything for the chance to be truly seen.
Set within the labyrinth of Daedalus (Boro Milošević), the play imagines an Icarus (Carter) weary of life spent in his father’s shadow. An encounter with the sun god, Helios (Adrian Pavone), begins with awe, but the admiration quickly becomes mutual. After recounting the story of his sister’s doomed love for a mortal, Helios offers to make Icarus a god so they can be together forever, transforming the familiar myth into something more intimate. Their relationship becomes the emotional centre of the production, providing warmth to a story that might otherwise feel predetermined by its tragic ending.
Director Abigail Sullivan’s production is understated but evocative. Rachel van Staalduinen’s costumes, Hannah Dulong’s set, and Sephora N’kosi’s lighting suggest the mythic world while keeping the performances at the centre. Carter’s Icarus is restless and sympathetic, while Milošević fills Daedalus with equal measures of love, control, and desperation. The play grants each character emotional legitimacy, even as their desires collide.
Although the script is written in iambic pentameter, the verse flows with remarkable ease, lending the dialogue a subtle lyrical rhythm. Icarus is Falling finds tragedy not in ambition alone, but in the desire to escape, to connect, and to leave something behind.
Rebel Spirits (Theatre Aquarius Studio)
It doesn’t take dragons or elaborate special effects to build a fantasy adventure. Sometimes all you need is two actors, a tavern, and a collection of increasingly ridiculous hats.
Created and performed by Devin Bateson and Justin Shaw, Rebel Spirits blends sitcom rhythms with sketch-comedy theatricality. The pair bounce between roles with the switch of a hat, literally, inhabiting an entire village of characters with exaggerated commitment. Not every joke lands, but the sheer volume of material thrown at the audience quickly buries any misses beneath something funnier.
The production’s self-awareness is one of its biggest charms. Characters constantly hold up signs telling the audience when to laugh or boo, a potentially irritating running joke that somehow fits perfectly into the show’s playful absurdity. There’s a definite Monty Python influence here, particularly in the low-budget fantasy setting and the gleeful absurdism, but Rebel Spirits channels that energy into a broader, more earnest comedic style that feels closer to a live-action cartoon than a piece of acerbic satire.
And beneath all the goofiness, there’s a surprising amount of heart. The show is ultimately about finding joy in a world that often feels anything but joyful, and it’s easy to see why Rebel Spirits was selected for Hamilton Fringe’s ALERT program, which supports emerging theatre-makers and gives artists the space to take creative risks.
Rebel Spirits may not overthrow any kingdoms, but it will probably win over the tavern.
There is No Anger Like That of a Woman (Theatre Aquarius Studio)
A banker walks into a brothel and pays for an hour with the most expensive woman there. It sounds like the setup for a joke, but instead of a punchline, There is No Anger Like That of a Woman has something else in mind.
Playwright-performer Grace Delamere’s intimate two-hander spends its hour observing Eve (Delamere) and her client Adam (Liam Armstrong) circle one another in conversations about misogyny, religion, sex work, and power. The ideas themselves may not be particularly revelatory, but that almost seems beside the point. Whether the play unfolds in the present day or some more abstract space, discussions of the biblical Eve’s legacy in Christian theology or the persistence of patriarchal institutions remain relevant, and Delamere’s script approaches them with wit, conviction, and occasional welcome bursts of humour.
Not every argument lands. Adam can feel less like a person and more like the embodiment of every frustrating conversation Eve has ever had with a man, but the play seems less interested in presenting a balanced debate than capturing the exhausting reality of women being asked to accommodate male viewpoints that rarely extend the same generosity in return.
Meg Gibson’s stripped-back direction leaves Adam and Eve with nowhere to hide. Armstrong brings an easy naturalism to Adam, while Delamere gradually lets Eve’s confidence give way to something more vulnerable.
For all its righteous fury, There is No Anger Like That of a Woman isn’t all that interested in winning an argument. It’s interested in the uncomfortable, often difficult work of having the conversation at all.
RATS! Another Musical? (A Totally Improvised Musical Comedy) [The Staircase | Bright Room]
The hardest part about reviewing an improv show is figuring out how to describe something that, as the performers themselves admit, “will never exist again.”
Every performance of RATS! Another Musical? (A Totally Improvised Musical Comedy) is built from scratch, shaped by ideas suggested by the audience before the show. At the performance I saw, that meant astronauts, aliens, and a cast ready to transform those ideas into an original musical.
Led by musical director Rory Grant — who plays live piano accompaniment throughout the show — the ensemble (Nitin Anand, Kara Austria, Kristi Boulton, Sean Cage, Daniel Fishbayn, Robbie Grant, and Arielle Zamora) builds on one another, transforming spontaneous jokes into character moments and slapdash melodies into fully realized songs. More than once, I found myself wondering how they were able to create action that felt so carefully constructed in mere seconds.
A West Side Story-inspired framework helps give the chaos a foundation, borrowing the familiar ideas of rival groups, conflict, and romance while allowing the performers to fill in the details. Without elaborate scenery or props, the focus remains where it should be: on the chemistry between the ensemble and their ability to create something together in real time.
What makes RATS! such a fun experience is watching the process itself. The songs may only exist for one night, but the skill behind their creation is very real. Hilarious, energetic, and endlessly surprising, RATS! captures the strange magic of live theatre, and the feeling that anything could happen, because it can.
Notes From Underground (The Players’ Guild of Hamilton)
Adapting a literary classic for the stage always invites the question: why tell this story this way? Notes From Underground, adapted and directed by Moazzam Reza from Dostoevsky’s classic novella, is a thoughtful production that, despite a strong central performance and well-chosen design, never quite answers that question.
The play asks a lot from its unnamed protagonist, known as the Underground Man (Reza), whose lengthy soliloquies and philosophical musings dominate much of the show. Reza delivers a commanding performance, particularly in a late sprawling monologue that shifts between self-loathing, anger, vulnerability, and defiance. It’s an impressive feat, even if the character’s relentless bitterness can make him difficult to connect with.
The supporting cast (Sagal Hussein, Klein Wilhelm, Luke Huffman, Patrick McEwen, Colin Crawford, and Roy Mondal) help bring the world around him to life, as effective costuming and practical prop work ground the performance in 19th-century Russia. That said, the production occasionally struggles to maintain momentum. Frequent blackouts between scenes slow early sections of the play, and voiceovers intended to deliver narrative information are often too quiet to compete with the activity unfolding onstage.
At times, the adaptation can feel more like a reading of Dostoevsky’s writing than a theatrical exploration of it. The ideas the play wrestles with — arrogance, isolation, and the possibility of redemption — are interesting, but the production doesn’t always find a language for expressing them onstage.
The Giant Space Monster That Ate Hamilton in 3-D (The Players’ Guild of Hamilton)
Beware, citizens of Hamilton! From the darkest corners of the cosmos comes a creature unlike anything humanity has ever faced. A monster of unimaginable size. A threat beyond comprehension. A force that can only be stopped by… two performers and a handful of puppets?
The Giant Space Monster That Ate Hamilton in 3-D is a low-budget love letter to the wonderfully cheesy world of old B-movies, complete with homemade effects, absurd characters, and 3-D glasses handed out to the audience before the performance.
Created and performed by Kristian Reimer and Larry Smith, the show follows two actors as they attempt to save the city from an intergalactic threat while juggling a rotating cast of characters. What makes the production stand out is how specifically Hamiltonian it feels. The local references give the show a personal touch that makes the destruction of the city feel oddly affectionate rather than apocalyptic.
The production’s scrappy nature does occasionally work against it. The performances are intentionally broad, but the acting can feel a little uneven, and there is quite a bit of voiceover, which was difficult to hear from my seat. The frequent fourth-wall breaks also become less charming when they draw attention away from the comedy and toward the mechanics of the performance itself.
Still, there’s something endearing about a show that embraces theatrical imperfection so completely. The Giant Space Monster That Ate Hamilton in 3-D is silly, sincere, and proudly weird — it’s exactly the kind of strange little theatrical adventure the Fringe was made for.
The Hamilton Fringe Festival runs until July 26. More information is available here.
Intermission reviews are independent and unrelated to Intermission’s partnered content. Learn more about Intermission’s partnership model here.
WRITTEN BY
Hunter Weaymouth
Hunter Weaymouth (he/him) is a Hamilton-based playwright, screenwriter, and theatre critic.
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