Elena Porter in I’ll Be Here: a musical cabaret. Broken Toys Theatre. Photo by Ryan Parker
By Liz Nicholls,
Starting Thursday you have the fun of launching yourself into the galaxy of Fringe Full of Stars, the 44th annual edition of the oldest and biggest of the continent’s Fringes (and the prototype for the rest).
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You have 223 shows to choose from, in 40 venues, at this year’s Edmonton International Fringe Theatre Festival (through Aug. 24). OK, it’s a lot (and the 152-page $15 glossy guide weighs a ton in your purse). But don’t be flattened, be pumped. Take your cue from the deluxe improvisers in this theatre town, and say Yes to experimenting.
Did you have a peek at ‘s selection of a dozen intriguing shows to get you started? It’s here. And here are some further thoughts about the strange and wonderful world at hand.
playwright Moemen Gaafar, author of Genesis , Fringe 2025. Photo suppliede
A new play by an emerging playwright: Nobody’s Fringe is complete without one. And Genesis, a first play by Egyptian-born computer science whiz Moemen Gaafar (the 2025 recipient of the Fringe’s Mowat Diversity Award), has a particularly enticing premise: playwright Adam, struggling with writer’s block, tries to dislodge his creative impasse by changing places with his character Eve.
Read the Fringe’s own interview with the playwright here: https://tinyurl.com/2ay53py
Shakespeare shows up: He’s a stand-up Fringe collaborator; no playwright is more resilient. There are two versions of Macbeth at the Fringe (maybe the theme of ambition is irresistible). One’s a new opera, Macbeth, performed by the New Era Group (12 musicians, eight singers), music by J. A. Creaghan. The other, Out Damned, Spot is a 45-minute punk rock musical which sees the world of Macbeth through Lady M’s eyes.
Jon Paterson and Rod Peter in Iago vs Hamlet, RibbitRePublic. Photo supplied
Houston-based comedian Patrick Hercamp is evidently a specialist in ripping through entire Shakespeare plays in 30 minutes. Fakespeare promises a condensation of “some of Shakespeare’s best loved tragedies, characters, and iconic dramatic moments.” In Tragedy or Triumph: An Improvised Shakespearean Epic, Vancouver’s Spontaneous Shakespeare Company makes up an entire Shakespeare play on the spot, the one he somehow forgot to writer, from audience cues. Andrew Hamilton’s Kaliban wonders what happens to Prospero’s unruly servant, the son of a sea witch (with a viable land claim), at the end of The Tempest. In Jason McDonald’s Iago vs Hamlet, two of Shakespeare’s heavy-hitters go at it over … life? mortality? No, a double-booked rehearsal space.
Larissa Poho in Moonshine, Edmonton Fringe 2025. Photo supplied.
Scaling up, not down!, for the Fringe. When I saw it at Nextfest in 2018, Moonshine was a highly unusual one-woman show — performance art for want of a better descriptive — in which Larissa Poho celebrated her Ukrainian roots in story, song (and trays of vodka shots). As of its Fringe premiere this week, Moonshine, “a Ukrainian kitchen party in a fried chicken restaurant,” is re-born as “a five-member actor-musician ensemble show,” she says. It defies the Fringe drift to smaller, more condensed, in a striking way.
The bilingual Poho is the possessor of a remarkably expansive artist skill set: actor, playwright (Before The River), singer, composer, lighting designer, visual artist, musical director and arranger. She plays the violin, and a veritable band full of instruments including the accordian, the dulcimer, the guitar, an assortment of exotic Ukrainian instruments. She’s a tattoo artist, too.
For Moonshine, as she describes, Poho “leads the storytelling” (in two languages), supported by Billy Brown, Scott Shpeley, local singer-songwriter Marissa K, Saskatoon’s Jordan Welbourne. “Yes, there is new and even more music!” she says. And it comes in a eclectic whirl of styles, “folk, pop, klezmer, punk, instrumental and a capella. And many more instruments. Whereas previously I played the show solely on my violin, we’ve added guitars, mandolin, ukulele, tsymbaly, accordion and more.” Bonus: Moonshine happens in a (licensed) BYOV where you’ve never seen a Fringe show, Waffle Bird (Stage 35) in the heart of Fringe Land.
Assassins, Uniform Theatre at Edmonton Fringe 2025. Graphic supplied
Topicality, renewed: Stephen Sondheim’s 1990 musical Assassins returns to the Fringe after a decade in all its dark, weird, subversive brilliance. And it’s armed (so to speak) with a new and lustrous topicality in our Moment. The characters are men and women who assassinated presidents of the United States, or at least gave it a shot. Even if that American Dream mantra that any kid can grow up to be president is a big fat lie, any kid can grow up to kill one. The 10-actor Uniform Theatre production happens at a first-time Fringe BYOV, ArtsHub Ortona in the river valley.
Homecoming: The Fringe is a playground, and brave new world, for young and emerging artists, yes. But the Edmonton Fringe’s enduring success is also built on its appeal, however intermittent, for seasoned professionals, like director Jim Guedo (back at the Fringe after 35 years to direct Victor and Victoria’s Terrifying Tale of Terrible Things). The last time actor/director James MacDonald did a Fringe show was Someone Who’ll Watch Over Me in 2003. Since then, a lot has happened in a career that’s taken him to the Citadel and across the country, and to the artistic directorship at Western Canada Theatre in Kamloops, a job he’s recently left. He returns to Edmonton and the Fringe as an actor, in the cast of the dark political comedy Bomb. The appeal, as he describes, was three-fold. One was the “excellent production of First Métis Man of Odesa” that played WCT under his watch. “I was so struck by the beautiful artistry and daring creativity” of director Lianna Makuch and star Mariya Khomutova. And they’re the artistic engine of Bomb. Meaningfully, MacDonald is in the role (of the doctor) that was to have been occupied by the late great Julien Arnold. “I am so pleased to to it, both to work with some innovative artists on a unique and topical play, and also as a tribute to my great friend and his incredible legacy in Edmonton.”
Broken Toys Theatre, the company created by husband-and-wife team Elena Porter and Clinton Carew, has brought Edmonton audiences powerful contemporary productions of the masters (Chekhov’s The Three Sisters, Pinter’s Betrayal) along with such large-scale originals as Star Killing Machine. It’s been six years since a Broken Toys production has been at the Fringe (The Trophy Hunt). Till now. And for the first time, something as “small, personal, and intimate” as a cabaret, as Porter says. A musical theatre veteran she stars in her first cabaret, I‘ll Be Here: A Musical Cabaret. with Steven Greenfield, directed by Carew. She’s always loved the form, and its juxtaposition of known, and little known, songs, gathered to reflect on “the joy and pain of the past decade.”
Michelle Todd and Cheryl Jameson in Paloma & Joy, Whizgiggling Productions. Photo supplied
Busiest artist at the Fringe: Hands down, playwright/ director/ actor Trevor Schmidt, artistic director of Northern Light Theatre (who also wrote a play, Monstress, for NLT this past season). Q: why doesn’t Schmidt have a Red Bull sponsorship? He has written no fewer than four three new comedies for the Fringe and co-written a fourth. He has directed and designed all four. And he’s in the cast of two of them. Whizgiggling Productions (Black Widow Gun Club, Destination Wedding) premieres Schmidt’s comedy Paloma & Joy (which re-assembles the fave trio of Michelle Todd, Kristin Johnston and Cheryl Jameson, and an unusual guest star, “a rare and exotic white tiger”). The comedy Carole of the Belles is for the collective 100% More Girls, and he joins the Whizgiggling trio onstage along with Jason Hardwick and Jake Tkaczyk. Co-written with Darrin Hagen, Flora & Fawna Face Their Fears, with Schmidt as Flora, is a Guys in Disguise production, returns to the characters, earnestly helpful pre-teen girls, we met in Flora & Fawna’s Field Trip. Schmidt has also written a comedy, Lousy Parents, for the Novus Actors lawyers’ collective (all proceeds benefit the Varscona Theatre).
Accidental Beach: A Previously Improvised Musical, Grindstone Theatre. Photo supplied.
Sequels and a prequel: There are sequels at the Fringe, !SNAFU’s Sexy Puppet Show (Epidermis Circus 2) among them, a follow-up to Ingrid Hansen and Britt Small’s ingenious physical puppet show, all done with fingers and other body parts, mirrors and a camera. The Fringe has become self-referential for its returning audiences. Prequels, thought, are rare upon the ground, as rare as rhymes for Saskatchewan River. GUMS: An Accidental Beach Prequel couldn’t be more local. The new Grindstone musical by the stellar theatre composer/musical director Simon Abbott with Dallas Friesen, Abby Vandenberghe and Malachi Wilkins rolls back time, back before last summer’s Accidental Beach: A Previously Improvised Musical — a goofball affair with clever songs — back to the moment that a dangerous, shifting new river beach emerges, along with a scary giant sturgeon. Where’s a heroic lifeguard when you need one?
Tell us a story, do (the loneliness of the long-distance storyteller): The Fringe circuit is a repository for storytellers (not least because it’s a portable solo art form and generally designers need not apply). Fringe Full of Stars has three of the best.
Martin Dockery in 1 Small Lie, Edmonton Fringe 2025. Photo supplied.
One is the charismatic Anishinaable playwright/storyteller Josh Languedoc of Indigenized Indigenous Theatre (one of my favourite company names) is puckishly titled Elon Muskrat, whose protagonist has put his new casino up for sale. Martin Dockery’s particular kind of low-key bemusement lends itself to the unspooling shaggy-dog kind of comedy, made incrementally plausible. It seems tailor-made for a possibly-true crime premise like 1 Small Lie, in which, as billed, “a family man robs a thief of a ton of money.” Paul Strickland, a Kentucky storyteller of great charm and comic chops, is a specialist in the particularly deadpan comedy of tall tales somehow made plausible. And they come with music. Last year he brought us Once Upon A Lie; this year 100% UnTrueBadour.
New musical theatre at the Fringe: Launching a new musical anywhere, much less at the Fringe, takes impressive (crazy labour-intensive) creative energy. But, hey, they have proliferated in a startling way at the festival. There are genre spoofs (Final Girl), live cartoons (Popeye The Musical), dramatic period pieces (The Spotlight’s Shadow). There’s even a solo musical (Zombies, Inc.).
Tickets, show descriptions and schedules: fringetheatre.ca.
