With its lottery-selected programming, the Toronto Fringe Festival has long served as a platform for theatre productions in early stages of development — while the same organization’s Next Stage Theatre Festival has allowed artists to showcase their more polished works at a standalone, juried festival since 2008.
This year, however, Fringe is combining the two and hosting Next Stage as a series within the 37th iteration of the main festival. The series comprises a curated lineup of four higher-priced shows set to run from July 2 to 13. Toronto Fringe executive director and co-lead Rachel Kennedy said the decision to amalgamate the two festivals was made to bring more attention to Next Stage productions.
“Our July programming garners so much interest and has such strong industry attendance, that we realized it was actually the best time to highlight our Next Stage artists and introduce them to a larger audience than we have access to at other times in the year,” Kennedy wrote in an email statement.
The four Next Stage shows are Siranoush, Songs by a Wannabe, Have Fun Kids, and Justice For Maurice Henry Carter. They’ll all run between the two main theatres in Soulpepper Theatre’s Young Centre for the Performing Arts. A first-time Fringe hub, the Distillery District building will play host to five different venues, as well as the annual Fringe patio.
Solo show Siranoush was inspired by the first woman from the non-Western world to play Hamlet. Like writer-performer Lara Arabian, Siranoush was an Armenian actress, though she lived more than 150 years ago.
“This woman, through multiple obstacles and unbelievable world events, not only survived but thrived and went on to found her own theatre company and cross continents and play over 300 roles,” Arabian said over Zoom. “I find it hard enough now, juggling being a mother, artistic drive, and the idea of being an ‘ethnic’ actress in Toronto and being in that box — so how did she do it?”
From that question came this play: a multimedia conversation between the late actress and Arabian about cultural roots, creative passion, and female empowerment. Because the text moves between Armenian, French, and English, the production features surtitles that are woven into Avideh Saadatpajouh’s projection design; they don’t only function as a translation tool, but also as a means of evoking a certain time, place, or theme.
Siranoush was the first play Arabian ever wrote (she’s written more since), and she first performed it in a sold-out run at Aluna Theatre’s RUTAS Festival in 2022.
“I had members of my own community coming up in tears that their story had been represented for the first time,” Arabian said of the show’s first run. “It wasn’t only my community, it was all of these first-generation immigrant kids from different backgrounds, and also people who were artists and had an understanding of what it costs you and what it gives you.”
Arabian hopes Fringe audiences will respond similarly this time around, especially since its themes of immigration and motherhood, as well as language and its erasure, feel even more pertinent to her now than in 2022.
She concedes she initially felt some trepidation about being included in the main festival and running among more than 100 other shows — a departure from what she originally signed up for, as Siranoush was initially slated to be a part of the 2024 Next Stage cohort — but she says she’s eager to share the show with festival attendees.
“It feels lovely to be in this curated window of it,” Arabian said. “They are working hard to make sure that we stand apart, which doesn’t mean we’re any better or worse than any of the other shows but just a little bit different, and we are excited to have a conversation with the Fringe audience.”
Barbara Johnston, the creator and star of another solo show, Songs by a Wannabe, told Intermission she’s thrilled to be among the four productions included in the series, and the only musical among the selected shows. This is the second Next Stage offering she’s been a part of, with the first being Edge of the Sky’s Blood Ties in 2017.
“Fringe is wonderful because it gives artists and performers at different stages of the development of a piece — but usually in the early stages — a platform to get some tangible feedback from an audience,” Johnston said over Zoom. “That’s such an important first step, but the challenge is going from that to a fully producible, polished show that can tour or run at a theatre, and it’s that chasm that is often lost.”
She believes Next Stage fills that gap.
Directed by Mitchell Cushman, Johnston’s semi-autobiographical show follows Babz, a Ginger Spice impersonator in a Spice Girls tribute band who has just come off “the tour from hell” and is reflecting on her career. The story draws from Johnston’s real-life experience — her own Spice Girls band Wannabe has been successfully performing and touring for nearly 14 years.
The first iteration of the show was Bubble Babz: Songs from the Tub, which Johnston mounted in 2022. It, too, was about how she felt in her career and creative endeavours, though without any mention of the Spice Girls.
The latest version was written following a two-month Wannabe tour through North America that took a serious toll on Johnston and her bandmates. It was post-COVID-19, prices had increased, and the performers had aged, making sleeping on a bus slightly less pleasant than they’d remembered. The tour prompted conversations among the members about whether it might be time to slow things down to pursue other ventures, like having children or exploring additional creative pursuits.
“We’ve definitely been at a crossroads with what the future of the band will look like,” Johnston said. “Do you stop this when you’re dead in the ground and it doesn’t have the same magic it once did, or do you stop it before you’ve given so much to something and it’s taken up a certain amount of energy that maybe could’ve been put elsewhere?”
That provocation is at the heart of Songs by a Wannabe, which features an original pop score written by Johnston and her real-life bandmates Suzy Wilde and Anika Johnson. (Wilde recently composed the music for another show about a band, Musical Stage Company and Tarragon Theatre’s After the Rain.) Some of the songs featured are “trunk songs” which were previously written by members of the trio for different projects and are now being repurposed, while others were written explicitly for this piece.
“It’s going to be fun and funny, and it’s also hopefully going to offer a window into the reality of what it’s like to be an artist,” Johnston said. “For fellow artists, I hope they feel seen, and for people who maybe are less familiar with the behind-the-scenes element, I hope this exposes some truths.”
The 2025 Toronto Fringe Festival runs from July 2 to 13. Tickets are available here.
Toronto Fringe is an Intermission partner. Learn more about Intermission’s partnership model here.
WRITTEN BY
Mira Miller
Mira is an arts, lifestyle, and health freelance writer based in Toronto. She covers intersectional feminism, issues affecting the 2SLGBTQ+ community, theatre, body image, and more. In her spare time, you can find her listening to the soundtrack of a musical, watching Broad City, or dreaming about her next meal.
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