The Toronto Fringe Festival

I’ll be writing more about my trip to England later in the week. But for the time being, the Toronto Fringe Festival is running and I’ve been invited to a lot of preview shows just so that I can relate my opinions back to you all. Let’s face it: you can’t have a preview without the word “Review”. Without it, you’d just have a “p”. And you can’t just have a p in a theatre, you have to go to the toilets. I know. I’ve been thrown out of enough shows.

One of the most talked-about shows in the festival is An Angry Transvestite Talks About His Crotch, a one-man show in the Gashlycrumb Tiny Auditorium on Yonge and St. Muffin. I’ll be honest, if you’re not interested in transvestites, crotches or high-pitched laughter at one’s own jokes, you’re not going to find much to enjoy here.

Gratuitous Swearing in the Motherfucking Title is a new play from the drama club of Saint Liberace’s Middle School in West Parody. In all my years of reviewing things, I have never seen anything quite so violent, so sexually explicit, so foul-mouthed and so gut-wrenchingly bleak as this performance. It made Harvey Keitel’s Bad Lieutenant look like an episode of Smallville. God, this was fantastic. Take your kids. If you don’t have kids, take someone else’s. You can usually find some outside a shoe shop.

If you like improv, you’ll love the Statue of Ad-Lib-erty, which is running from Tuesday to Tuesday following, at the Whiplash Theatre in the Jerseying District. Shout out things that you think are funny and receive rolled eyes from the performers who really do actually see you as a barrier to humour, rather than a facilitator. Oh, “Nantucket”, how hilarious, nobody’s ever shouted “Nantucket” before. Are you sure you’re not Colin Mochrie or something?

A Tribute to Someone You’ve Never Heard of features the comedy stylings of Dan the Faux Misogynist, Deborah the Traffic Warden Who Wears a Mexican Wrestler Mask for Comic Effect and Ted, That Guy Who Pretends to be Mentally Slow by Slurring But Actually Isn’t Because He’s Really a Financial Advisor in Real Life. Anyone who watches this show is guaranteed at least one and a half actual laughs or your money back. Free show, then.

Finally, a thoroughly enjoyable play stars Edgar Badmoustache and Jemima Duddlepuck as two old people who sit and reminisce in front of a fireplace. The play, which doesn’t have a title, is showing at Grumbly Street Nursing Home, every day until December. The play is free, though viewers are asked to donate several biscuits and tea for the performers.

The Toronto garbage collectors are currently on strike, meaning that the city streets are piled high with crap and rubbish. That this is occurring at the same time as the Fringe Festival is purely coincidental.

Book Review: Gingerbread Hunter by Kathryn Wehrle

Kathryn Wehrle's first piece of non-fiction is the story of her quest to find the best-tasting gingerbread in the whole of Toronto. Along the way she finds and befriends all sorts of different people, bringing them together under the tasty brown umbrella that is a good gingerbread.

The book takes the reader through the Toronto bakery world, from the upper class croissant houses of Yonge to the seedy sesame bun shacks that form the city's notorious backstreet baking underbelly. The chapters dealing with these latter parts of the quest are terrifying, especially when the author's taste testing is interrupted by a visit from the bakery's owner, the notorious crime lord Saffron Tumerick, head of the Danish Mafia.

Other elements of the story are uplifting, such as the chapter in which Kathryn manages to save a struggling patisserie by recommending them to a hungry passer-by; the man is none other than Richard Branson, and he invests huge sums of money in the bakery, rescuing it from bankruptcy. There are also hilariously funny scenes, such as the impromptu food fight in a tea shop populated by upper-class ladies, and the scene in which Kathryn finds a woman's toe in a gingerbread man. Her search for the toe's former owner took her to three different continents and started a friendship that would eventually lead to divorce.

But rather than the people, the star of Gingerbread Hunter is the gingerbread itself. Kathryn's description of each morsel alone is worth the price of the book. From the 'delapidated creosote bungalow smell' of an out-of-date coffeeshop pastry to the 'smarmy self-confident sneer' of Guutenborg's $3,000-a-piece luxury gingerbread, Wehrle's prose makes each mouthful of biscuit real.

All in all, I would give this book five icing sugar buttons out of five.