First Week of Fringe

We're actually well into the second week of Fringe.  I managed to see 9 productions.  Most of them were quite good, and indeed, two of them are considered hits that are selling out (Three Men and a Bike and Tita Jokes), so I think I have picked fairly well.  The Huns at Crowsnest was good in a darkly humorous vein.  There was a very entertaining site-specific Taming of the Shrew, which was in the Grange behind the AGO.  (So I took my son into the AGO for a quick refresher before the show.)  However, they play this completely straight-up and didn't try to soften Kate's complete obedience to her "lord and master" at the end.  I'm definitely coming around to the idea that this last scene (with Kate upbraiding Bianca and the widow and teaching them their "duties") should just be cut completely.  It simply cannot be salvaged in any reasonable way, whereas the bits up to this point can be finessed.  Nonetheless, it is still one of the funnier plays in the canon, even if incredibly dated (as my son said afterwards).  In contrast, the ugliness of anti-semitism in The Merchant of Venice is so all pervasive that I simply have no desire to ever see this play again.  (I had forgotten that I had a longer piece on redeeming the Shrew from several years back.  I think the points are still valid, particularly in this stripped-down version that didn't bend the play nearly as much as Driftwood a few years back.)

There was one show I saw where the acting was good but the plot, such as it was, didn't make any sense, but I probably would have gone regardless, since I knew one of the actors.  There was only one bad show where one of the actors was still peeking into his script and then there were all these bizarre plot twists at the end, none of which made any sense if you really stopped to think about it.  So only one true dud so far.  What made it even worse is that I left a library book at the show (as my pannier was sort of overflowing).  I was extremely fortunate that one of the volunteers found it and then brought it to the Fringe Patio the next day where I was able to retrieve it.  So a happy ending after all.

There is a chance that I'll still make In Waking Life at Crowsnest this weekend (to round things out to 10) but a lot depends on what my step-mom and her family wants to do, since they are in town to visit Toronto.  In her case, this is the first time she's been in Toronto in decades, and probably seeing the Toronto Fringe is not at the top of her list...

All in all 2019 seems like a pretty good Fringe (for me), and definitely a much less stressful one than last year where I really was running around like crazy, even when I wasn't stage managing my own show.