The annual Toronto Fringe Festival is running until Sunday July 12, and most shows still have two performances left, perhaps three if they've been named a Patron's Pick and given an extra show on Sunday. On Thursday July 9, the winners of those Patron's picks, as well as the shows selected for an additional brief run at the Toronto Centre For the Arts, were announced at the Fringe club, the outdoor hub and beer tent behind Honest Ed's where Fringe performers and patrons have been congregating every afternoon and night since the festival opened on July 1.

Post City has now seen approximately a quarter of the 148 shows being performed at the festival, and we're here to recommend which ones you should snap up tickets for before the festival closes, either because you're not likely to get another chance, or because you will, but how great will it be to say you were one of the first to see a future hit? In the event that one of our six top shows are sold out, we've also recommended a couple more that are similarly great. You'll want to buy your advance tickets now, because most of the shows will sell out, as word of mouth has been spreading since the festival opened.

God's Beard! (The Only Sketch Show That Has Ever Happened)

This year's Fringe has seen a bumper crop of good comedy. Some of Canada's best and most award-winning comedic talent (those that haven't permanently decamped for America, anyway) are taking part in the festival. Sketch troupe Falcon Powder are multiple Toronto Sketch Fest award winners, as well as Canadian Comedy Award winners, and all three members – Jim Annan, Scott Montgomery, and Kurt Smeaton – work regularly as writers for Canadian television. God's Beard!, however, is their first full-length revue, and it's a whirlwind collection of sketches that constantly twist and turn in unexpected directions, tackling taboo subjects like euthanasia, necrophilia, and jazz scat with seemingly effortless aplomb.

Also in the Al Green Theatre space, comedy troupe Sex T-Rex, who've come to specialize at the Fringe in kinetic adventure plays, are presenting Swordplay! A Play of Swords, a swashbuckling epic that pays homage to films like The Princess Bride and The Three Musketeers. (Despite their troupe name, the show is quite family friendly, with all the duelling taking place with foam swords.) And closer to the Festival hub behind Honest Ed's, at the Randolph Theatre, madcap duo Peter n' Chris present Here Lies Chris, an oddball story in which Peter must travel to different dimensions in search of a replacement for his best friend after Chris dies in a tragic comedy accident. (It falls somewhere in between the mature comedy of God's Beard! and the all ages humour of Swordplay.)

Summerland

The Fringe also attracts top notch entries in the new and emerging musicals style; past Fringe hits like The Drowsy Chaperone and My Mother's Lesbian Jewish Wiccan Wedding moved on to Broadway and off-Broadway after Fringe success. This year, the most impressive spectacle is Summerland, a collaboration between rising musical composing team Johnson and Johnston, Suzy Wilde, and the Wexford School for the Arts. At one point, more than seventy singers and dancers are on stage for a musical number in the show, which blends elements of Peter Pan, Spring Awakening, and The Breakfast Club. Some storylines are a bit rushed (we suspect the show was condensed to meet the festival's ninety minute maximum running time), but the cast is chock full of potential future musical theatre stars, and the experience is akin to a Mirvish show, at Fringe festival ticket prices.

Less epic in scope but arguably smoother in execution, People Suck is a song cycle ruminating on everyone's tendency to sometimes be thoughtless and cruel to each other, performed mostly by Second City alumni (the show in fact feels akin to a Second City mainstage revue of all musical numbers). And after narrowly avoiding a show closing cease and desist lawsuit by DJ DeadMau5, Deadmouse: The Musical, a parody of EDM music that doesn't feature the music of the international star (or his trademarks), is a surprisingly fun musical romp that evokes movies like Ratatouile and The Rescuers. (Both these shows are Patron's Picks, with an additional show on Sunday.)

Vanessa Smythe (Image: Nancy Ribeiro)

 

In Case We Disappear

There's a select number of shows at this year's Toronto Fringe that are crossing the ocean later this month to perform in the world's biggest and most prestigious festival on the Fringe circuit, the Edinburgh Fringe. Toronto is sending some top notch talent, including Vanessa Smythe's In Case We Disappear, a solo show in which she performs an often humourous mixture of spoken word poetry, biographical storytelling, and song. Smythe weaves her own stories of love and loss into her intimate cabaret, which also features a smooth cover of a fellow Canadian performer.

Also at the Toronto Fringe and soon to be representing our city (and Canada) on the international stage: clown sister duo Morro and Jasp, who're currently remounting their past Fringe hit Morro and Jasp Do Puberty; and Rebecca Perry, who's taking last year's Fringe hit Confessions of a Redheaded Coffeeshop Girl to Scotland, but performing its new sequel Adventures of a Redheaded Coffeeshop Girl here in Toronto.

Blue Bigwood-Mallin and Rachel Blair. (Image: Jon Robertson)

 

A Man Walks Into A Bar

Sketch comedy and musicals may have become the dominant forms at the Fringe, but it's still a great place to discover emerging playwrights, or new work by playwrights who've already made a splash there, and elsewhere. Rachel Blair is a past winner of the Fringe's New Play Contest, and she has another knockout punch this year at the Tarragon Theatre ExtraSpace with A Man Walks Into a Bar, a cunning trojan horse of a show that starts with a woman telling the audience a joke, while a man encourages her; as the joke unfolds, the two, acting it out, have their roles and relationship subverted. It starts out charming and playful, then slowly shifts to something surprising and unsettling.

Also at the Tarragon Theatre, on the MainSpace stage, local company Cue6 Productions is presenting the Canadian premiere of British playwright Mark Ravenhill's Pool (No Water), a dark comedy about an artist collective with a complicated love/hate relationship with a former member who's become a star. The play itself is hypnotizing and mind-bending on its own, but this staging also features an innovative physical language employed by the actors to internalize the moral struggles their characters and constantly working through, cleverly choreographed by Patricia Allison. It's an absorbing experience — both visually and dramatically.

And down at the Annex Theatre, playwright Sophia Fabiilli has come up with The Philanderess, a witty revamp of a George Bernard Shaw play that swaps gender roles and amps up the comedy to full blown farce. It's especially assisted by a pair of strong performances by Jakob Ehman and Seth Drabinsky as brothers, with Ehman playing a nearly feral and obsessed young lover, and Drabinsky as a more level-headed psychologist in training.

Caws and Effect

Most of the performances in the Fringe are actors or singers on stage, but some use proxies to help tell their stories, like puppets or projections. Caws and Effect uses both, as Vancouver's Mind of A Snail, AKA Chloé Ziner and Jessica Gabriel, tell a largely wordless story of two crows and their efforts to raise their young from the nest. The pair begin as the crows themselves, then incorporate overhead projection to display entrancing moving images as part of a moving animated fable.

Caws and Effect is also an all ages story, as is Hamlet… a Puppet Epic!. Shakey-Shake And Friends have boldly turned one of Shakespeare's most famous tragedies into a witty highlight of the KidsFringe programming at George Ignatieff Theatre. Despite every character (save one) dying an untimely death, the ensemble has managed to keep the show light-hearted and swift-moving, while still pausing from time to time to explain the moral complexities faced by Hamlet in a clear and thoughtful manner.

Not all the puppet hows in the Fringe are all ages, though. My Big Fat German Puppet Show is a puppet cabaret for adults, featuring a cannibal zombie, a pompous lederhosen-wearing singer, a stand-up set by an unlikely celebrity, and more. We won't spoil just how puppeteer Frank Meschkuleit, who's had his hand in a Fraggle in his long career, displays his creations, save to say that the whole show is imaginatively self-contained.

Daniel Tobias. (Image: Andrew Wuttke)

 

The Orchid And The Crow

Some of the most polished shows at the Fringe are presented by out of town performers who're travelling with their act, some around the world. In The Orchid And The Crow, Australian Daniel Tobias takes his cancer battle story and juxtaposes it with a heartfelt yet irreverent diatribe against pessimism and the more negative aspects of organized religion, employing myriad methods such as some rock and roll numbers, a striptease, and an Italian aria to keep the potentially heavy material bouncing along.

Other travelling artists who've impressed us at the Fringe include Folk Lordz, a duo from Edmonton's Rapid Fire Theatre who improvise hilarious stories that incorporate elements of indigenous Canadian storytelling and Russian Chekovian drama, and The Untitled Sam Mullins Project, a series of stories by the West Coast raised storyteller who's spent much time on the road in the last few years (though he's now based here in Toronto).

Steve Fisher is a Toronto-based arts journalist and reviewer who writes regularly for Torontoist, and has contributed to The A.V. Club and CBC Music. Follow him on Twitter: @gracingthestage.