Each week, Torontoist examines the upcoming TV listings and makes note of programs that are entertaining, informative, and of quality. Or, alternately, none of those. The result: Televisualist.......

The Gladstone Variations is one of the most interesting things to come to the Toronto Fringe in recent years, and now the site-specific wonder is back. Here's what we had to say about it last year: The Gladstone Variations is taking the Fringe by storm. And with good reason. The 90-minute piece is by Convergence Theatre, who were the team behind last year's fantastic Autoshow, which was actually a collection of 7 ten-minute plays......

We really hope you saw The Swearing Jar by Kate Hewlett (pictured) at the Fringe, because it just had its last performance yesterday evening. Funny, compelling, and at times heartbreakingly sad, Hewlett's top-notch script (developed in the 2007 Tarragon Playwrights Unit) was brilliantly brought to life with Geoffrey Pounsett's direction and an absolutely perfect cast. Carey and Simon are a happy young couple about to become parents. Without giving too much away, there is......

Domestic is an absolutely insane black comedy about a bright-eyed 50s housewife who has to deal with an encyclopedia salesman who keeps dying in her kitchen, pesky phone calls from someone named "God" who keeps talking about the end of the world and her inability to have enough cat food. Also, a pair of fast-talking weirdos with faux British accents (pictured) keep bursting into her home and she may or may not have murdered......

When Antonin Artaud wrote Theatre and Its Double, the manifesto for his so-called Theatre of Cruelty, he called for the actors to bleed on the audience as well as a bunch of other things that are probably best left interpreted metaphorically. Surely, Glen Callendar's Transcendental Masturbation, now playing at the Fringe, was not exactly what he had in mind? During last night's performance, during a "peeling" joke gone awry, Callendar wound up removing not......

Caterwaul Theatre's How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Abortion, currently playing at the Fringe, is a heartfelt and hilarious dark comedy about a devout Christian named Esther who lives a happy existence with her husband in a small religious community, but also happens to run a secret midnight abortion clinic under the name "Medea's Buy and Sell." Things get complicated when a splinter cell within her Bible study group hears about the......

The name "TJ Dawe" has become ubiquitous at the Fringe. In any given summer, it seems like not only are we bound to see one of his famous one-man shows, but probably when we search through our programs at the end of various other shows we will undoubtedly discover that he has directed them or been in some way involved. This summer is no different. Not only is his new 90 minute one-man show......

David, a show playing at this year's Fringe, opens with a video projection of a man taking a shower. This should come as little surprise for anyone who's seen the play's racy poster (although, don't be fooled into thinking you'll get to gawk at a nude dude, the super NSFW trailer on their website shows more nudity than the actual play). The shower scene segues into a light show with a pre-recorded voice over......

Not all Fringe shows happen at the main or studio spaces of the big three (Tarragon, Muraille, Factory); some are in school basements (like Eve Ensler’s A Memory, A Monologue, A Rant and a Prayer), others are in smaller theatres (like the Robert Gill or Glen Morris), and others take place in bars. The Cameron has the Christian Republic Fundraiser in Dayton Tennessee, Paupers has Opera on the Rocks, and Bread and Circus has The......

Thick-Skinned is a play by first-time writer Laura Ross about Scleroderma, a rare and sometimes debilitating disease. Susie is a painter who always thought she just had cold hands until she gets diagnosed with a condition her doctor doesn't seem to know more about than she does. But pride gets in the way of her being able to fully share the full details of her condition with her roommate Ember or her new boyfriend......

It may be too early to call, but Lupe: Undone might just be the funniest thing at this year's Fringe. This completely insane one-woman show starring Melissa D'Agostino as a charismatic South American woman waiting for her lover, David Mirvish, in the alley behind Honest Ed's is one of the freshest, weirdest, and utterly charming pieces of theatre we've seen in a while. Lupe enters the scene scaling down a fire escape in a......

Sky Gilbert's Ladylike, a new one-act play written specifically for Canada's favourite trans woman, Nina Arsenault, comes to us by way of a well-received run in Hamilton. The play—in which Arsenault's character mostly addresses the audience (and occasionally her boyfriend, played by Wes Berger) on subjects like her family history, her many cosmetic surgery procedures, and ideas about gender construction—probably seemed pretty audacious and daring for Hamilton, but it's interesting to see how a......

Dear Jimmy Hogg, I am the guy with red hair who was sitting in the front row of your show, A Brief History of Petty Crime, at its Toronto Fringe debut last night. I am sure that you remember me. You started talking to me a bit during your show, at first when I laughed at a joke you made about pesto. Your chatty, digressive performance style allows for such interaction and abandonment of......

For patriotic theatre-going homosexuals (and really, is there any other kind?), there has been little downtime as of late. Pride, Canada Day, and now the mighty Toronto Fringe Festival have all bled into each other, separated only by a single Monday in which to nurse RuPaul-induced hangovers. Now in its twentieth season, Toronto's biggest theatre festival takes over the city as of 5:30 p.m. this evening. (And it's for straights, too!) Fringing blind is......

Here's something to clear away your post-NYE doldrums: the Fringe, everyone's favourite early-summer theatre festival (don't worry, SummerWorks, you're our favourite late-summer theatre festival) has had a baby. Aw! Last Wednesday, something called The Next Stage Theatre Festival began at Factory Theatre. Next Stage really is like a baby Fringe: a smaller festival of only 8 shows running in rep at a single theatre, complete with a heated beer tent. The plays, which run......

This review of Real Time comes to us from a guest contributor, Johnnie Walker, whose play The Zoo-Keeper's Love Song appeared in last year's Fringe Festival. The Fringe may be over, but thanks to The Diesel Playhouse, a bunch of Fringe shows are getting short rep runs over the next two weeks. One of these shows is Real Time, so if you didn’t get a chance to catch this fast-paced and pretty hilarious rom-com during......