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The Toronto Fringe Festival is an annual theatre festival, featuring un-juried plays by unknown or well-known artists, taking place in the theatres of Toronto, Ontario, Canada. Several productions originally mounted at the Fringe have later been remounted for larger audiences, including the Tony Award-winning musical The Drowsy Chaperone, and the sitcom Kim's Convenience.
The Toronto Fringe Festival started in 1989 and hosts over 150 productions every July. [1]
It is well known for not having a jury to judge which plays will be presented. Instead it uses a lottery system which gives each play an equal chance. It depends mostly on volunteers, donors/sponsors, and government grants. One notable feature is the 24-hour playwriting contest in which contestants write a play in one day based on items selected by the Fringe and the winning play is performed on the last day of the festival.
In 2008 "The Fringe of Toronto" launched a second festival called "The Next Stage Festival" (NSTF) which takes place annually in January. Unlike the summer festival, NSTF is juried and presents both new and remounted projects by "Fringe Artists". Also, unlike the summer Fringe Festival NSTF only showcases 8 productions.
NSTF was the first major step in the organization branching out to a year-round support organization that brings many opportunities to artists and arts-lovers. Since the launch of NSTF "The Toronto Fringe" has also introduced a number of artists outreach programs including The Fringe Evolution Fund to help independent producers remount their shows outside of the festival, and youth outreach programs including 10x10x10 which distributes 1,000 rush passes to priority youth in and around Toronto.
In 2010 the Toronto Fringe launched a new and expanded Fringe Club featuring free nightly entertainment, an expanded beer tent, a public stage called "Postscript Patio", art installations called Fringe-Pretty-Things, and food service provided by local restaurants. 2011 saw the grand opening of yet another expansion, this time a year-round fixture called "The Fringe Creation Lab".The Creation Lab is the new home of the Toronto Fringe and the indie arts community. The Lab consists of two studio spaces and the Toronto Fringe admin office, both housed on the 4th floor of the Centre for Social Innovation in the Annex. (Just steps away from Bathurst Station.) Both studios are available for anyone to rent at any time to do whatever they want. The spaces can be rented at various levels of subsidy, on a first-come, first-served basis. The studios are already a buzzing arts hub, bookable all hours of the day and night, where artists can focus on their craft and connect with their community without breaking the bank
Some notable productions include Trey Anthony's Da Kink in My Hair , winner of the Cultural Diversity Drama Competition, premiered as a one hour television pilot produced by VisionTV in 2004, and later was adapted into a half-hour weekly TV series in 2007-8 by the Global Television Network; My Own Private Oshawa , a one-man show by Jonathan Wilson which was later adapted into a film; and The Drowsy Chaperone , which went on to Broadway and several world tours. In 2009, My Mother's Lesbian Jewish-Wiccan Wedding was picked up by Mirvish Productions from the festival and opened only three months later at Toronto's Panasonic Theatre. Ins Choi's Kim's Convenience , winner of the 2011 Best New Play award, was remounted in 2012 by Soulpepper Theatre, and went on to become the successful TV series Kim's Convenience .
Canada's contemporary theatre reflects a rich diversity of regional and cultural identities. Since the late 1960s, there has been a concerted effort to develop the voice of the 'Canadian playwright', which is reflected in the nationally focused programming of many of the country's theatres. Within this 'Canadian voice' are a plurality of perspectives - that of the First Nations, new immigrants, French Canadians, sexual minorities, etc. - and a multitude of theatre companies have been created to specifically service and support these voices.
Fringe theatre is theatre that is produced outside of the main theatre institutions, and that is often small-scale and non-traditional in style or subject matter. The term comes from the Edinburgh Festival Fringe. In London, the fringe are small-scale theatres, many of them located above pubs, and the equivalent to New York's Off-Off-Broadway theatres and Europe's "free theatre" groups.
The Ottawa Fringe Festival is an annual fringe theatre festival in Ottawa. The festival was inaugurated in 1997. The festival takes place for ten days each June. Performances are held indoors and out.
Buddies in Bad Times Theatre is a Canadian professional theatre company. Based in Toronto, Ontario, and founded in 1978 by Matt Walsh, Jerry Ciccoritti, and Sky Gilbert, Buddies in Bad Times is dedicated to "the promotion of queer theatrical expression". It is the largest and longest-running queer theatre company in the world.
Judith Clare Thompson, OC is a Canadian playwright. She has twice been awarded the Governor General's Award for drama, and is the recipient of many other awards including the Order of Canada, the Walter Carsen Performing Arts Award, the Toronto Arts Award, The Epilepsy Ontario Award, The B'nai B'rith Award, the Dora, the Chalmers, the Susan Smith Blackburn Award and the Amnesty International Freedom of Expression Award, both for Palace of the End, which premiered at Canadian Stage, and has been produced all over the world in many languages. She has received honorary doctorates from Thorneloe University and, in November 2016, Queen's University in Kingston, Ontario.
The Drowsy Chaperone is a Canadian musical with music and lyrics by Lisa Lambert and Greg Morrison, and a book by Bob Martin and Don McKellar.
Prairie Theatre Exchange (PTE) is a professional theatre in Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada. It is located on the third floor of Portage Place mall in downtown Winnipeg. By the end of the 2016–17 season, PTE had presented 340 plays on its thrust stage over its 44-year history, 149 of which were world premieres, to an annual average attendance of 35,000 people.
Robert Martin is a television and musical theatre actor and writer from Toronto, Ontario, Canada.
The Saskatoon Fringe Festival produced by 25th Street Theatre is an annual Fringe theatre festival in Saskatoon, Saskatchewan, Canada. A Fringe Festival is not censored, and not juried, provides live theatre inexpensively, and a public busking forum for musicians. The 10-day international theatre, arts, and culture Festival is hosted annually in the Broadway District in the Nutana neighborhood.
Vanishing Point theatre company was founded in Glasgow in 1999 by Matthew Lenton.
Performance Network Theatre, founded in 1981, was Ann Arbor, Michigan's premiere professional Equity theatre. It produced a wide variety of dramas, classics, comedies, Pulitzer Prize and Tony award-winners, many of which were World or Michigan Premieres. Its professional season included five to seven main stage productions. Other programming included seasonal productions that ran in repertory over the holiday season, the Northern Writers' Project—a week-long playwriting intensive, children's programming, the Fireside Festival of New Plays, the Open Table Series, the Open Stage series, music and more.
The Governor's School for the Arts is a regional secondary arts school sponsored by the Virginia Department of Education and the public school divisions of Chesapeake, Franklin, Isle of Wight County, Norfolk, Portsmouth, Southampton County, Suffolk, and Virginia Beach. It is one of 19 Virginian academic-year Governor's Schools and provides intensive educational opportunities for identified gifted students in instrumental music, vocal music, dance, musical theatre, theatre & film, and visual arts. The school is housed in the historic Monroe Building in downtown Norfolk.
David Christopher Richards, best known as Christopher Richards is a Canadian playwright, theatre designer and casting director.
Greg Morrison is a Canadian composer and writer best known for his work on the Tony Award-winning musical The Drowsy Chaperone, written with songwriting partner, Lisa Lambert. The Drowsy Chaperone was their first collaboration. In 1999 Lambert asked Morrison to work on a musical to perform at the wedding stag party of their friends, Bob Martin and Janet Van De Graaff. Also a part of this original writing team was filmmaker, Don McKellar. That was the first incarnation of The Drowsy Chaperone. This was followed by an expanded production of the show at the Toronto Fringe festival, where Martin joined as a co-writer and performer.
Adam Kelly Morton (1973-), also known as Adam Kelly, is a Canadian actor, writer, producer and teacher.
Kim's Convenience by Ins Choi, is a play about a family-run Korean-owned convenience store in Toronto's Regent Park neighbourhood.
The Canadian Association of Fringe Festivals (CAFF) is an international body that promotes and safeguards the ideals and principles of fringe theatre in North America.
Dan Chameroy is a Canadian actor.
The 1st Canadian Comedy Awards honoured the best Canadian comedy of 1999 in live performances, television and film. The awards ceremony was presented by the Canadian Comedy Foundation for Excellence (CCFE), and was held on 6 April 2000 at the Masonic Temple in Toronto, Ontario. The ceremony was hosted by Dave Thomas. A one-hour version of the ceremony was broadcast late the following night on CTV, and the full program aired on The Comedy Network on 9 April at 9 pm.
bluemouth inc. is an experimental theater company known for creating immersive performance works. It holds split residence in New York City, Toronto, and Montreal and is an intersection of dance, performance art, visual media, electronic music, lyric poetry, and psychological realism. Collaborative and interdisciplinary in its approach, its hosts traditional theatrical and event-based performative productions.
