The 2025 Toronto Fringe Festival has officially kicked off! With over 100 shows on offer this year, there’s plenty of shows to choose from. I’m excited to share with you all my thoughts on this year’s shows! Happy Fringe!
A Play We Wrote Just Now – Yaas & Vyle Presents
Improv shows are a mainstay of any Fringe Festival, but what happens when you take an improv format and throw in the camp and comedy of drag? You get A Play We Wrote Just Now by legendary queens Hillary Yaas and Selena Vyle. Taking audience suggestions and turning it into an hour of hilarity and drama, A Play We Wrote Just Now is a great reminder of what Fringe is all about.
Armed with a rack of costumes (which they said they’ve stolen from other shows), some wigs, and a basket of props, Hillary Yaas and Selena Vyle are ready to take on whatever the audience throws at them. Asking for a genre, starting location, end location, and title, Yaas and Vyle then launch into creating a play. What tops it all off is that there’s a playlist of songs given to the stage manager which seemingly contains random songs and they still have to find a way to work them into whatever scene is occurring, no matter how incongruous that song is to the moment. All of these elements come together to create a truly unique experience; no one else is going to witness “Melting Vanilla”, the story my audience created, ever again. You can keep coming back to A Play We Wrote Just Now time after time during Fringe and you’ll never see the same show twice!
Yaas and Vyle are not just stunningly beautiful drag queens (these gals have mugs beat and hips padded for the Gods, henny), but they’re incredible performers as well. Their interactions with the audience are just as entertaining as the show itself, and their improv skills are clearly well-honed. A Play We Wrote Just Now was the perfect way for me to kick off my Fringe and it’s certainly a fun show you won’t want to miss!
A Play We Just Wrote Just Now | Toronto Fringe Festival
Photo by Philip Sawaia
Regarding Antigone – The Sky is the Limit Theatre
We live in a world where watching atrocities from across the world is essentially expected every time one takes a glance at their phone. But what do we actually DO about it? Banafsheh Hassani’s haunting play Regarding Antigone asks us to reflect on that, and much more, as we watch a human slowly loses their life on stage. A series of poignant vignettes linked by an unsettling narrator, Regarding Antigone is a play about witnessing the horrors of this world and how we choose to react to them.
Hassani plays multiple roles throughout Regarding Antigone, telling stories of kidnapped children, beaten protestors, and young people taking their own lives. While the subject matter is heavy, these are the realities of life in other parts of the world, realities which we get mere snippets of through social media. Between these stories, Hassani plays a narrator whose Cheshire Cat smile is a little too big and who laughs a little too hard; an unsettling portrayal of the facade we all wear despite the terror we feel. There’s a very meta-theatrical feel to the piece, as they narrate when they are going in and out of characters, as well as using direct address to implicate the audience.
Hassani’s performance is moving and unforgettable; not only the way they tell these stories, but their physicality as well is fantastic.
At the end of the show, there’s a guided cool down session, as well as an opportunity to talk with other audience members and the team about the show. These safety practices being extended to the audience, as well as the performer, is beneficial for us all considering the weight of the subject matter.
So, what are you going to do? Sit back and watch, or get up and help? Regarding Antigone pointedly asks this of its audience and it’s up to us to decide what to do next.
Regarding Antigone | Toronto Fringe Festival
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