Source: Edmonton Journal
Author: Justin Bell
Gwendolyn Magnificent and Bartholomew Spectacular are a pair of star-crossed lovers. They live on separate peninsulas and meet at a market on the mainland where Gwendolyn sells dragon fruit, nourishing the dragon fruit trees with her tears. Bartholomew loves dragon fruit.
They fall fast in love, the type of love that makes you giddy, makes you say silly things, makes you count down the hours until you next get to see the shining visage of your beloved. It’s not burning passions or wanton desire, but the type of love that gives you butterflies and makes your palms sweaty. It’s sweet, innocent love you can’t help but cheer for.
Source: 12thnight.ca
Author: Liz Nicholls
Nearly 15 years ago, in the chaotic excitement of reviewing Fringe shows, I found myself in a nondescript church basement in Strathcona: musty church basement smell, sullen lighting, inauspicious wooden church chairs.
What happened after that was an hour or so of pure theatrical magic, the kind you don’t forget. With only a ladder, water glasses, a whirly-wind, and a couple of lamps, Emily Pearlman and Nicolas Di Gaetano of Ottawa’s Mi Casa told an enchanting musical love story fairy tale. Like all musical love story fairy tales should, it started with ‘Once Upon a Time’….”
The show was Countries Shaped Like Stars. And I remember it as if it were yesterday.
Source: 12thnight.ca
Author: Liz Nicholls
At the Fringe, on the very night, you can see a sweet rom-com that starts in elderly tranquillity and works backwards, through big moments. Evie and Alfie: A Very British Love Story, a rom-com by and starring Brit-born Fringe stars Alex Dallas and Jimmy Hogg, returns here for one night only. Tickets: fringetheatre.ca. See 12thnight’s preview interview with the pair here.
Source: 12thnight.ca
Author: Liz Nicholls
“Evie and Alfie, an older retired couple, sit in their house. Nothing happens for some time.”
That was the inspiration (and the initial stage direction), of Evie and Alfie: A Very British Love Story. The unusual romantic comedy created by, and starring, the Brit-born Toronto-based Fringe faves Alex Dallas (Sensible Footwear, Horseface) and Jimmy Hogg (The Potato King), returns to Edmonton as a theatrical Valentine for a single performance Feb. 14, as part of the Fringe Theatre season.
October 31, 2025
Source: Edify Edmonton
Author: Areeha Mahal
Why She’s Top 40:
Advancing preventative health care while strengthening our theatre community
Age: 35
Job Title: Market Development Manager for Alberta Blue Cross and Board Chair of Edmonton Fringe Theatre
By day, Elizabeth Hammell is shaping preventative health initiatives at Alberta Blue Cross. By night, she’s cheering on performers at North America’s largest and longest-running Fringe Festival. At first glance, the worlds seem far apart. But Hammell thrives where structure meets creativity and strategy dances with imagination.
November 1, 2025
Source: 12thnight.ca
Author: Liz Nicholls
In Tough Guy, an exhilarating new play by Hayley Moorhouse, a queer up-and-coming filmmaker tries to justify turning their camera on their friends, survivors of a shooting in queer nightclub mere days before, and reeling from the death of one of their circle.
Emerson (Autumn Strom) has arrived back home too late for the funeral (“I lost track of time”). Their artistic concept, in progress, is a film capture of “queer joy,” something visceral and powerful (also words in the Emerson lexicon). They’re arguing for the idea of art, self-expression, the compelling need to put the queer story out there in the world and thereby restore “agency” to the queer experience. And their friends, shattered in various ways, aren’t buying.
October 29, 2025
Source: Edify Edmonton
Author: Caitlin Hart
From winter light-ups and food fests to theatre, art and 1940s swing — here’s how to make the most of Edmonton in November.
October 28 to November 8
Tough Guy, a new play by local playwright Hayley Moorhouse, follows a group of friends navigating the aftermath of a shooting at a queer nightclub. See this complex exploration of grief, healing and joy at Fringe Theatre Arts Barns.
October 28rd, 2025
Source: 12thnight.ca
Author: Liz Nicholls
Do you remember where you were when you heard …?
There are moments in life when you know your answer will be instantly available in your memory, forever. Hayley Moorhouse, whose new play Tough Guy premieres Thursday in a Persistent Myth production directed by Brett Dahl (part of the Edmonton Fringe Theatre season), distinctly remembers driving to work one morning in 2016, listening to the radio. En route the news came on: a horrific mass shooting in Pulse, a queer nightclub in Orlando. “I’m not normally a big emotional kinda guy,” says Moorhouse, who indeed has a brisk, articulate sort of thoughtfulness and good humour in conversation. But they found themself “sobbing so hard I couldn’t see and had to pull over. It hit me so hard.”
October 23rd, 2025
Source: CTV News
Author: Adrienne Lee
The Fringe Theatre is opening its 2025-2026 season with an award-winning stage production next week.
Tough Guy by Hayley Moorhouse will kick off the theatre season next Tuesday at the Backstage Theatre at the Fringe Theatre Arts Barns. It explores themes of tragedy and “queer joy” as the story follows a group of friends after a traumatic shooting at a queer nightclub, according to the theatre’s news release on Thursday.
October 22nd, 2025
Source: Edify Edmonton
Author: Zachary Ayotte
How do we make art about trauma? The question is age old, and the answer, ever evolving, is often best expressed by the art itself — the paintings, movies, novels and performances that try to communicate how a traumatic event can change a person’s life.
It’s in this vein that Tough Guy, the new play running from October 28 to November 8 at Fringe Theatre Adventures, opens on the funeral of someone killed in a mass shooting at a queer nightclub. From there, it follows a group of friends, many of them also survivors of the shooting, as they try to process a collective trauma — together and alone — and grapple with irreversible loss.
August 7th, 2025
The newly minted Fringe Historian — the longest-serving employee at the Edmonton International Fringe Festival and formerly its office manager — is able to recall a staggering number of details from his tenure at the festival. As he leads a visitor down the west hall of the Arts Barns, where posters from each of the festival’s past outings are mounted, Osborn recalls bits of trivia, celebrity sightings and iconic festival moments with alacrity.
July 30th, 2025
Gerald Osborn has a soft spot for festival goers who get sucked into bad Fringe shows, or at least for people who get stuck attending dud after dud. After all, he’s been working at the Edmonton International Fringe Theatre Festival since 1989 and is a prolific playwright, putting on 19 shows over the years. He’s also the official Fringe Historian.
June 24th, 2025
The Edmonton International Fringe Festival is in its 44th year. Each year the Festival brings drama and laughs to our city with almost 220 theatre productions, in 40 venues, featuring performances by more than 1,600 artists.
June 13, 2025
The Edmonton Fringe Festival has unveiled its theme for the 2025 edition of the theatrical free-for-all.
May 1, 2025
The chores are unending on the farm owned and operated by Duncan J Hayes. He’s up before the crack of dawn to milk the cows, collect eggs, fill the water trough, the million little tasks that make up farm living.
April 9th, 2025
While the Edmonton International Fringe Theatre Festival has grown its monthly donors from 34 to 535 since launching its Sustain Fringe campaign one year ago, officials say it still needs to find more.
March 27th, 2025
Edmonton’s proximity to the vast, untouched wilderness of Northern Canada places it right on urbanism’s final frontier. The city is an approximately three-hour drive from the entrance to the expansive Jasper National Park and the Canadian Rockies; yet, you don’t have to leave Alberta’s capital to find crowd-free, tree-lined trails and an abundance of wildlife.
March 6, 2025
Edmonton is known as ‘Festival City’, holding more than 50 events every year. But perhaps the most famous is its Fringe. North America’s largest and oldest Fringe Festival sees the streets of Old Strathcona transformed by a flurry of pop-up performances.
February 20th, 2025
Gerald Osborn, the Edmonton International Fringe Theatre Festival’s first official historian, told Taproot that he always lies that he was at the first festival in 1982.
December 18, 2024
There’s no better time to connect with Edmonton’s artsy side than in August, when the International Fringe Festival takes over the city. The 11-day event fills the town with live shows in parks, theaters and even on the streets.
The assumption is that audiences are only interested in what they know and that art is only worth producing if it is guaranteed to draw in a massive audience. There is one place that rejects this notion, proving original ideas are endlessly entertaining and worth producing: the Edmonton Fringe Festival.
Festival of the Year: Edmonton International Fringe Theatre Festival
Established in 1982, the Edmonton International Fringe Theatre Festival is North America’s largest and longest-running festival of its kind, offering a platform for artists to present unjuried and uncensored performances.
