5-Step Guide to Being German 2.0 Paco Erhard's comedy is internationally hilarious. You don't have to be German to appreciate his humour but if you are, there seems to be a touch of Mario Barth influence.

There is a reason this show has been sold out around the world since 2011.

His show is a look into how the world sees and stereotypes Germans and how those cliches have come to exist. His explanation with diagram, of a particular Autobahn problem will have you in tears. His delivery is energetic and he is a great storyteller.

Get your tickets for this one soon because they won't last long.

​5-Step Guide to Being German 2.0 is playing at Waterfront Theatre 6 - 16 September as part of the 2018 Vancouver Fringe Festival.

~ reviewed by Ferne Brown

Small Town Boys is a one-man show written and performed by Sean Leclaire Casey, originally a Canadian who now lives in Boston Mass. Casey's powerful tale is his own story of growing up in a small rough town outside of Montreal. Those were the days when being a man meant being tough and affection was shown more through closed fists than clasped hands.

The stage setting effectively creates a ghostly memory of the Freeman Pub, a central character from the story of the lives of these Small Town boys. Casey interacts with the tables and chairs to take us across time and space to meet the boys and men of his youth and tell their tragic tales. It was the most 'theatrical' of the staging I have seen yet at the Fringe.

The show lives up to its billing. It left me and others I spoke to with a sense of regret and loss for those sensitive souls that were entrapped in certain expectations of maleness. The stereotype of the macho male that is forged in those small towns is very much relevant in today's world where a resurgent view of the hyper-masculine, testosterone poisoned male is admired in some quarters of society.

The show is an excellent educational piece to provoke discussion about gender stereotyping, social pressure to conform, and the potential to escape the conditioning of one's childhood. 

Small Town Boys is playing at Waterfront Theatre 6 - 16 September as part of the 2018 Vancouver Fringe Festival.

~ reviewed by Evelyn McKelvie

Josh Languedoc of Indigenized Indeginous Theatre from St. Albert, Alberta is the creator of this marvellous play. It is about his relationship with his grandfather and is told from the perspective of a young boy reading his story to the rest of his class for a school project.

The setting is minimal - a chair in the centre of a stage, a folder of torn and ragged pages on the floor, pages over to front stage right. The actor vividly portrays the young sick boy in a hospital bed from the chair and his recovered self reading from the folder, telling his fellow students about how his story came to him while he was ill.

The actor (and writer) moves from one character to another beautifully and seamlessly, holding our attention through the winding tale as it moves through time and space. Eventually he plays multiple characters in the story - the grandfather, raven, young warrior, King, wolf and many others that fill the stories told by his Grandfather. In each case Languedoc subtly inhabits each, giving physical clues so that we never lose track of the story as each character tells his part.

I thoroughly enjoyed the play and the performance.  I can't think of anyone who wouldn't enjoy it. It's a great tale for children as well as adults.

Rocko and Nakota - Tales From The Land by Indigenized Indeginous Theatre is playing at the Waterfront Theatre 6 - 16 September as part of the 2018 Vancouver Fringe Festival.

~ reviewed by Evelyn McKelvie

This show explores the concept of procrastination through acrobatics. Video games and fiction intertwine with real life. The structure could be stronger, and the show could have been longer, but the script was funny and I really enjoyed the idea of it. 

One of the main things about the show is it heavily relies on references to video games and anime culture. So if you aren't or in that world of video games or anime, you may feel lost or out of place in the theatre. The only thing keeping those references together is acrobatics. So the show mainly has acrobatics as the glue to keep the audience interested when all she starts to fall. (Haha, get it? Fall? It's acrobatics and they fall. Nevermind...) 

My Imagination Ran Away Without Me is playing at the Waterfront Theatre 6 - 16 September as part of the 2018 Vancouver Fringe Festival.

~ reviewed by Michelle Williams