Stage/Toronto Fringe 2024

Running July 3 to 14, this year’s 76-show Toronto Fringe Festival lineup was weighted toward laughs, with 35 comedies to 13 dramas, and the 2024 patrons’ pick awards — given to the best-selling production in each venue — reflect that asymmetry.

On the comedy side, the winning productions include a pair of two-person, five-N clown shows, MONKS (in the Tarragon Solo Room) and Rat Academy (in the Theatre Passe Muraille Mainspace), as well as the solo show Artificially Intelligent by YouTube star/musical comedian Anesti Danelis (in the Tarragon Extraspace) and the three-part genre film mash-up Crime After Crime (After Crime) by popular comedy troupe Sex T-Rex (in the Tarragon Mainspace). Over at the Alumnae Theatre, Kate Barris and David Schatzky’s dark comedy Dead Right won.

Just two dramas received patrons’ pick awards: First Born Theatre Company’s five-N Gringas (in Native Earth’s Aki Studio), about seven Latine teenagers attending a Spanish-language summer camp, and Theatre Topikos’s POZ (in the Theatre Passe Muraille Backspace), winner of the 2024 Fringe Best New Play Contest.

This year was also light on musicals, with only six at the fest — still, Breakaway Entertainment’s Billy Joel/Elton John jukebox musical Scenes from an Italian Restaurant (in the Al Green Theatre) managed to secure the genre’s single patrons’ pick award. (Andrew Seok’s five-N Rosamund was ineligible, as it played an unconventional venue, Trinity-St. Paul’s United Church.)

The KidsFest patrons’ pick was Theatre Borgo’s Madame Winnifred’s Circus of Wonders; for Teen Fringe, it was Creative Music and Theatre with Claire’s Get a Clue!

In addition to receiving patrons’ pick awards, Artificially Intelligent and Rat Academy won awards determined by vote: the former took home the Second City Award for Best Comedy while the latter tied with the disorienting clown show Colonial Circus for Spirit of the Fringe, chosen by the artists. (Colonial Circus took home Canadian Green Alliance’s Greenest in Fringe Award, too.)

The Volunteer Choice Award went to Blair Moro’s Cabaret of Murder, a touring production in which three women present art made by serial killers. And North(519) Best of Fringe, adjudicated by Theatre Orangeville, went to Bare Theatre Collective’s Stiff & Sons, a dark comedy about a funeral home, as well as Bol, Brown Boy, Bol (Speak, Brown Boy, Speak), a rhythm-infused solo show by Nawaaz Makhan.

It’s great to see shows like MONKS and Gringas, from up-and-coming companies, sitting next to festival favourites like Danelis and Sex T-Rex on the list of winners — a varied array of artists is exactly what many audiences come to the Fringe for.

In a press release sent out Monday, the Fringe shared that 59 per cent of all available tickets were issued, with $460,000 in revenue returning to the artists. That rather high percentage matches up with what we saw on the ground as we reviewed over 20 shows at the festival: by the end of the first weekend, it was very difficult to get tickets to hyped-up productions; and by showtime, even less talked-about shows sometimes sold out. Perhaps that’s the positive side of the festival presenting around half the number of productions it did in pre-pandemic years.