This is the last weekend for Hamilton Fringe 2025!
Hamilton Fringe Festival 2025 runs from July 16 to 27. Order tickets online or pay using anything but cash at the door and remember there's a mandatory one-time $5 button fee to support the festival.
Be sure to check out the Hamilton Fringe Festival on until July 27. Find all the plays and events here. Order tickets online or pay using anything but cash at the door and remember there's a mandatory one-time $5 button fee to support the festival and you must wear your button to every play or they’ll make you buy another.
Small Change Reviews
Let’s start with four must-see productions that audiences are flocking to! Three are high energy comedies while one drama foreshadows the horrors we are witnessing in the USA, other parts of the world, and right here at home.
Writer and performer, Joanna Rannelli Credit: Hamiton Fringe
Bangs, Bobs & Banter: Confessions of a Hairstylist at Theatre Aquarius is a must-see show that will have you laughing out loud!
Joanna Rannelli plays Nikki, a charismatic, empathetic and long suffering hairstylist who has a penchant for storytelling. Rannelli seamlessly plays about ten different clients with vignettes spanning a hilarious, cookie making 81-year-old who adds a secret ingredient for her birthday guests to that paternalistic, sexist middle aged man we all know to women navigating online dating, dick pics, finding true love, as well as more serious topics.
Flawless transitions including great music to reset the mood while Rannelli changes wigs, accents and personas made this a standing ovation show!
Rannelli has two more performances at Hamilton Fringe on Saturday, July 26 at 2:45 pm and Sunday July 27 at 3:15. But If you can’t make it to Bangs, Bobs & Banter: Confessions of a Hairstylist during the Hamilton Fringe then, be sure to catch Rannelli at Here For Now Theatre in Stratford, ON, August 7 to 10! This performance is well worth the drive to Stratford!
Warnings: Sexual Content, Coarse Language — but you can handle it.
Minimum: The Intergalactic Federation of Space Beers Credit: Hamilton Fringe
Minimum: The Intergalactic Federation of Space Beers asks the question every worker in Ontario wants answered, what would happen if the Premier had to live on minimum wage? That’s right! Just $35,766 a year instead of $209,000 annually.
Playwright and actress, Victoria Sullivan, has created a comedic masterpiece incorporating all the pertinent issues of the day that “common Ontarians” have to deal with. Then she threw in a conniving Prime Minister who leaks a video of the newly elected Premier inadvertently agreeing to live on minimum wage during his tenure.
Add an unexpected divorce, lack of affordable housing — who knew?, public transit, the cost of designer coffees, an all too eager office assistant and 25 cent beer and you have the makings of a perfectly hilarious storm.
Oh! And, did I mention, Doug Ford just happens to be the fowl mouthed Prime Minister of-the-day who sets the minimum wage lifestyle in motion — although, thankfully, you never actually see him.
Find out what happens when a Premier who once spent $36,000 a year on suits has to move into a rooming house on Barton Street in Hamilton and take the GO train to Queen’s Park each day.
Sullivan who plays the Premier’s soon-to-be ex-wife has brilliant chemistry with actors Brandon James Sim (the Premeir) and Gavin Sibley (his nervous and conniving assistant) making for a thoroughly enjoyable experience with lots of laughs!
Writer/Performer Johnnie McNamara Walker Credit: Hamilton Fringe
OMG! I need some of Johnnie McNamara Walker’s energy and positivity!!!
Spend an evening at Mills Hardware with a room full of like-minded 2SLGBTQIA+ folks — or so Walker thinks — as he takes you on a deep-dive into the shocking world of . . . heterosexuality!
This non-stop comedy on steroids offers heterosexuals a very revealing view of themselves and their narrow take on life choices as viewed through the lens of 2SLGBTQIA+ folk. Walker expertly shines a brilliant disco light on what queers really think about straight folks.
By the end of the show your cheeks will hurt from laughing.
Warnings: Sexual Content, Coarse Language
A Question of Character stars Paula Wing and Tanisha Taitt Credit: Hamilton Fringe
German dancer, actress, film director, producer, screenwriter, editor, photographer and feminist, Helene Bertha Amalie "Leni" Riefenstahl, is still considered one of the most controversial personalities in film history thanks to propaganda she created for the Nazis during WWII.
Consider what it would be like to sit in a room with Riefenstahl, played by Paula Wing, as she’s interviewed by a film aficionado, played by Tanisha Taitt, who happens to make her living writing about film and filmmakers. But this is no happenstance meeting.
The chemistry between Wing and Taitt is formidable and keeps you on the edge of your seat. The tension builds as niceties and conventions are thrown to the wind and intensifies as the veneer is peeled back exposing what was known, what should have been known, and who was choosing to look away in the name of art.
Playwright Steven Elliott Jackson convincingly brings these women to life in a play that mirrors what is currently taking place in many parts of the world. A Question of Character reminds us that we haven’t really learned from history and are actively repeating the same mistakes in real time.
Catch A Question of Character at Mills Hardware.
Warnings: Violence — but, you can handle it.
The Fruits that Rot in Our Bellies Credit: Hamilton Fringe
Family secrets haunt many lives — especially the lives of women and girls. The Fruits that Rot in Our Bellies explores the affect intergenerational secrets have on the present and the future.
Two siblings, each in a same-sex relationship, try to navigate their murky upbringing as they launch into a tenuous agreement for one to be the surrogate mother of the other’s child.
The Fruits that Rot in Our Bellies is an exploration of how the lives of these sisters and their partners are not only impacted by this decision, but also by the inevitable changes and challenges that come with such an arrangement — especially when the pregnancy revives suppressed memories and ghosts.
Warnings: Themes of miscarriage, abortion, incest, CSA, and domestic violence.
Charon at The Gasworks Credit: Hamilton Fringe
Playwright/Director Jake Hunter undertakes a challenging and dark journey in his production of Charon at The Gasworks.
Charon, from Greek mythology, is the ferryman tasked with transporting the souls of the dead across the rivers Styx and Acheron to the Underworld. The dead traditionally pay Charon with a coin that has been placed in their mouth during burial — provided they received a proper burial. But, what happens if you don’t have a coin?
That’s the fate of Daphne who is clearly struggling with her transition from life to death. Coinless and not wanting to spend one hundred years haunting her mother and sister before she can cross the Styx again, Daphne strikes a bargain with Charon to take her to the other side. During their travels the pair grapple with universal concepts of fate, fear and death with Charon offering perspectives from a variety of religions. That mentoring helps Daphne as she fights less than kind memories, bad decisions and tragic outcomes.
Performers Ali Farhadi and Jessica Konkle have a good chemistry and Hunter ends the play on the perfect note for a sequel.
Warnings: Coarse Language, Violence Age Suitability: Parental Guidance (ages 13+)
The Vibe Review
Waiting for* Godot, *Waiting for Waiting for Credit: The Vibe Hamilton
Waiting for* Godot, *Waiting for Waiting for at The Staircase in the Studio Theatre:
The vibe of Waiting For* Godot, *Waiting For, Waiting For is uniquely surreal and tense.
Don’t wait to get tickets for Waiting For* Godot, *Waiting For, Waiting For! Expect the unexpected from this atypical, at times anxiety fuelling play that comes with a side of comedy.
While the stage manager and three actors wait for the elusive and somewhat reclusive writer/director to show up for their first rehearsal, shared personal journeys lead to clashing personalities.
Actor Liam Lockhart-Rush has perfected the know-it-all, doing-it-by-the-book brown-noser full of angst, while Jonah Paroyan – who seems to just be playing his authentic self – is the countervailing happy, easy-go-lucky, organic blueberry eating man everyone loves, gets along with and wants to work with. Everyone but Lockhart-Rush, that is.
Then, there’s Adelaide Dolha, a psych major – because her folks didn’t think acting was a real thing – who did some acting on the side only to have it consume her life.
And, rounding out the group is Sarah Soares, who convincingly plays the keep-peace-at-all-costs stage manager who knows basically nothing about when or if the writer/director is going to show up.
Oh, yeah, and of course, Braden Henderson makes a brief appearance as the befuddled writer/director before leaving the group to wonder when, if ever, he’s going to return.
A lively 60-minute production weaving together drama, comedy, improv and sometimes . . . simply waiting.
Warning: Course language — but nothing you haven’t heard in high school hallways from the kids.
*Find additional Hamilton Fringe reviews here.
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