The Ottawa Fringe Festival (June 18th – 28th) is in full swing with an astonishing line-up of quirky, intriguing, experimental and outrageous productions.

Some of us Ottawa bloggers were invited to a wine and cheese last evening by the Fringe people. They wined us and cheesed us and we had some interesting conversations with some of the Fringe performers who were out promoting their shows. In exchange for all this wining, cheesing and schmoozing, the bloggers were asked (kindly) to write a little something about Fringe.

The first thing I’ll write about is how they happen to choose the bloggers that were invited. I think it was a kind of hit or miss selection process – if they’d somehow stumbled across a blog and could find an email address, you got an invitation. They did ask for our Breakfast Bloggers mailing list, but of course we couldn’t give them that. Zoom offered to send out an invitation on behalf of the Fringe, but they didn’t like that idea. So in the end, they didn’t get a lot of bloggers turn out. Which was okay because that meant more cheese for us!!

1. This is a Recording – verbatim theatre (a ll lines are quoted from interviews)
2. Grandma Sol and Grandma Rosie – one woman show with giant puppets
3. Catgut Strung Violin – slapstick physical comedy
4. The Accident – one man show
5. Countries Shaped Like Stars – play about courtship

As you can see, there is overlap with the suggestions I got before.

Another play that looks good is We Never Clothed.

Finally, I have also heard great things about “Countries Shaped Like Stars” and it is at the top of my list to see. It will be a great summer!

We look forward to seeing a lot of great shows in Ottawa.