Montreal Fringe Festival Keeps Surprising

With its roots in Edinburgh, Scotland, there are Fringe festivals in cities across Canada, the U.S. and Europe. And no matter the location, the Fringe Festival, now running in Montreal until June 21, 2026, shares the same goal: to promote diversity by showcasing independent artists across all artistic disciplines. This time, I focused on one of those disciplines: the solo show, which is represented by my reviews of the following three shows: Existential Lingerie by Montreal Fringe Festival veteran Lou Laurence; BC-based song satirist Tall Mark’s venture into live autobiography with Eat It Anyway; and the anarchistic 1-Man No-Show, where anything goes (and it certainly did). Enjoy!

Existential Lingerie

Lou Laurence is back with a brand-new solo show called Existential Lingerie that explores how — through words and music—she is trying to get back into the dating scene.

The show revolves around Lou’s date with Carl, whom she met through a dating website, who speaks in a monotone voice and never calls her by her first name. Through repartee dialogue and personal stories, Lou shares her search for Mr. Right and the continuous bumpy road to that goal. And of course, there’s her repertoire of original songs that complements her narrative so well. Two highlights include songs that tell of her mistrust of men who do not read fiction books, and why she can never find the right bra size.

Existential Lingerie is a show filled with comedy, song and stories that are both entertaining and heartfelt. That’s especially so when one tries to find their soul mate, whether one is looking for love in all the wrong places or the search ends up being a futile waste of time (or, surprisingly, successful).

Tall Mark’s Eat It Anyway

Canada has a new song satirist, and his name is Tall Mark.

Tall Mark’s Fringe Festival offering is a highly enjoyable 60 minutes of autobiographical stories and songs that he classifies as “absurdorealism” and delivers plenty of it in his solo show Tall Mark’s Eat It Anyway.

Using five musical instruments and a microphone that’s attached to his chest, Tall Mark entertained the audience with episodes from his life that revolve around his health issue of being diagnosed with Ankylosing Spondylitis, a chronic ailment that causes inflammatory arthritis and affects the spine and sacroiliac joints. That prompted him to sing about a doctor’s tendency to pile one diagnosis upon another, and how the pharmaceutical industry creates a pill for every known disease or condition.

But it doesn’t end there. Tall Mark also shares episodes from his life that have an absurdist edge. This includes about how a lack of food choices in the town of Cumberland, BC, evolved into the $100 hot dog, or a west-to-east cross-Canada drive that turns into a quest to encounter an authentic moose (especially between the hours of 8 p.m. and 10 p.m.). Such material is reminiscent of the late Tom Lehrer, the legendary American song satirist of the 1960s who approached issues of that turbulent era with the same absurdist twist that Tall Mark uses.

Tall Mark caps off his exercise in live autobiography with the same absurd realism in the song inspired by his being chosen to write and perform original kids’ songs for CBC Kids. The end result is a sort of anti-kids’ anthem that had the entire audience singing along with him, the chorus in particular, that went like this:

“Be kind. Be kind. Be kind,

Or everyone will hate you.

Be kind. Be kind. Be kind,

Or you will die alone.”

Don’t miss Tall Mark’s show of tall tales and taller songs ($100 hot dogs not included).

1-Man No-Show

Unpredictable. Uproarious. Madcap. Those are the three words that perfectly describe one of the wildest shows at this year’s Fringe Festival: 1-Man No-Show.

Isaac Kessler, your host for this one hour (or 52 minutes and 52 seconds, to be precise) spectacular, fully dressed in black and using a portable microphone and speaker as a means of communication, immediately engages the audience members before the show, as well as distribute to select members with a variety of items like flashlights, a doll’s shoe and — in my case—a small children’s tea cup, that would be used throughout the show as part of the ongoing audience participation portion.

This out-of-left-field approach — whether improvised or part of an organized routine (which Kessler continually assures the audience by saying “this is a good bit”) — carries the entire show and results in nonstop laughter and a burning sense of anticipation about what will happen next. Kessler calls it “high art” (which explained why a framed copy of the Mona Lisa was hanging from the ceiling above the stage), but the unsuspecting audience would have labelled it an insane roller coaster ride that is definitely worth the 52 minutes and 52 seconds spent within the friendly confines of the Petit Campus.