The economics of Fringe festival touring provide motivation to create an entertaining performance with a limited number of team members. And the artistic challenge of keeping an audience engaged for an hour or so on one’s own raises the stakes for solo performers, and leaves the audience more impressed when it works. There are about 82 shows in the Fringe program that list a single cast member. But theyre not all the same!

On the Fringe opening night, I took in three solo performances.

No Die! Or: How I left Amsterdam and Almost Died in Africa – Fedor Ikelaar, Acacia Hall (venue 5) When we were recommending it to others later, I called this Storytelling and a friend called it Stand-up Comedy. I would still classify it as a storytelling performance, but I see why the performer’s natural delivery and responsiveness to the audience might lead to a description as stand-up comedy. Plus, it was funny! After a few comments about being a Dutch visitor in Canada, the performer Fedor Ikelaar launches into a long tale of travel misadventures, contextualized by the hubris of being a straight white man along with the overconfidence of a first-year anthropology student thinking he could fix the world and could make a significant difference in a short volunteer trip. In school he’s learned about the Human Development Index, so he decides to spend his summer in the country which is currently last on the list, Sierra Leone. The title is a spoiler in that he does not die. But he does wander through more misadventures than Mr. Magoo, receives significant support and care from the Sierra Leonean people he thought he was going to help, and uses his outcome an encouragement to travel more.

The Game of Bluff is Susan Jeremy’s narrative about the shuffling characters and lives of herself, her mother (a lifelong poker player), her grandmother (supporting her household as a small-time bookie), and her great grandmother (a numbers runner). The performer embodies each of these characters with distinct voice and mannerisms, and adds clarity by having the speakers address each other by name a lot. Besides the ones mentioned above, there’s her father, her mothers poker cronies, a fortune-teller, and others. It was interesting to see how she wove the thread of gambling through the multiple generations of the family, with many of them benefiting from the industry and one addict – not a viewpoint I’d seen before. Walterdale Theatre, venue 3.

Solovela was my first improv show of the festival. Diane Jorge from Miami had the half-full room in Acacia Hall laughing right from the start of her midnight performance, creating a telenovela (Latino-style soap opera) from a few questions she asked some (consenting) audience members, and some props she used to signal a shift between characters. She embraced some tropes of the genre such as having the audience recite the name of the story at commercial breaks (one of which was actually a short pitch by an artist in the audience for his own show), and showing a romantic focus on one character by having them stand over a fan blowing their hair around. There was romance, there was suspense, there was a fight (in which she performed both combatants), there was justice and happy endings. Jorge seemed relaxed and comfortable and she was very funny, from her self-deprecating asides to her characters’ physicality.

I had forgotten that it was handy to have cash on hand to donate to touring performers in exchange for show merch. All three performers had mementoes available and I wanted to support all of them. Good thing there are bank machines on the grounds!