The 2026 Victoria Fringe Festival is celebrating a milestone, and once again, I’m ignoring any sensible attempt to see everything under the sun. Weather in Victoria, BC is fickle, and for those not wanting to wait in line for too long, it’s always good to bring a bottle of water! While they are keeping 40th century style celebrations a temporary secret, as they want to surprise, it’s best to subscribe to their mailing list and check online for the latest updates to find out what’s in store!
And once again, I offer my top picks on what to see at this year’s show. With a few returning shows to quickly include on the list, namely Space Queen and 52 Stories, Instead, I’ve gone hunting through this year’s lineup for shows that appeal to the nerdier side of the Fringe experience. That means science fiction, horror, pop culture, unusual adaptations, strange concepts and anything else that makes me stop scrolling and wonder, “What the heck is this?”
With productions selected through the Fringe lottery rather than a traditional curated programme, you never quite know what will turn up. Some shows arrive polished after touring the Canadian Fringe circuit, while others are homegrown experiments getting their first chance in front of an audience.
Here are the productions that have caught my attention for 2026.
A Cabaret of Legends
Tymisha Harris, Victoria, BC
Legendary songs from the collections of Legendary Artists, and the stories behind them. International award-winning vocalist and performer Tymisha Harris (Josephine, Josie & Grace) sings us through the generations of the most iconic performers of the last hundred years, highlighting black female excellence as she shares stories of these Legends and their impact on her personal journey. Featuring songs from Ella, Billie, Josephine, Aretha, Nina, Tina, Whitney, Beyonce and more!
Aspiring legendary vocalist Tymisha Harris spent decades performing as Aretha Franklin at Universal Studios and working as a Tina Turner impersonator and tribute artist. She has won dozens of awards for her portrayal of Josephine Baker in the off-Broadway and international hit show “Josephine”, and is a 2X winner of the Orlando Sentinel Critic’s Choice for “Leading Actress, Musical” (one for Josephine, the other for her embodiment of Billie Holiday in “Lady Day at Emerson’s Bar & Grill”).
Diary of a Madman
Featuring Clayton Jevne
A man in vintage underclothes, shackled by the ankle and grinning at the audience isn’t exactly an image suggesting everything is going swimmingly.
Diary of a Madman immediately taps into another corner of my interests: classic literature filtered through psychological horror and theatrical performance. The title alone carries plenty of literary baggage, but the sparse staging and unsettling promotional imagery are what caught my attention here. Fringe theatre can be particularly effective when a production strips away elaborate sets and forces a performer to create an entire deteriorating world through character and language.
And there’s something wonderfully appropriate about watching someone’s grip on reality collapse inside a small Fringe venue.
Genki Bear: Memoirs of a Granddaughter
Kizuna Theatre
Genki Bear: Memoirs of a Granddaughter earns a spot on this list partly because its promotional image raises considerably more questions than it answers. Misty Cozac appears in an enormous yellow duck costume alongside a puppet, which isn’t exactly the visual I expected from something called Memoirs of a Granddaughter.
That’s enough weirdness to make me curious.
Kizuna Theatre’s production appears to mix personal storytelling with puppetry and Japanese cultural elements. Exactly how the duck fits into all this remains something I’d rather discover in the theatre.
Not every Fringe selection needs monsters, spaceships or dystopian futures. Sometimes I just want to know why someone is dressed as an enormous bird.
Randy & Elizabeth: A Savage Love Story
Geoff Hughes
Professional wrestling has always existed somewhere between theatre, athletics and pop culture mythology, which makes Randy “Macho Man” Savage perfect material for a Fringe show. Randy & Elizabeth: A Savage Love Story is a one-man production about Savage’s career and his relationship with Elizabeth Hulette, better known to wrestling fans as Miss Elizabeth.
Even for audiences who weren’t glued to professional wrestling during its 1980s and 90s boom, these two became pop culture figures well beyond the ring. Savage was an explosion of sunglasses, tassels and gloriously excessive interviews, while Miss Elizabeth became an essential part of the character’s story.
The intriguing part is where performance ends and reality begins. The show follows Savage’s rise through professional wrestling alongside his tumultuous marriage to Elizabeth, turning one of wrestling’s most famous on-screen relationships into something considerably more human.
After appearances at other Canadian Fringe festivals, this isn’t quite the unknown quantity some Victoria productions are. Reports from previous audiences suggest even people with little interest in wrestling have found something to enjoy here.
And yes, resisting the urge to fill this entire section with “OOOOH YEAH!” was difficult.
Reclaimed! The Woodsical
Peter Worden, Victoria, BC
As a derelict house is prepped for demolition, foreman “Demo” Dan hurries his ragtag crew of labourers under the deadline of a demanding developer. He has his hands full ducking civic activists and jumping through hoops and loopholes. Meanwhile, his eco-conscious foreman Adam Lovegrove – lead singer of a ‘wood n’ roll’ cover band the Rolling Stumps – marches to his own beat. When he meets Alexa, the head of a local heritage society, the two devise a plan to halt the wrecking ball and try to save the home – and maybe the world – from ending up in the trash.
This enviro-musical centers on our planet’s most reusable, regenerative and widely-used building material – wood — and features parody-oke style ” wood n’ roll ” tunes from the 70s, 80s and 90s.
Rhymes With Ducks
David Heyman, Victoria, BC
“Rhymes With Ducks” is the sequel to the hit show Ducks, which won Outstanding Original Script at the 2023 Victoria One-Act Play Festival, won “Best Director” for Jason Vikse, who’s also returning as director this year, sold out several shows at the 2024 Edmonton Fringe Festival and which was a big hit last year at the Victoria Fringe Festival.
It features the same four characters who meet in the same office eight years later, less than an hour before their Conservative government must hand over power to the victorious NDP. While all documents are being desperately shredded before the midnight deadline, the unscrupulous Mitch Lafleur, a former communications guru shows up claiming ownership of a mystery briefcase whose contents he refuses to disclose. He’s opposed by, Kaylee Grant, who’s overseeing the shredding and refuses to give it to him unless she can see what’s inside.
Superhero Percussion: All the Hits!
Sticks and Stone Percussion, Edmonton, AB
Superhero Percussion: All the Hits! looks like the sort of energetic oddity that makes Fringe festivals such fun to explore. Sticks and Stone Percussion combines percussion performance with superhero theatrics, and that makes this a useful change of pace between some of the darker productions on this list.
It’s also a reminder that nerd culture doesn’t always have to involve a complicated mythology, thirty years of continuity and an argument over whether the original version was better.
Sometimes a cape and a percussion instrument will do.
The Ice Keeps
Melissa Taylor, Victoria, BC
Sometimes all it takes is an image.
The promotional artwork for The Ice Keeps depicts an Arctic expedition, a ship trapped beneath the ice and explorers separated by a crevasse. Even without knowing where the story ultimately goes, that’s enough to send my imagination wandering toward doomed expeditions, isolation and the kind of historical horror where discovering what’s waiting in the frozen wilderness is rarely a good thing.
Of course, that doesn’t necessarily mean something supernatural is lurking beneath the ice. But I’d be disappointed if there wasn’t. Melissa Taylor’s Victoria production is one of the bigger mysteries on my list, and that’s precisely why it interests me. The Fringe is one of the few places where going into a show knowing very little can still be part of the attraction.
