A Perfect Bowl of Pho at the 2022 Toronto Fringe (Send Noods Productions)

NOTE: This is not a review. I’m in a Fringe show (The Boy Who Cried), so I don’t feel super comfortable doing critical evaluations of people’s work. Instead, my 2022 Fringe writing is more in the vein of “creative reflection”. The goal is to get conversations going about people’s shows, not deem them good or bad.

A Perfect Bowl of Pho, Nam Nguyen’s acclaimed metatheatrical “noodle musical” exploration of the Vietnamese diaspora, is one of this year’s buzziest Fringe shows. And the show is clearly living up to the hype — at the sold-out Sunday afternoon performance I attended, Pho rocked the 300-seat venue to a standing ovation.

Like Juzo Itami’s 1985 Tampopo, one of the great films about food, Pho includes a string of food-related vignettes. It’s a challenge for any vignette show to make a coherent, unified “point” out of fragmented scenes, but Pho swats this challenge away by drawing attention to it: the character Nam (Chris Vergara) — who, as luck would have it, is writing a musical called A Perfect Bowl of Pho — describes frustrating meetings with white playwrights who insist his show needs to be “about” something. Nam feels like this advice misses the point of the show’s fragmented, diasporic structure, so he disregards it. Of course, though, at the very moment Nam rejects the need for Pho to be about something, Pho all-too-cleverly becomes about its own lack of aboutness.

But if it’s true that all Pho wants to do is have some silly noodle fun, this production fulfills those dreams: Kryslyne-Mai Ancheta brings down the house with “Medium Pho”, director Steven Hao and choreographer Margot Greve blow up otherwise small jokes into cathartic theatrical events, and music director Kevin Vuong pushes the score’s wild variance as far as it can go. 

Pho is rightfully cynical about the colonial structures that theatre upholds. But through its unabashed embrace of joyful theatricality, Pho makes a new meal out of old ingredients — and cooks up a bowl large enough to share. 

The Toronto Fringe Festival runs from July 6-July 17. A Perfect Bowl of Pho is playing at Ada Slaight Hall; click here for tickets. Click here to return to my Fringe Masterpost.