Fringed Off

Following a few fringe-heavy years I have been sitting on the sidelines, "lurking" the sites for the MN and NY fringes, and paying a little attention to the feedback and fallout. I'd like to get back to one of those eventually, but you need to have a show first.

Actually, that's not true, a great deal of shows accepted by the MN Fringe during the lottery in February share the title TBA.

Because I was a PR Director for a local theater, once upon a time, I am more interested than most in what kind of free attention theater organizations can squeeze out of the media. Non-critical articles, as well as the reviews that may (or may not) come later on. As we have a daily subscription to the NY Times, every year at this time I use that to clock what's going on at the NY Fringe.

When Toni's show Angst:84 went in 2001, I noticed about a dozen reviews over the course of the festival's two week run. Of these, only one was scathingly negative. Then Urinetown opened that fall, a show which had its originas at the NY Fringe, and in 2002 there were maybe twenty Fringe reviews. That year they were almost universally negative.

In 2003 there were no individual reviews, only longer, week-end articles which pointed out some of the more interesting, "worth your while" productions. So I began to get the impression that the NY Times doles out attention to this famously hit-and-miss, yet difficult-to-ignore-based-on-its-size festival based on how good last year's festival was.

Lucky me, 2003 must have been a good year, because I got a write-up in 2004. If my theory is correct, however, 2006 must have sucked big yahoodies. The festival is half over, and the only mention the largest fringes festival in America has garnered in the nation's largest newspaper (it is still the biggest, isn't it?) was an advance piece in last Sunday's paper, which was mostly about Elena K. Holy, executive director and extremely nervous person.

In fact, as if to add insult to insult, the Times has written not one, but two long pieces about how things are going - and going so much bigger and better - at the Edinburg Fringe this month. In fact, it's the guy who wrote the IHT review - Jason Zinoman - who is cabling these reports back from Scotland.

Compared to Edinburgh, he says the NY Fringe is a lemonade stand. Ouch. Sour.