All the deets on this year’s Minnesota Fringe Festival are on the web site. It starts today and runs through Sunday, August 9. Venues, shows, schedules, tickets/punch cards/passes, all of that are right there for you, so I won’t regurgitate all that. Plus, this year’s Fringe web site is so very pleasing to look at; I wouldn’t want to deprive you of that experience.
Wait, what’s a fringe festival? It’s a live theatre festival. Minnesota’s is 11 days long, which means this year it goes from Thursday, July 30, to Sunday, August 9. Ours is unjuried and uncensored. Shows are chosen by lottery, so anyone and everyone has a chance to be in the Minnesota Fringe Festival if they want to be. You’ll see everything from dance to storytelling to puppets to serious drama to mimes to multimedia to comedy to straight up weird and/or cool shit.
There are 20-ish venues through out Minneapolis (and, this year for the first time ever, St Paul). At each venue, there are four time slots per day on weekdays and seven time slots per day on weekends. So there are 150-ish shows and it’s not possible to see more than… I think it’s 56 if you see one show in every available time slot. Okay, my math is sloppy, but you get the order of magnitude, right?
So it’s a big, hairy, fun, theatrical deal. One of my top three favorite things about living in the Twin Cities, no lie.
While you’re out and about sprinting between venues and cramming snacks on the way, visit fringefestival.mobi for shortcuts to the most important info and your personal schedule and follow @mnfringe on Twitter. (Include the #mnfringe hashtag in your tweet and it’ll appear on the web site.)
In years past I’ve very carefully plotted my schedule, tried to cram in as many shows as possible, and spent much of my blogging effort on reviewing shows. But, you know, I kind of suck at reviewing shows. I’m not a trained theatre performer nor a trained critic. It’s like wine and beer: everyone likes something different. So who cares what I like? (Although if I see something that I think is particularly awesome, I’ll let you know.)
This year I’m more interested in the behind-the-scenes stuff. I’m pulling some volunteer shifts, working venues and the new-for-this-year Concierge Desk at Fringe Central, aka the Bedlam Theatre. So I hope to enlighten you on what all goes into putting on the awesomest and unquestionably most well run fringe festival in the country.
Disclaimer: I’m on the Minnesota Fringe Festival’s Board of Directors. Opinions expressed here are mine alone and do not represent the official position of the Fringe unless noted.
2 Comments
We saw Comedy Go (***1/2), Tech Support The Musical (**), Bard Fiction (*****) and An Evening with Fotis (****). Five stars (asterisks!) to Bard Fiction, which was very well acted, cleverly staged and freakin’ hilarious! Fotis was very funny in both his own show and the Ferrari McSpeedy show (Comedy Go). Tech Support The Musical is a funny idea that suffers from lazy songwriting and an uneven cast, but the male lead is very good (despite channeling Jackie Gleason a bit too much) and the singing is mostly high quality.
I like Fotis’s brand of humor, so for me he is always a must-see, but the real MUST-SEE is Bard Fiction. It very much deserves to be remounted somewhere.
I saw some tweets about Bard Fiction as well. Gonna have to get that on my schedule.
I think I’m gonna pass on An Evening with Fotis simply because I do already know what I’m gonna get and I see him do other stuff pretty regularly throughout the year.