A Fringe Full Of Stars artwork by Yu-Chen (Tseng) Beliveau, Edmonton Fringe 2025.
By Liz Nicholls, .ca
Your star has risen, fellow Fringe travellers. It’s August, and Fringe Full Of Stars is yours for the exploring.
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Tickets and passes go on sale today at 10 a.m. (in person) and noon (online) for the 44th annual edition of Edmonton’s international summer theatre Big Bang, the continent’s biggest and oldest Fringe (Aug.14 to 24).
Along with the course you chart through the 223-indoor show galaxy, you can get your tickets in multiple ways. You can order them online at fringetheatre.ca (and get e-tix in your inbox). You can call 780-409-1910. You can show up live and in-person at the central festival box office at Fringe HQ (Fringe Theatre Arts Barns, 10330 84 Ave.) or downtown at the Edmonton Arts Council’s Shop/Services (9930 102 Ave.). And when fringing (there’s a quintessentially Edmonton verb) starts on the 14th, there are other in-person ticket options, too: the box office at 83 Ave and 104th St. next to ATB (aka Gazebo) Park and the one at La Cité francophone (8627 91 St.) in the French Quarter.
Times being what they are for the arts — i.e. extremely tough, witness rocketing production costs, the freezing of grants, the dwindling of sponsorship money — the top ticket price for a Fringe show went up a couple of bucks to $20 last summer. And it’s holding there for Fringe Full of Stars. Fringe artists set their own ticket price, to a $15 max, and take home 100 per cent of that. The Fringe tops that up with a $5 service charge. What you see in the program, online or in the glossy $15 152-page guide, is an all-in price. For tickets set at less than the max price by artists, that service charge is reduced accordingly.
A glance at the program either online or 3-D reveals that most artists (understandably) opt for the max. But as always there are exceptions (and many shows offer discounts for seniors and students). Tickets for 4% Rye, an “autobiographical show” by and starring Rye Fournier, are $10, for example. Pushy Productions’ You’ve Been Served, from San Francisco, is a $15 ticket (students and seniors $10), Free Pony from Portland $12. And hey, you get a free pony, which has got to be the bargain of the Fringe, right? OK, there are a couple of provisos, including sitting through “exciting investment opportunities to obtain pony” and “pony subject to rules.” In Out, Damned Spot from Vancouver’s Mouthy B Productions, you can see, as billed, an entire “punk rock Macbeth” for 12 bucks. The Fringe’s own Late Night Cabaret, a midnight collaboration with Rapid Fire Theatre curated by Jake Tkaczyk and Audrey Ochoa at the Granite Curling Club where it moved last year (Stage 9) is $17 a ticket.
The best deal for the star-struck Fringe traveller, as always, is the coveted Frequent Fringer Pass ($170 for 10 tickets) and the Double Fringer Pass ($340 for 20 tickets). They are gone in a twinkling, so get on it ASAP.
You’ll be launching into the starry 223-show firmament in some 40 venues (an expansion, in an incremental way, from last year’s 216 shows in 38 venues). Ten of these, representing about 90 shows, are official Fringe “theatres” — which is to say acquired, outfitted and staffed for theatrical action, by the Fringe itself at a cost of about $15,000 apiece, and programmed by lottery.
The other 133 shows are to be found in BYOVs, bring-your-own-venues, acquired and equipped by artists themselves. Most are in Old Strathcona and environs. But not all. There are two BYOVs at Theatre Network’s Roxy Theatre on 124 St., for example. In the river valley, ArtsHub Ortona, a first-time Fringe BYOV, is where Uniform Theatre is producing Sondheim’s Assassins. There’s even an outlier BYOV in the Alberta Avenue ‘hood, at Plaza Bowling.
The four curated venues in the French Quarter — three inside La Cité francophone, one across the street at Campus Saint-Jean — have 32 shows between them. Grindstone Theatre curates a Fringe roster of 26 shows in its four venues — including its tiny comedy theatre home base on 81 Ave., the Lutheran Centre across the street, the venue under the Mill Creek Cafe on Whyte, and Mile Zero Dance Stage. Strathcona’s arts-oriented Holy Trinity Church has 14 shows in its three BYOV venues.
You can find Fringe shows in actual bona fide theatres, like the Varscona, the Gateway, the Fringe’s Westbury and Backstage Theatres, Walterdale, Rapid Fire’s Exchange Theatre, Theatre Network’s Nancy Power. But many of the venues have other lives — as bars, dance clubs, community centres, church halls, art galleries — and in the case of Waffle Bird, Stage 35, a chicken-and-waffle joint.
And there are even two BYOVs, stages 39 and 40, with outdoor orientation addresses. Mere steps away from Fringe headquarters, find Checkpoint Cassandra, “an interactive mystery experience” (with clues and puzzles scattered through the Fringe site) and The Nix, “a site-specific storytelling walk into Edmonton’s history.”
For the youngest fringers, KidsFringe, curated by Alyson Dicey of Girl Brain, is back, and free!, in Light Horse Park (10325 85 Ave.), daily starting Friday August 15. Kids 12 and under and their grownup companions will experience theatre, storytelling, music, crafts, activities of all kinds. It counts as a bona fide Fringe hit: last year it attracted an audience of 14,000 to Dicey’s inventive programming.
Pêhonân (nêhiyawêwin for “meeting place”) is a celebration of Indigenous voices, history, and culture that happens throughout the Fringe site and on every stage — in performances, installations, storytelling gatherings, workshops, initiated and assembled by the festival’s Indigenous Director MJ Belcourt Moses.
There’s a nightly music series on the ATB Stage; there are outdoor performances of every description (with a schedule in the Fringe guide). There are buskers and food vendors. And of course there are beer tents (did you doubt it?) in which the bevies are led by locally brewed Sea Change, “the exclusive beer provider of the Edmonton Fringe.”
Which brings us to the question of the year: what to see at Fringe Full of Stars, now just a week away. .ca is here to help you with that. Stay tuned to this site for encouragement, suggestions, previews, features, and reviews.
And speaking as we are of encouragement, if you’ve been enjoying the theatre coverage on my free (so far!) and independent site — supported entirely by readers — I really really hope you’ll consider chipping in to my ongoing Patreon campaign — with a monthly contribution that will support the continuation of .ca. Click here!
