Every August, the Edmonton International Fringe Festival transforms the popular historic neighbourhood of Old Strathcona into an 11-day street party. Multiple blocks become pedestrian-only. Food trucks whip up greasy food. A kids’ stage hosts family-friendly theatre. Beer tents flourish. World-class street performers attract crowds of passersby.
The largest and longest-running North American festival of its kind, Edmonton Fringe featured 221 ticketed productions in 2025, making it about one-and-a-half times the size of the Winnipeg Fringe, and double that of the Toronto Fringe, which I’ve attended obsessively since I was a teen.
I’ve long been curious what it would feel like to attend a Canadian festival of this size — so, two weeks ago, I made the trip. And from the moment I stepped onto the Fringe grounds, the atmosphere was invigorating. The festival’s centralized nature is also highly practical: Most key venues are located within strolling distance, so it feels natural to spend a whole day hopping from show to show, pausing occasionally to chill by the outdoor stage or grab a coffee at the Fringe’s year-round cafe and performance space.
Above all, I was moved by the reciprocal relationship the festival seems to have with the city. While part of what makes Toronto Fringe impressive is that it flourishes in a metropolis that can be actively antagonistic toward the arts — like a peacock somehow thriving in the arctic — the Edmonton festival appears at home in its habitat. The Fringe wholeheartedly integrates itself into the city’s urban environment, energizing a rich array of spaces; in return, residents show it plenty of love.
***
Hoping to get a better sense of the local theatre scene before diving into productions from further abroad, I initially made a point of attending world premieres by Alberta creators. One play I think could find success across the country is the solo show Elon Muskrat, from Anishinaabe writer-performer Josh Languedoc (with co-direction and -dramaturgy by Kenneth T. Williams and Charlie Peters). After interrupting the venue’s pre-recorded land acknowledgment with a prop chainsaw — an opposite tactic to Cliff Cardinal — the Edmonton-based artist spins a riotous reflection on the way the Canadian culture industry markets Indigenous art.
Most of Elon Muskrat takes the form of a sales pitch for an Indigenous-themed casino, and the piece’s edge originates from the choice to cast the audience as investors. Dressed in a sleazy blazer and jeans, Languedoc’s entrepreneur protagonist claims the casino will make the crowd so Indigenous that we’ll “have intergenerational trauma.” And in a raucous sequence choreographed by Tia Kushniruk, he sings a Britney Spears parody called “Colonizer.”
On the festival’s opening night, the production ran around 45 minutes, and the script contains a couple of interesting threads that could benefit from further development. While Languedoc initially implies that Elon Musk has stolen his character’s identity, as well as his company “Rezla,” the show rarely returns to this funny idea. Similarly, while there’s a smart plot twist surrounding a parable Languedoc tells about an exploited beaver, the show ends before it can do much with this reveal. Even in its compact current state, however, Elon Muskrat is a satire with chomp.
Keeping with the rodentia theme, Edmonton-based creator-performers Katie Yoner and Dayna Lea Hoffmann returned to the Fringe with Rat Academy 2: Gnaw and Order. The series’ lovely first instalment sprung to national success after premiering at the festival in 2023, and the duo have since become poster rodents for recent Fringe donation campaigns. Narratively, the new show is quite loose; unlike the first instalment, there’s no academy, and despite the title, only a few minutes of Law & Order.
Instead, the delightfully embodied rats grapple with an eviction notice from their apartment in Alberta, the largest rat-free jurisdiction in the world. They brainstorm various solutions, riffing on ideas for a few minutes before inevitably throwing them away. We’re basically just hanging out with the duo — and when their voices squeak as adorably as they do, that’s enough.
Both Languedoc and the Rats are solidly established within the Alberta theatre scene, but I also tracked down a handful of shows from emerging local collectives. Particularly exciting was Liam Witte’s Primadonna, about the mysterious disappearance of a Taylor Swift-like pop star (who barely appears on stage).
The three-actor drama dissects contemporary fandom with an exacting sharpness, representing online interactions via a metamorphic character called Vox Populii, played by the pyrotechnic Avery Nault. While there’s room to finesse the beat-to-beat details of the production, director Abby Witte’s larger vision is propulsive and stylish, with a climax evocative of classic Hollywood thrillers. By the way, Abby is the playwright’s sister, the production company’s name is Little Sis Co., and the play orbits around a sibling relationship — so I was very glad I attended with my own younger sister.
***
Two of my favourite productions were genre-blurring new works that had already played elsewhere on the continent. The first, A Kind of Electra, is the inaugural full production from the Clown School Company, the performance arm of a 16-year-old, Los Angeles-based physical theatre training ground whose work engages with multiple forms of clown, from across history. (The creators of the hit Toronto Fringe export Monks have named parts of the L.A. clown scene as a major influence.)
In the 90-minute three-person riff on Euripides, adaptor-director David Bridel applies the spontaneity of clown to a tragic narrative, and the result is assumption-exploding. From the production’s sly opening sequence — the only time we see a red rubber nose — the cast occupies an essentially bare stage with the kind of playful presence usually reserved for rambunctious comedies. As Electra, experienced film actor Caitlin Stasey employs a low-key, colloquial tone until the arrival of tragic events — then, she conjures up emotional waterfalls, punctuating her text with piercing, dolphin-like cries. Hayden Ezzy and Tiffany Elle operate in similarly unrestrained registers as they jump between multiple roles. The show’s press release says the creation process was based around improvisation, and that’s very much evident in the utterly alive final product.
Bridel has particular fun with a lengthy pivotal monologue describing offstage violence (a key trope of Greek tragedies). Playing a chorus-like role, Elle lists off bloody details; swooning jazz music plays as she takes on the physicality of a Vegas lounge singer who’s gotten a little too tipsy, stumbling around the stage in a manner that counterpoints the gravity one might associate with such a speech. In this rendering of ancient Greece, the tragic and ridiculous are partners in the same, brutal tango.
While A Kind of Electra’s dynamism seems born from Bridel’s immense amount of experience working with actors on an educational basis, part of the appeal of the autobiographical solo show New Wave Your Behaviour is that writer-performer Tor Lukasik-Foss has relatively little formal dramatic experience — his artistic portfolio is instead impressively interdisciplinary, encompassing sculpture, drawing, and songwriting. It’s clear he’s turned to the theatre because he has a story to tell that genuinely fits the medium, that needs to be on stage. And since premiering in 2023, the Mariló Núñez-directed production has found success at fringe festivals in Kingston, Victoria, Winnipeg, and Lukasik-Foss’ hometown of Hamilton.
Through lucid narration, the performer explains that seven years into a career as an arts administrator, dissociative anxiety attacks forced him to take mental health leave, which involved returning to therapy after years away. During these sessions, his counsellor encouraged him to label the different parts of himself; around the same period, while driving around the city, he developed an obsession with New Wave music, the score to his childhood.
These initially separate threads fascinatingly intertwine when Lukasik-Foss begins analyzing the psychology of New Wave. He breaks down the different voices that appear in the genre, giving them names like “the Authority,” imitating their dance moves, and using a synthesizer to alchemize his observations into wonderful original songs. On the night I attended, the small audience rained down cheers whenever he broke into another monologue explaining his intelligent taxonomy of New Wave. (One of the reasons I adore the show is that it’s partly a work of music criticism.) While the atmosphere was rowdy, a great deal of tenderness lay beneath the enthusiasm, as we weren’t just celebrating Lukasik-Foss’ songs but his real-life mental health journey. Such is the duality of the passionate and truthful New Wave Your Behaviour, undeniably a production from the heart.
***
The above productions played in a variety of venues, including traditional theatres, a nearly 100-year-old community hall, and a multi-storey school for swing dance. Only 10 of the festival’s 40 performance spaces were run by the Fringe, with programming selected by lottery, as per the direction of the Canadian Association of Fringe Festivals; the rest were provided by outside entities, from producers of individual shows to stalwart comedy hub Grindstone Theatre. Because around 60 per cent of the Fringe lineup falls in this “bring-your-own-venue” programming stream, there’s a far more consistent stable of returning faces than in Toronto, where the lottery still reigns supreme (aside from a few exceptions).
I checked out work from a few of these regulars, such as puppeteer Ingrid Hansen, songwriter-comedian Shirley Gnome, autofictional storyteller Martin Dockery, and the high-energy company Monster Theatre — all virtuosic in their own way. But dozens of other local favourites had shows on offer. And that’s not even getting into the Fringe’s impressive lineup of improv, which, as I gather is usual, featured several returning productions (not to mention riffs on a startling number of aesthetic traditions, including 19th-century gothic novels, 19th-century regency novels, murder mysteries, soap operas, Shakespeare, Ian Fleming, and crowd work). While I personally still adore spelunking for gems in lottery programming, these sorts of recurring faces help open the festival up to audience members who prefer safe bets.
One annual tradition I fell hard for was Late Night Cabaret, co-produced by the Fringe and Rapid Fire Theatre. The title carries a double meaning; now in its 14th year, the variety show both starts at midnight and takes inspiration from late-night talk shows.
The cabaret played out at an endearingly Canadian venue: A sprawling indoor curling rink with changerooms for bathrooms, fairy lights hanging from the ceiling, glowing signs advertising local brews, and the nation’s flag on the wall. The night’s hosts Matt Schuurman and Joleen Ballendine kicked off the show by reading a string of variably funny jokes, penned minutes before by comedy writers with work at the festival. They then introduced a sterling lineup of talent, including singer-songwriter Kate Stevens (excellent), representatives from the comedy troupe Sketchy Broads (whip-smart), magician-slash-circus-artist Jay Flair (unbelievable), and a house band (so much fun).
Between acts, Schuurman and Ballendine stewed up Dionysian chaos, at one point auctioning off a signed vintage headshot of Fringe artistic director Murray Utas — not for money, but for an item from the audience, which ended up being a spectator’s “grandmother’s pearls”; later, past 1 a.m., the same necklace appeared in a bag of goodies bestowed on the first person to get their mom on the phone, in a segment called “free shit.” Based on audience response, the giveaway was a recurring bit from last year. Same goes for the “wheel of destiny,” which sent guest Ingrid Hansen weaving through the crowd in a banana costume, attempting to eat two real bananas while running from someone wearing a monkey suit.
As part of a speech toward the evening’s beginning, Schuurman invoked an idea from Lewis Cardinal: that Edmonton’s creative spirit is so electric because the city exists on a stretch of land where the veil between dimensions is thin. And, indeed, there was something gloriously liminal about that cavernous grey rink, where beams of fuschia light intermingled with clouds of haze and the stage felt open to any artist who calls the festival home, whether they tell stories, belt pop songs, or manipulate puppets; improvise, contort, or clown; provoke laughter, sadness, or bewilderment — in short, to anyone on the fringe.
The 44th Edmonton International Fringe Festival ran from August 14 to 24, 2025. More information is available here.
Intermission reviews are independent and unrelated to Intermission’s partnered content. Learn more about Intermission’s partnership model here.
WRITTEN BY
Liam Donovan
Liam is Intermission’s senior editor. His writing has appeared in publications like Maisonneuve, This, and NEXT. He loves the original Super Mario game very much.
LEARN MORE
