A Fringe Full Of Stars artwork by Yu-Chen (Tseng) Beliveau, Edmonton Fringe 2025.
By Liz Nicholls, .ca
Where theatre meets astronomy (by starlight): the upcoming 44th annual Edmonton Fringe has its theme.
A Fringe Full of Stars, this year’s edition of Edmonton’s mighty summer theatre festival, running Aug. 14 to 24, was christened Friday. “Amazingly, we discovered that at the edge of the Milky Way, a fringe of new stars are born,” says Fringe Theatre executive director Megan Dart, a playwright herself. “Our (light-up) constellation is is made up of artists, onstage and backstage, volunteers, sponsors, donors, the team, you the audience … everyone’s a star. It’s the most magical thing; it brings out the joy in everyone.”
The cosmos that is North America’s oldest and largest Fringe festival is lighted by 1600 artists in 223 shows in some 40 venues. As Fringe director Murray Utas explains, 90 of those shows are selected by lottery, and run in 10 official Fringe-run venues, each acquired (and sometimes built) by the festival, at a cost of roughly $15,000 apiece. The other 133 are in BYOVs, bring-your-own-venues acquired and equipped by artists themselves, and mostly in Old Strathcona (with exceptions like the four curated venues at La Cité francophone, and the odd outlier downtown).
The size of A Fringe Full Of Stars represents deliberately modest growth from the lineup of last year’s Find Your Fringe, with its 215 show in 38 venues, and 185 shows the year before that at The Answer Is Fringe. Fringe 2025 assembles shows and artists from here, across the nation, and around the world, nine countries in all. Utas and Dart are determined to “build up the audience and build capacity” before allowing the festival dimensions to expand more dramatically. “We can’t outpace our audience, and our resources,” as Utas puts it. “We’re the largest (of the Fringes on the circuit) in North America, by far. And most of the others, including Winnipeg, have cut back.”
To this starry galaxy are added such Fringe traditions as the (free) nightly music series in ATB (aka McIntyre aka Gazebo) Park. And the (free) KidsFringe, for younger fingers — some 14,000 in number last summer — and their grown-up companions, returns to Lighthorse Park, curated and directed by Alyson Dicey.
The Late-Night Cabaret, a Fringe starry starry night hit of 14 years standing that started out in the Backstage Theatre,, returns to its larger digs at the Granite Curling Club. Last year it sold out all its performances there.
Dart and Utas celebrate the return, for the 12th summer, of the Fringe’s “lead festival partner ATB Financial. Ah, and in their third year Sea Change, “the exclusive beer provider of the Edmonton Fringe,” (which just has to be named from Shakespeare’s The Tempest: “a sea change into something rich and strange”). The Sea Change initiative of the summer is a new brew: Fringe Beer Tent Blonde Ale, “a beer with theatre in it,” as Dart and Utas say. It’s available at hospitality hot spots all over Strathcona and a portion of the proceeds from every can sold go to support the Fringe.
Pêhonân (nêhiyawêwin for “meeting place”), the Indigenous-led initiative assembled by the Fringe’s Indigenous Director MJ Belcourt Moses, will be found throughout Fringe site. It includes not only performances on a stage, but “art installations, self-directed tours, (stops) where you might learn how drums are made …” as Utas describes. A “celebration of storytelling” in all its forms, says Dart.
And that’s a theme to which both she and Utas return again and again. “The Fringe movement is the movement of the future,” says Utas, whose mentorship reach includes countless Zoomed ‘town halls’ with Fringe artists who request it. “In my time, art is more precarious than it’s even been. And it’s more essential than ever. And when it’s gone it’s gone…. We battle back against darkness with stories, with art. And we gather!”
And this just in: More than a thousand volunteers, in teams, make the Fringe possible every summer. And Dart reports that as of Friday, 86 per cent of volunteer positions have been filled (so step up the pace if you want in). The year-old Sustain Fringe campaign to expand the community of monthly donors started modestly last year with 34. That number is now more than 540. And since expenses continue to expand exponentially, the campaign continues: fringetheatre.ca/give. If every Fringe ticket-buyer contributed $5 a month, the Fringe would become “instantly sustainable.”
Festival guides to A Fringe Full of Stars are on sale July 30. Festival passes and tickets August 6.
