By Liz Nicholls,
After 11 days and nights Fringe Unforgettable, the 45th annual edition of our big insomniac summer theatre binge, will exit the stage (all 38 of its stages, to be precise) Sunday night.
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And it will take its curtain call as a multiple record-breaker. As of Sunday noon, with an afternoon and evening’s worth of shows still to come, this year’s Fringe had sold some 142,000-plus tickets to its 209 indoor shows (which broke its own post-pandemic ticket record of 140,000 tickets last summer). And this sunny news from the box office is accompanied by additional glad tidings: a record 550 sold-out performances, with 24 shows that sold out their entire Fringe runs (up from 2025’s 16).
The gods, who had sent punishing weather our way all summer long, relented (a Sea Change perhaps?). And Edmontonians embraced summer in a big way: the 825,000 site visits were a record-buster, and the free KidsFringe in Light Horse Park is likely to report attendance way up from last year’s 14,000.
The news that gladdens the heart of Fringe Theatre’s executive director Megan Dart most of all perhaps is the record-breaking $1.53 million (and counting) that Fringe artists will be taking home, up from last year’s $1.49 million. And since the 2026 show count of 209 was slightly down from last year’s 221, it will be dispersed amongst fewer shows.
The slight reduction in the number of shows this year, 209 down from 221, wasn’t a deliberate move. “It just happened,” says Dart. After all, a lot of Fringe theatre happens in BYOVs acquired and outfitted by artists themselves. But a show count between 210 and 220, give or take, is a “comfortable fit for us,” she says, “with our staff and volunteer complements.” Ah, and funding constraints, which include “city funding that’s remained stagnant for a decade.”
As she put it, “we want the artist experience to be exceptional, and the audience experience to be exceptional too.”
The prevailing principle shared by Dart and Fringe artistic director Murray Utas is “to sustain what’s good before we grow.” Sustainable growth includes caution about adding an official Fringe venue to the Fringe’s roster of 10 (at a cost of about $15,000 each), which house nine productions each, programmed by lottery (the rest are in BYOVs, venues acquired and outfitted by artists themselves).
There were 533 applications for those 90 Fringe slots this year, Dart reports.
“But “we’ve been very intentional,” she says, about growth that doesn’t outpace audiences, or Fringe infrastructure, both human and financial. She and Utas have focused on “audience engagement, to make sure artists are getting audiences. So we’ve invested a lot of strategy and resources to reaching out to first-time Fringe goers” via such initiatives as itineraries and Fringe tours.
Like Utas, Dart is an artist and theatre-maker herself. And she’s confident about the live theatre effect. “We know it can seem overwhelming; that 209 (count) can seem very daunting. But once someone sees their first show, they’ll be back to see three, or four, or five. And the next year, they’re a pass-holder!” And, she adds, “we’ve had an uptake in first-time Fringe ticket buyers this year.”
This week, organizers from Fringes across the country, Toronto, Vancouver, Winnipeg, Saskatoon, plus Orlando) visited Edmonton’s Fringe, the oldest and biggest on the continent and a prototype for the rest. Dart reports that “they were struck by the incredible vibrancy of the theatre community here.” As one of them observed, “each Fringe Festival responds to the needs (and personalities) of the town where they are; you couldn’t just lift a Fringe from one place and set it down in another.”
Ours is “unique to our community,” Dart points out. This is a theatre town, and “the indie heart of this theatre community is what keeps this Fringe alive.” And the record-breaking tally of sold-out performances testifies that artists are finding their audiences.” The Fringe is “an affordable entry point for an audience.” And that audience has learned at the Fringe, a festival “that is by its very nature experimental.” It’s one reason Fringe Theatre has renamed its black box studio theatre the Brian Paisley Theatre Lab,” lab in honour of the Fringe founder whose zest for experimental art and artists never wavered.
Erika MacDonald: Tea TIME, Fringe 2026. Photo supplied
And despite it all, the biggest of the Fringes has retained its appeal for artists taking a chance, trying something a new idea. Erika MacDonald, for example, an artist from Kentucky who’s been coming to Edmonton for more than a decade started coming to Edmonton in 2013 is back again, with a ’new to Canada’, and risky, solo show. TeaTIME, she says, is “not really a comedy, though it starts very Up and very funny. And it’s not clown, not really, and not really storytelling either…. It’s the most audience participatory I’ve ever done…. And the timing is really challenging,” synchronized as it is to making a cup of tea onstage, the boiling of the water, the steeping, the pouring, the cooling enough to drink. She finds “an adventurousness” in the Fringe audiences here, a willing to try “off-traditional off-kilter shows.” Hers, she says, “has grown up a bit during the run.”
Shrute and Tungsta, Dirty Fish Theatre. Fringe 2026. Photo supplied
One of the sleeper hits of the Fringe is the riotous two hander Shrute and Tungsta, whose characters are a pair of provocative German performance artistes in the bathroom of a big Berlin techno club. They test at every turn the audience’s nerve and willingness to take a risk in deliberate confrontations. Aidan Collins, who co-stars with Harper Oud, says the show run twice before before the Fringe, both times in public bathrooms, with the audience crowded into the stalls. The Fringe is the first time they’ve tried producing an unconventional show in a conventional theatre space, its own kind of challenge. And audiences have been loving it. “I think the days of passively sitting and watching a theatre show are ending. Audiences enjoy stimulation (no pun intended).”
On Saturday, I went to see a genuinely experimental half-scripted half-improvised show that takes the Fringe up on its claim that everyone has a story to tell. For PLAYS BY [BLANKS], director Joe Vanderhelm changed course from his PLAYS BY BOTS in the past. He’d used Dramabot in the past, “when AI was still fun,” to write half a script, with Rapid Fire improvisers making up the rest. Now that AI has terrorized the world, he’s unplugged AI and enlisted “everyday people,” as opposed to career playwrights, people like his mom and his neighbour across the script, to write a script. On Saturday it was nine-year-old Alice, whose smart, funny comedy Video Game, taken over by an international quartet of improv stars half way through, was a big hit with a packed house. The sight of RFT artistic director Matt Schuurman, as a tap-dancing dog in a banana suit as required by Alice’s stage directions, will not soon be forgotten by anyone present. In its origins the whole Fringe was an improv experiment, after all.
Time to sign off on this year’s edition (except for the Fringe holdovers that extend the fun, read about them on here). It’s the surprises of the Fringe adventure that keep us coming back.
