Fringe Comments- By Joel Markowitz Musical Podcaster/Theatre Schmoozer

My hats off to all the volunteers and the administration who pulled the Fringe Festival off. Alot of people worked very hard to make this a success. It will be interesting to see what the final ticket sales were, but most of the shows I attended were near capacity. A special thanks to the box office workers who had enormous patience.

Another special thanks to all the playwrights, actors, directors, techies, etc. who invited me to see their shows and gave me those wonderful comps. I was treated very well by all of you, and I thank you for your generosity. It was a personal pleasure to schmooze with many of the artists during the happy hours and parties before and during the festival, and at DCTR’s podcast recording sessions at The Warehouse. Your spirit and dedication was and still is infectious.

And a special thank you to the muffin maker at Warehouse. Your muffins are the best, especially the vegan ones. I’ve worked very hard on the treadmill this weekend trying to burn off those muffins I devoured.

The only two suggestions I have for the next Fringe Festival, is to hold it in the fall when it’s cooler, and to allow people who are waiting in line to get into a “sold out show.”

Sell standing room ticket(s), at a reduced rate, for all the shows, and if there are empty seats because of no-shows, the standees can then fill up the empty seats. I’ve been running a social group for 16 years, and my first obligation is to fill up the empty seats and to ensure that the cast is performing to a full house. I hated seeing people standing out in the sweltering heat, and not being allowed to fill up those empty seats.

Again, congrats to a job well done. My life is richer because of my Fringe experiences.

Joel Markowitz

Lorraine Treanor, our Director of Marketing, had these thoughts about our first Fringe.

Hats off to the organizers of Capital Fringe for proving that Washington has a huge hunger for Fringe. As a producer (of Mamas, DOn’t Let Your Cowboys Grow Up to Be Actors) I attended the first Fringe meeting last summer where we heard the hopes and dreams of organizers Julianne Brienza and Damian Sinclair. One hundred productions. Inside and outside new and customary venues all around Penn Quarter. In July.

But – Washington is a conservative town! Would audiences stay aware in droves? Would artists putting not only their creative spirits on the line but some hard earned cash as well, see it all crash and burn? Everyone took their chances and with one collective roll of the dice, by January we had a festival lineup of 97 productions.

As we all know by now, the Capital Fringe Festival was a huge success. Show after show sold out. Fringe frenzy set in – people lined up at the Festival box office, saw their favorite shows had sold out and laid their money down for other shows – seeing 2 or 3 shows in one day, even those late night shows.

As a member of DCTR, I recorded the pre-show podcasts. I saw performers, many working on their own without the net of a theatre company, develop original and, by all accounts, audience-pleasing material. Because the festival was self-produced, every performer got a taste of what marketing means; creating websites and audio promos, sending out press releases, and squeezing in time to create, print and hand out postcards in between rehearsals.

Every actor hopes to make a living in theater. Most do not. But once festival receipts are tallied and checks remitted, many actors and producers just might be receiving one of their best paychecks of the year.

I loved how a fringe community formed over those 11 days; in the easy atmosphere of the Warehouse Bar, strangers became friends whether they had walked in as performers, audience members reviewers or crew.

Looking ahead, I hope that Fringe II will make a bigger visual impact around town – street banners, bus ads, and maybe even pull off the opening day parade that had to be set aside this year. Daytime street and lunch time events are being talked about. It will be bigger. It will be better. It’s in the works even as you read this.

Lorraine Treanor

Senior Reviewer Tim Treanor had these thoughts about our first Fringe

The Fringe itself was an unalloyed success. It’s one of the best things I’ve seen Washington area theater do. What it shows is that there is immense talent waiting to get out and express itself. Most of the Fringe stars were folks I had never seen on stage or writers I had never seen produced. The Fringe gave them an opportunity to explode out of whatever limitations were keeping them off stage and into public consciousness, to the benefit of public consciousness.

The most important lesson is one in theater economics. I saw thirteen shows, and ten of them were sold out or nearly sold out. This is immensely informative to small companies with revenue problems. If I was running one, I would immediately grab some of the hot shows (particularly the one-actor shows, which obviously have minimal operations costs) and put them in my theater on dark weekends, splitting the take 50-50. The $15 admission price worked for the Fringe, too, and may be informative for theaters throughout Washington. It may be time for theaters to rethink the supply-demand curve; in Washington, supply of fine professional theater seems to exceed demand, and that may have to impact prices.

I think that Fringe management was smart not to impose content restrictions in an effort to make the Fringe far out. The fact of the matter is that audience defines the sort of theater we’re going to have here. Washington is a culturally conservative community, and it is unlikely that the eccentric productions that make it big in New York or Chicago (Manson! the Musical! was one of my favorites there) are going to find a home here, even on the Fringe. Don’t push the issue, I say. Let the artists and the audience collaborate to find out how experimental they want to get.

Tim Treanor