North America’s oldest and largest theatre festival has set a record for most tickets sold in its 43-year history.
The executive director of the Edmonton Fringe Festival says it has broken its all-time box office record set in 2019 and sold 138,500 tickets this summer, which amounts to $1.48 million for its 1,600 artists.
Megan Dart says it surpasses the $1.39 million the festival garnered in 2019 with the 127,000 tickets it sold.
“We are just so thrilled, this year’s festival was such a celebration of theatre-making, of storytelling, of boundary-pushing, art-making.”
The festival was set to come to an end this weekend, but Dart said it’s extending some shows for another week due to the turnout.
Dart pinned the success of its 221 productions across 40 venues in Edmonton to its increased marketing efforts.
“We put a lot of work into intentional invitation, reaching out to community groups who maybe haven’t been at (a) festival for a while or haven’t ever attended before,” she said.
Dart, who is also a board member of the Canadian Association of Fringe Festivals, said she has heard that all 32 Fringe Festivals across Canada have also seen a general increase in the number of patrons.
She said this year’s success comes after the COVID-19 pandemic and the affordability crisis changed audience behaviour in the last couple of years, forcing the festival in Regina to cancel its events this summer.
And even though the cost of threatre production has gone up significantly in the last couple of years, she added, festival organizers were keen to ensure ticket prices remained affordable.
“I joke that we’re sort of the Netflix of live performance,” she said.
Festival organizers say the milestone confirms that Fringe is an essential part of Edmonton’s cultural identity.
Alberta’s capital city was the first one in Canada to host the theatre festival in 1982, drawing inspiration from the Edinburgh Festival Fringe, which first began in 1947.
Dart said the organizers of other festivals across Canada are well-connected and will be taking lessons from Edmonton’s theatre festival this summer.
“There is so much best practice that we can share as producers who care deeply about this movement,” she said.
“We’ll certainly ensure that we’re here for generations to come.”
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