25 years of Orlando Fringe Festival memories: 1992, the 1st festival
Fringe 1992: Storefronts, magic, AIDS, clowns, severed limbs, Wayne Brady and weird people
by Matthew J. Palm
The Artistic Type
March 10, 2016, 8:16 pm
For the Fringe's 20th festival, Orlando Sentinel arts writer Matthew J. Palm published a series of reminiscences on the Fringe's history, using information found in the newspaper's archive. In honor of the 25th Fringe, which opens this May, we're republishing and updating the series. To start, here's a look back at the first Orlando Fringe Festival, in 1992:
For anyone who has seen the avant-garde, sometimes racy content of shows at the Orlando International Fringe Theatre Festival it will come as no surprise that organizers caught the Orlando Sentinel’s eye by sending the newspaper a pair of underwear.
Sentinel columnist Bob Morris saluted the Orlando Theater Project in March of 1992 for its inventive press release: Fruit of the Loom underwear trimmed with red fringe and engraved, on the seat, with an invitation to a press “briefing.”
The group’s hook — to lure the media to write about plans for the First Ever Orlando International Fringe Festival.
25 years later, we’re still writing about it. Orlando’s salute to theater, dance, performance art, music and the occasional madness, as an old Fringe slogan went, is now the United States’ oldest Fringe-style event.
Back in that first year, the Fringe button cost $2, and tickets cost up to $7. Plays were performed in four storefront spaces: Sak Theatre Comedy Lab, 45 E. Church St; the old McCrory’s store at 101 S. Orange Ave.; 125 S. Orange Ave., next to Terror on Church Street; and 56 E. Pine St., at the corner of Pine Street and Court Avenue.
An outdoor performance space was on Church Street, and an art gallery showed the work of 28 artists.
The fringe featured five theater groups from England, six from Canada, one from Puerto Rico, 13 from the Orlando area and three from other parts of the United States. Six groups performed outdoors: three from Orlando, one from Chicago, one from Toronto and one from California.
Those 34 groups were chosen simply because they were the first ones to apply. Nowadays, there’s so much competition, of course, a lottery has to be held. And for those who don’t get picked in the lottery, the legendary wait list can geel interminable.
The Fringe was dreamed up and presented by the Orlando Theatre Project and produced by Terry Olson, Andy Anthony and Rick Kunst (all associated also with Sak Theatre). It was unjuried from the start: “We’re not an institution saying ‘This is good, this is not,’ ” Olson said in 1992. “People can decide for themselves.”
The community rallied behind the cause: The Sentinel reported that Margaret Moorefield, a well-known Central Florida chef who planned to open a restaurant next door to Terror on Church Street, postponed her plans by several weeks so the space could be used for the Fringe art gallery and one of its performance sites.
And the festival kicked off with a one-block “parade” down Church Street, featuring the World’s Worst Marching Band (their words, not mine_.
The first festival was considered a success artistically, if not quite financially. The producers lost $2,000 to $3,000 on the 10-day event, which had a budget of $79,000, Olson said. He blamed most of the shortfall on food and drink concessions that did poor business. About 2,500 people bought about 5,400 tickets to festival events, and total attendance to all festival events – which included plays in four storefront theaters, variety acts on an outdoor stage on Church Street and a display of visual arts in another storefront on Orange Avenue – was about 14,000, Olson said.
That fell short of organizers’ hopes, but bouyed by the $30,000 in box office receipts for the individual theater companies that performed, they hatched plans to return the following year.
Groups got creative to finance their Fringe shows: The Sentinel ran a notice for the Per4mAnts, who raised funds for their Fringe performance of “Ant Vanya” by holding a yard sale.
Several performing groups reported back to the Sentinel that they broke even with their participation. Among the first-year performers: a three-woman group from London, Sensible Footwear, with “Close to the Bone,” about good girls going bad; and a Puerto Rican troupe, Bohio Puertorriqueno, with “Tres Piraguas en un Dia de Calor” (“Three Snowcones on a Hot Day”), a play about life in their country staged with a comedy style popular in the 1950s.
Among the Central Florida groups: Genesis Inc., with Wayne Brady, performing a revue about the black experience called “Exodus: A Musical Journey”; a group of Actors Equity members doing the Richard Maltby Jr.-David Shire musical revue “Closer Than Ever”; KVG Productions, presenting a bill of two one-act dramas dealing with AIDS, “Cross Country”; and Roamin’ Productions, performing two Lanford Wilson one-acts under the title “Love Is A Many Splintered Thing.”
Also among the shows (and counted as only one of the 28 groups performing indoors) was the Orlando International TheatreSports Tournament, which pitted Orlando’s TheatreSports team in improvisational comedy against nine other teams from New York, Seattle, San Francisco, Los Angeles and Chattanooga, Tenn., as well as from Edmonton and Calgary in Canada and from Australia and New Zealand. Local celebrities judged the competition.
Sentinel theater critic Elizabeth Maupin’s first published review from the festival was quintessentially Fringe: “When you think of clowns, you rarely think of severed limbs” began her positive write-up for the clowning comedy of Toronto duo Mump & Smoot.
The first festival impressed Sentinel entertainment columnist Commander Coconut, who summed up the fun this way: “What we saw we liked, and it’s always good to see lots of people in downtown Orlando, especially weird people.”
Fringe 1992: Storefronts, magic, AIDS, clowns, severed limbs, Wayne Brady and weird people
by Matthew J. Palm
The Artistic Type
March 10, 2016, 8:16 pm
For the Fringe's 20th festival, Orlando Sentinel arts writer Matthew J. Palm published a series of reminiscences on the Fringe's history, using information found in the newspaper's archive. In honor of the 25th Fringe, which opens this May, we're republishing and updating the series. To start, here's a look back at the first Orlando Fringe Festival, in 1992:
For anyone who has seen the avant-garde, sometimes racy content of shows at the Orlando International Fringe Theatre Festival it will come as no surprise that organizers caught the Orlando Sentinel’s eye by sending the newspaper a pair of underwear.
Sentinel columnist Bob Morris saluted the Orlando Theater Project in March of 1992 for its inventive press release: Fruit of the Loom underwear trimmed with red fringe and engraved, on the seat, with an invitation to a press “briefing.”
The group’s hook — to lure the media to write about plans for the First Ever Orlando International Fringe Festival.
25 years later, we’re still writing about it. Orlando’s salute to theater, dance, performance art, music and the occasional madness, as an old Fringe slogan went, is now the United States’ oldest Fringe-style event.
Back in that first year, the Fringe button cost $2, and tickets cost up to $7. Plays were performed in four storefront spaces: Sak Theatre Comedy Lab, 45 E. Church St; the old McCrory’s store at 101 S. Orange Ave.; 125 S. Orange Ave., next to Terror on Church Street; and 56 E. Pine St., at the corner of Pine Street and Court Avenue.
An outdoor performance space was on Church Street, and an art gallery showed the work of 28 artists.
The fringe featured five theater groups from England, six from Canada, one from Puerto Rico, 13 from the Orlando area and three from other parts of the United States. Six groups performed outdoors: three from Orlando, one from Chicago, one from Toronto and one from California.
Those 34 groups were chosen simply because they were the first ones to apply. Nowadays, there’s so much competition, of course, a lottery has to be held. And for those who don’t get picked in the lottery, the legendary wait list can geel interminable.
The Fringe was dreamed up and presented by the Orlando Theatre Project and produced by Terry Olson, Andy Anthony and Rick Kunst (all associated also with Sak Theatre). It was unjuried from the start: “We’re not an institution saying ‘This is good, this is not,’ ” Olson said in 1992. “People can decide for themselves.”
The community rallied behind the cause: The Sentinel reported that Margaret Moorefield, a well-known Central Florida chef who planned to open a restaurant next door to Terror on Church Street, postponed her plans by several weeks so the space could be used for the Fringe art gallery and one of its performance sites.
And the festival kicked off with a one-block “parade” down Church Street, featuring the World’s Worst Marching Band (their words, not mine_.
The first festival was considered a success artistically, if not quite financially. The producers lost $2,000 to $3,000 on the 10-day event, which had a budget of $79,000, Olson said. He blamed most of the shortfall on food and drink concessions that did poor business. About 2,500 people bought about 5,400 tickets to festival events, and total attendance to all festival events – which included plays in four storefront theaters, variety acts on an outdoor stage on Church Street and a display of visual arts in another storefront on Orange Avenue – was about 14,000, Olson said.
That fell short of organizers’ hopes, but bouyed by the $30,000 in box office receipts for the individual theater companies that performed, they hatched plans to return the following year.
Groups got creative to finance their Fringe shows: The Sentinel ran a notice for the Per4mAnts, who raised funds for their Fringe performance of “Ant Vanya” by holding a yard sale.
Several performing groups reported back to the Sentinel that they broke even with their participation. Among the first-year performers: a three-woman group from London, Sensible Footwear, with “Close to the Bone,” about good girls going bad; and a Puerto Rican troupe, Bohio Puertorriqueno, with “Tres Piraguas en un Dia de Calor” (“Three Snowcones on a Hot Day”), a play about life in their country staged with a comedy style popular in the 1950s.
Among the Central Florida groups: Genesis Inc., with Wayne Brady, performing a revue about the black experience called “Exodus: A Musical Journey”; a group of Actors Equity members doing the Richard Maltby Jr.-David Shire musical revue “Closer Than Ever”; KVG Productions, presenting a bill of two one-act dramas dealing with AIDS, “Cross Country”; and Roamin’ Productions, performing two Lanford Wilson one-acts under the title “Love Is A Many Splintered Thing.”
Also among the shows (and counted as only one of the 28 groups performing indoors) was the Orlando International TheatreSports Tournament, which pitted Orlando’s TheatreSports team in improvisational comedy against nine other teams from New York, Seattle, San Francisco, Los Angeles and Chattanooga, Tenn., as well as from Edmonton and Calgary in Canada and from Australia and New Zealand. Local celebrities judged the competition.
Sentinel theater critic Elizabeth Maupin’s first published review from the festival was quintessentially Fringe: “When you think of clowns, you rarely think of severed limbs” began her positive write-up for the clowning comedy of Toronto duo Mump & Smoot.
The first festival impressed Sentinel entertainment columnist Commander Coconut, who summed up the fun this way: “What we saw we liked, and it’s always good to see lots of people in downtown Orlando, especially weird people.”
Copyright © 2016, Orlando Sentinel (original article)