Stage Writes
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New York Fringe Cancels the 2017 Festival
Organizers say they want a sabbatical to rethink the festival’s goals.
Jeff McCarthy and Spencer Kayden in Urinetown
The New York Fringe Festival has announced that it is taking 2017 off.
The midsummer festival, which has provided stages for more than 3,600 offbeat, experimental and/or aspiring plays and musicals in its two decades of existence, will take a sabbatical next year; Shelley Burch, president of the board of the Present Company, which produces the festival, broke the news to The New York Times.
The Fringe's producing artistic director Elena K. Holy said she needs time “to completely reconsider what the festival needs to be.”
In all those years only one of FringeNYC’s hundreds of productions achieved real prominence—the musical Urinetown, which transferred to Broadway in 2001 and won Tony Awards for Best Book and Best Score.
Click here for the full article on Playbill.com, published by Robert Viagas on October 3, 2016.