This year’s St. Lou Fringe Festival, which kicks off today in Grand Center, is the biggest ever. Will it be the best ever? That’s something that even president and artistic director Matthew Kerns can’t answer. After all, even he hasn’t seen most of these acts.
And that, of course, is the whole point of the Fringe.
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“We were born out of people telling artists that they weren’t good enough, that their work wasn’t good enough, and they went out and created their own festival that was uncensored and unjuried,” Kerns says. The majority of this year’s 52 acts were chosen via lottery—drawing names out of a literal fishbowl, with no pre-screening and no curation.
That means Kerns will be as surprised as anyone by which acts have a breakthrough moment. But he can promise you this: Some of them will break through. “I can tell you that some of the most magnificent work in our 14-year history has come from the fishbowl,” he says.
The headliners, however, are by invitation, and this year’s list is a good one. The festival runs the gamut from theater to musical performances to magic to comedy to burlesque, with local favorite Lola Van Ella returning to St. Louis from New Orleans to be the Late Nite Headliner. The National Headline Act is Br. John Rajpa, the Kansas City artist behind the cabaret show It’s Not Over Until the Legends Sing.
Perhaps the most obvious crowd pleaser, though, is The Cherokee Street Theater Company’s world premiere of John Hughes Choose Your Own Adventure. It’s a mashup of two Gen-X touchstones: Those once-ubiquitous paperbacks where you, the protagonist, guide the plot and the eponymous director’s movies about teens. “The Cherokee Street Theater Company has written this show with 27 different situations for the audience to walk through, based on all of the John Hughes movies like Curly Sue and Ferris Bueller’s Day Off and The Breakfast Club,” Kerns explains. “And then they’ve given the audience over 3,000 choices inside of the show for them to act out. They have no idea where it’s going to go.”
It’s such a can’t-lose idea, Kerns offers a bit of advice for anyone new to the Fringe and not sure what to see. “The best thing you can do, if you’ve never been to the Fringe Festival before, is buy yourself a five-show pass knowing that you’re going to go see John Hughes Choose Your Own Adventure. Stay for Lola Van Ella’s Late Nite Romp, and then those other three shows, take a chance on something that you just have never heard of before,” he says. “And I promise you’ll be surprised, pleasantly surprised, because that’s the point of the Fringe, is to expose our audiences and expose our artists to audiences, and to brand-new works that are being built for the stages of our town by our independent arts community.” You could even try the fishbowl method yourself: Put some options in a hat and see what comes up.
The festival is designed for walkability. Everything happens in Grand Center, with various performances at .ZACK, the High Low, The Marcelle, Urban Chestnut Brewing Co., and (for the first time this year) Hidden Gem. Grab a drink at Urban Chestnut between shows, and you’ll undoubtedly run into performers and other audience members, filling the neighborhood with an artsy buzz.
Performances begin August 11 and run through August 17, a mad six-day sprint of theater taking place during the day and night, with more than 100 performances over the course of the week—joining the 650 shows that have been presented and produced across the festival’s 14-year history.
“The important thing to know is that the independent arts community is alive and well in St Louis,” says Kerns—and hearing all the numbers behind the festival, it’s impossible to argue.
