I’m going to be covering the New York International Fringe Festival for my Wall Street Journal drama column later this month. This year’s festival, which opens August 13, is presenting shows by 197 “emerging theatre troupes and dance companies.” That is, how you say, an impossible task, there being only one of me and I having only enough time to go to a dozen shows at most. What’s more, the hardest job is picking the shows. Every once in a while the buzz on a particular performance becomes overwhelming, but for the most part I find myself sifting through a stack of press releases in search of inspiration, wondering if I might do better to use a dart board.
This time around I’ve decided to enlist the help of those “About Last Night” readers with an interest in theater. So if you know of a particular Fringe show that you expect to be good, either because you’re in it or you know somebody who’s in it or you’ve simply heard good things about it, please make haste to send me an e-mail saying so. Be brief, but not too brief (i.e., tell me in a sentence or two why I should see it). I don’t promise to take your advice, especially if I get a lot of it, but I do promise to pay attention to it and be grateful for it. Besides, who knows? You might be responsible for my writing a rave of a show I wasn’t planning to see as I write these words. Wouldn’t that be cool?
Don’t delay–I’ll be scheduling and booking my Fringe visits early next week.