Jason Zinoman on the 2010 New York Fringe Festival

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UPDATE: A Fringe administrator and Jason Zinoman trade comments at Matthew Freeman’s post on the issue. (Matt’s latest work, Brandywine Distillery Fire, created with Michael Gardner, will open the fall season at the Incubator Arts Project in September.)

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“Complaining about the Fringe … is part of its tradition,” says Jason Zinoman in today’s New York Times about the annual New York International Fringe Festival, which is just ending its 2010 edition (along with its transatlantic counterpart, the Edinburgh Fringe). His thoughts are especially pertinent; Jason is perhaps the New York Times reviewer most familiar with the downtown theatre community and has a reputation for balanced and informed judgment, so when he complains, it’s notable. A few of his notes on this year’s festival:

As I have visited much more audience-friendly Fringes in Edinburgh and Philadelphia, however, the New York International Fringe Festival now appears needlessly bland and poorly organized. It also does no favors for the reputation of downtown theater. We deserve better. …

When you present 200 productions that are quickly put together, there will be bad work. I may have had poor luck this go-round, but over the years the kind of bad shows at the Fringe has changed. They are now usually failures of ambition and imagination as much as craft. … What I worry is that while Off-Off Broadway throbs with energy, ambition and the finest low-budget experimental theater scene in the world, you would likely never know that from attending the New York International Fringe Festival.

The full text of Jason’s article can be found here.

2 thoughts on “Jason Zinoman on the 2010 New York Fringe Festival”

  1. Thank you, George for the kind words. And yes, with hundreds of Fringe shows under my belt, I speak with some experience.

  2. My pleasure, Jason.

    I wonder if any of this has to do with “festival-thinking” on the part not only of the Fringe festival organizers, but also curators of other festivals — that the brand has somehow become more important than the product, something that does not seem to have happened (yet) in Edinburgh or Philadelphia. But that’s a question for another think-piece.