Attending Cincinnati’s annual Fringe Festival can be an arduous task. It’s fun, to be sure, but it can be a big challenge to identify which shows to see and navigate your way through during the 13 days of performances at more than a dozen venues across downtown and Over-the-Rhine.
Since the beginning, the planning team behind the theater festival, now helmed by producer Chris Wesselman, has never stopped innovating. This year welcomes back Film Fringe, a selection of indie movie offerings at Mini Microcinema on Main Street. It also sees the return of a fan-favorite performance from a decade ago, plus free family-friendly offerings on the weekends of June 2-3 and June 9-10 and live music throughout the festival. Fringe will also include multiple art galleries, street performers and an audio installation in an igloo.
And that doesn’t even include the primary lineup: Cincy Fringe’s main component features 35 roughly hour-long performances. Depending on how you look at it, Fringe can be a veritable holiday of theatrical adventures or it can be an overwhelming buffet of too many choices.
That’s where CityBeat‘s intrepid team of reviewers comes in, led by theater critic Rick Pender. He and his team are reviewing early-run performances of 35-plus shows, and we’ll post them on our Fringe Festival coverage hub here.
And here:
- Critic’s Pick: Musical Chairs
- Critic’s Pick: Eddie Poe
- Critic’s Pick: Doppelbanger
- Critic’s Pick: There Ain’t No More
- Critic’s Pick: The Whitest Baby in All of Africa
- Critic’s Pick: The Blackface Project
- Critic’s Pick: The Amphibian
- Critic’s Pick: All We Have Borne
- Critic’s Pick: Of Monster Descent
- Critic’s Pick: Re-Grooving
- Critic’s Pick: Annalise
- Critic’s Pick: Vox Box
- Critic’s Pick: Show Up
- Critic’s Pick: bloom
- Take Flight
- Forealism Tribe Origins
- Thrive IRL
- Last Drag
- Curie Me Away!
- Billy: The Haunting of William Howard Taft
- Walt Fit
- The Gospel of Barabbas
- Damage
- Please Shuffle the Cards
- Aphrodite’s Refugees
- Lost Generation
- The New Adventures of Calliope Jones and Captain Cool
- Bad Poetry Night
- One More Bad Thing
- The Mountains Did Quake
- The Bureau
- ExTrashVaganza
- She Buried the Pistol
- Fadeaway Girl
- Delivery
You can also find theater critic and writer Erica Reid’s May 23 cover story previewing Fringe here.
Check back often for the latest reviews, and click on over to cincyfringe.com for ticket information.
This article appears in May 30 – Jun 6, 2018.