Advice for Future Hollywood Fringers

Here is the transcription of my most recent video blog:

(And here’s the audio on Anchor FM)

Hey everybody, this is Queen Mab, and Hollywood Fringe is over, but much like Brazilian Carnaval, there are shows that now doing extended runs. In Brazil after Carnaval, all of the samba schools keep doing performances, and they call it the “resaca,” or the “hangover”…so I guess this is the “resaca/hangover” of Hollywood Fringe. So I’ll put a link, and make sure you go check out some of those shows. I know I’m probably going to, because there were a lot I didn’t get to see.

So what I’m going to talk about today is the things that I learned from doing Hollywood Fringe this year, and I hope that this can be useful to anyone who’s going to be doing it in future years, and maybe even to festival organizers – who knows? 

The first thing that I would like to tell any future Hollywood Fringer is in order to simplify the box office process (which is complicated at Hollywood Fringe, because for most of the venues, you have to handle your own ticket sales and your own box office, which was a big change for me from other festivals I’ve done) – I would recommend making a discount code for Fringers, and whenever someone messages you and says, “Hey! Wanna trade comps?” just send them that discount code, don’t worry about – oh, by the way, a comp is a free ticket, okay? So “Wanna trade comps?” means “Wanna trade free tickets to our shows?” Okay? Just send that code to whoever is asking you rather than going in and entering in an individual comp for everybody, because it’s just exhausting. 

Now, let’s talk about this business of performers not necessarily getting in for free. That’s another thing that was very different for me about Hollywood Fringe as opposed to other Fringe festivals that I have done. In my opinion, I really think that all performers should get into shows for free, because all of us are spending so much to produce our shows, AND because all of us, as a Fringe community, are involved in nominating shows for awards, so really, it makes sense to want Fringe people in the audience so that you’re going to get those connections, and you’re going to get those nominations. So I don’t know if that’s something…a policy that the entire festival can institute, or if it’s up to the individual theaters, but I would highly recommend that, and performers, I would highly recommend that on your end. So, there’s that.

The second piece of advice that I would give is to keep your show to an hour – or under an hour. I got conflicting advice about this as I was preparing to bring my 75 minute show to the festival this year, and I don’t necessarily think my show is too long, but I think it is too long for a Fringe festival. And it’s not just because everyone’s trying to go from one to show to the other to the other, and so I need to keep the time short. I think it has more to do with the fact that everyone is just watching so much theater that their brains are kind of on overload, and so nobody can handle anything that’s longer than an hour, so I would have done that differently. 

And the last piece of advice that I would give is to go to as many shows in person as possible. Now, this was a problem for me, because I live in San Diego, and I wasn’t able to just go be up in LA for three weeks, so if I do the festival again, I don’t know how I’m going to navigate that. I do have fantasies of getting a whole bunch of San Diego theater people together and all of us doing Hollywood Fringe and just being kind of this San Diego mafia, but even that doesn’t fully solve the problem, because we still have to drive three hours to get up and three hours back, so…

Oh, by the way, while I was up there, I definitely saw a bus that said, “GO CHARGERS!” and I had to work really hard not to give it the middle finger, because I’m sure they would have had no idea why I was giving it the middle finger. But PS, Chargers, we don’t miss you. We never needed you. Have fun in LA. ANYWAYS! That was beside the point. So those are my reflections from Hollywood Fringe. I’m really looking forward to the “resaca/hangover” shows, and…if you like what I’m talking about, “like,” comment, subscribe…or don’t. That’s cool too. Thanks…see you next time!