The Answer Is Fringe. Design by Pete Nguyen.

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

You are now perfectly positioned to answer for yourself the Great Question of Life, the Universe, and Everything. And unlike Deep Thought (in Douglas Adams’ trippy and comical Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy), it won’t take you 7.5 million years. The Answer is Fringe. And tickets go on sale today at noon for this 42nd annual edition of Edmonton’s international summer theatre extravaganza, the continent’s biggest and oldest Fringe.

The Great Question of Fringe tickets (and passes) has several answers. They’re online at fringetheatre.ca; by phone (780-409-1910); in person at Fringe Theatre headquarters in the Arts Barns box office (and during the festival at any festival box office), or the Edmonton Arts Council Shop & Services downtown (formerly TIX on the Square). After many years in a holding pattern, the top ticket price is up by $2 this summer. Fringe artists set their own price, to a $15 max, up from last year’s $13 (100 per cent theirs to keep), and the Fringe adds a $3 service fee. So you’ll be paying $18 tops to see a show.

The best deal for the bargain hitchhiker is the Frequent Fringer pass, ($140 for 10 tickets) and the Double Fringer pass ($280 for 20), maximum of two tickets to any performance per pass. These get snapped up in a hurry. And there are daily discounts, too, determined by Fringe artists (only in-person sales).

For your galactic interstellar travels, you have 185 Fringe shows (at last count) to choose from, in 35 venues, eight of them programmed by lottery and 27 BYOVs (bring-your-own-venues) acquired and outfitted by artists themselves. This counts not as a wild surge from last year’s 162 shows but “incremental growth” (as Fringe Theatre’s executive director Megan Dart puts it).

As you’ll see in the hefty high-gloss $12 hitchhiker’s guide to the Fringe galaxy, a couple of the usual venues are temporarily missing for Fringe #42. But new BYOVs have stepped up, including Rapid Fire Theatre’s new air-conditioned Exchange Theatre (Stage 12), Mile Zero Dance (Stage 32), Boxer Bar (Stage 35), The Rooster Kitchen (Stage 36).

You can find Fringe shows in actual theatres, like the Varscona, the Gateway, the Westbury, the Backstage, and the Studio Theatre in the Fringe Theatre Arts Barns, Theatre Network’s Roxy, La Cité francophone. But many of the Fringe BYOVs have other lives — as bars, cafes, dance studios, night clubs — ah, and in the case of 221B Baker Street (Stage 37), the Fringe garbage container just on the north side of the Fringe Theatre Arts Barn. That’s where  Los Angeles company, The Best Medicine Productions, gives Fringe sleuths a secret map and sets them forth on a quest (à la Found Fest) for clues around the festival grounds in The Sherlock Holmes Experience.

And for your star travels, it’s worthy of note that in honour of the summer festivities the Fringe has installed A/C in Workshop West’s sizzling Gateway Theatre (Stage 6), regarded by most veterans as the hottest venue.

Festival director Murray Utas points out that international artists who haven’t been at the Edmonton Fringe in many a year — Cameryn Moore, the Dead Rabbits, the Coldharts, Australian storyteller Jon Bennett among them —  are back for The Answer Is Fringe. It’s an auspicious sign that the COVIDian imperatives have waned and the Fringe has regained its mojo. “And it speaks to our own community,” he says. “Audiences unafraid to take a creative risk with them,” says Dart, “are part of the Fringe culture.”

Utas has reduced the number of shows in each of the eight lotteried venues from 10 to nine, “a more human-centric policy … so the technician (a pair, that come with the venue) can actually have a dinner break.” The BYOVs are “all artist-driven,” but Utas, a Fringe artist himself, has played match-maker on many occasions by connecting newcomer artists who are “an unknown quantity” with veterans and possible venues. When Anita Charania, Marion Poli and Charlotte Szabo, winners of the Fringe’s Mowat Diversity Award, needed a director for their new musical The Catalogue of Sexual Anxieties, for example, Utas contacted the Plain Janes’ Kate Ryan on their behalf. Voilà, a new relationship. The production happens at the Old Strathcona Performing Arts Centre (Stage 8).

Most BYOVs, at Utas’s urging, urging are “anchored” by a local. And sometimes it’s the venues themselves who reach out and want to be part of things. Utas always asks them why. “The best answer is ‘I want to support the Fringe’.”

The KidsFringe is back at Light Horse Park (10325 84 Ave.) starting Friday Aug. 18, 10:30 a.m. to 5:30 p.m., with a lineup of activities and shows curated by Alyson Dicey of Girl Brain, all free, for the under-12 set and their grown-up companions. There’s music on the ATB Outdoor Stage in the park both Fringe weekends, at 9 and 10 p.m., curated by the indie folk/rocker (and musical theatre composer) Lindsey Walker.

And check out the mural wall on 85th Ave., with DJs and emcees, all powered by young street artists, painters, musicians, textile wizards, storytellers. “We believe in the importance of storytelling,” says Dart of the festival, “that can exist in many different forms…. We’re planting the seeds for future generations, of artists and audiences, in ways we don’t even know yet.”

Which brings us to the other Great Question of Life, the Universe, and Everything Fringe: what to see at the 42nd annual edition of our mighty summer festival. 12thnight.ca can help with that. Stay tuned to this site for encouragement, suggestions, features, and reviews.

And if you’re finding the theatre coverage on my free (so far), independent site 12thnight.ca worthwhile and entertaining, I really hope you’ll be able to chip in to my ongoing Patreon campaign — with a monthly amount to support its continuation. Click here.

We’ll set forth on our explorations in a week.