By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

Find Your Fringe, the 43rd annual edition of the Edmonton International Fringe Theatre Festival.

Find Your Fringe finds itself going into its final weekend on a roll. With good news to share.

As of Friday morning the 216-show 43rd annual edition Edmonton’s 11 day-and-night summer theatre binge has sold 13,000 more tickets to indoor shows than at the same point in last year’s Fringe. And as Fringe Theatre executive director Megan Dart reports, to her particular delight, the payout to festival artists (who take home 100 per cent of ticket sales, minus the $5 max festival surcharge) has already broken the $1 million barrier. Which does more than hint that last year’s $1.2 million artist payout will easily be surpassed by Sunday night.

“Our goal is always to build audiences, and give artists the support they need,” says Dart. And this year’s 216-show dimensions, an incremental rather than an exponential increase from 185 in 2023, feels like “a comfortable fit” for audience engagement, she thinks. “Deep roots instead of wider branches.”

So far, Fringe organizers report “more than 300 sold-out performances.” And, says Dart, multiple shows (among them Rat Academy, High School Musical, Evil Dead the Musical, Colin Mochrie: Live At The Fringe!) sold out their entire Fringe runs before the festival even began. The Fringe’s nightly Late-Night Cabaret, always a magnet for insomniac fringers in its 13-year history at the 120-seat Backstage Theatre, “continues to bustle every night,” as Dart puts it, in its new digs, the Granite Curling Club, a venue twice the size.

The beer tents have been so busy that the Fringe’s usual mid-week mid-festival order, traditionally Wednesday, had to be bumped back to Monday instead.

Like many other arts organizations across the country, it’s been a year of struggle for our Fringe, the oldest and still the biggest on the continent. The skyrocketing costs of producing the massive festival, and shrinking (or frozen) funding from every level of government, have seen to that. The festival’s “Sustain Fringe” campaign was launched in March, with the aim of raising $300,000, in $5-a-month pledges. It started with 34 monthly donors, and as of Friday morning, there are 420-plus. And the current campaign total stands at $210,000.

“If every Fringe fan donated $5 a month, the Fringe would instantly be sustainable,” says Dart. Opportunity knocks: fringetheatre.ca/give/sustain-fringe/.

And meanwhile there are shows to see, lots of shows. Have a peek at 12thnight’s reviews; you can find them gathered under the heading “Fringe 2024,” at 12thnight.ca.