12 days. 100 shows. 280 volunteers. Here’s what it takes to put on the Toronto Fringe Festival

Less than 48 hours before the Fringe Festival officially begins, Lucy Eveleigh seems oddly calm.

“It’s weird, because this year has been the most stressful in terms of financial insecurity,” said Eveleigh, who’s been with Toronto’s biggest theatre festival for the past 10 years, the first five as managing director and the most recent as executive director.

“But this team is amazing,” she said, pointing to staffers swirling about the POSTSCRIPT Patio, assembling the box office booth, bar and performance stage.

In just over 24 hours, that stage would come alive with drag queen Pearle Harbour and Broadway star/country crooner Graham Scott Fleming, the latter an old friend of Eveleigh’s from her acting days, who was to perform in a pre-Fringe launch event, a first for the festival.

Tessa Cernik, the Fringe’s projects and operations manager, directed a van wanting to make a delivery on this holiday Monday to the back of an adjoining hotel. Pretty soon she and POSTSCRIPT technical director Heather Kilner wouldn’t have any such interruptions.

Last year, Cernik said, their limited permit meant that each night they had to strike part of the patio setup to allow cars to pass by in the alley after 2 a.m. This year, she worked some magic with the city and their permit allows them to have the entire space next to the Tranzac Club free for a week and a half.

The patio is the event’s hub, where audiences, artists and those in search of a good party gather to eat, drink, swap notes and spread the buzz during the busiest 12 days of the city’s summer theatre season.

The financial insecurity Eveleigh mentioned has to do with an urgent letter she sent out in late spring on behalf of the not-for-profit festival, which turns 35 this year.

“We are hurting,” Eveleigh wrote in a plea to Fringe supporters for donations. “Thanks to your generosity, we have a contingency fund in place, which enabled us to continue our vital work during the pandemic. But now, our ability to continue at the level our community needs is in jeopardy and we are looking at an operating deficit.”

As she told the Star’s Joshua Chong back then, this year’s festival was going to be crucial for the event’s future. If the numbers didn’t add up, she and the board might have to reduce the 2024 festival from the current 100-plus shows to 50 or 60.

Things have turned around since then.

“The fundraising campaign has proved to me that people care,” said Eveleigh. “People are buying tickets. We had a great opening sale day. This past weekend was one of our best selling weekends ever before the festival. The team is amazing. So I feel hopeful. I’m trying to be positive. I hope it stays that way. We’ll see how tickets go. One show (‘The Will of a Woman,’ one of the Star’s best-bet picks) is already sold out. It’s hard to tell but, at the moment, it feels like people are ready to Fringe again.”

Volunteers

The day before, a few blocks away in an office on Spadina, I was sitting with dozens of Fringe volunteers receiving their orientation training. Volunteer co-ordinator Ellen Reade and associate volunteer co-ordinator Kavone Manning were delivering a one-hour presentation on all aspects of things the volunteers might encounter: from how to de-escalate potentially violent situations to dealing with accessibility issues.

Volunteers are the lifeblood of any festival and Reade, who’s worked at approximately 20 festivals since 2017, said she loves working with them.

She and Manning met during Hot Docs, continued their collaboration at the North by Northeast Music Festival in June and are capping off their summer at the Fringe.

“What I love the most about working with volunteers is you’ve got a group of people who are passionate about an event and the people around it,” said Reade, who’s got the cheerful and approachable spirit you need in any group leader.

“The community-building aspect of something like Fringe is really fun,” added Manning, who used to attend the Fringe as a patron. “You meet so many different people and hear their stories. What I like is that everyone’s joined together by a common interest: theatre, music, film.”

And what’s in it for the volunteers — who this year number about 280 — besides a distinctive volunteer T-shirt (which this year is purple) to help patrons identify them, plus vouchers to see shows?

For Katherine Newman and her daughter Jordana Tramontozzi, volunteering at the Fringe is a bonding experience — and a way to support the arts.

“This is our third time here, and it’s a great way to spend time together and hang out and have fun,” said Newman, who’s got a busy full-time job managing highrise Toronto condos. She considers volunteering her “down time.”

Over the past few years, they’ve volunteered together at the Hot Docs, ImagineNATIVE and Inside Out film festivals, as well as Pride. But they’ve got a soft spot for the grassroots theatre festival.

“It’s more hands on than a lot of other festivals,” said Tramontozzi. “I like being able to check everyone in as they enter one of the venues.”

So far, they haven’t had to deal with many rude or unruly patrons.

“Sometimes people are mad because a show’s sold out, or they’ve shown up at the wrong theatre and have tickets for something else,” said Newman. “But they’re not mad at us, just frustrated with themselves.”

Long-time volunteer Lesley Nicholls is a familiar face to Toronto theatregoers — year-round. She’s been volunteering at the Fringe and other performing arts venues since 2010.

“It’s just a wonderful community. The actors are so nice and appreciate everything you do to help things run smoothly,” said Nicholls. “What’s really impressive is that the co-ordinators remember your name. That means a lot.”

Festival changes

Back at Fringe headquarters, Lucy Eveleigh was discussing one of the festival’s big changes this year. Namely, there won’t be physical box offices at each venue. Patrons can buy online, over the phone, or in person at the Fringe hub and the Alumnae Theatre, one of the new venues.

“But if someone really needs to buy a ticket at the door, we have capabilities of taking that through the front of house app if we need to,” she explained.

She had already fielded calls about the box office changes, the mandatory mask mandates at two Fringe spaces — Theatre Passe Muraille and the Aki Studio — and the two-phase lottery system for Fringe entries.

“We hold 50 per cent of the lottery spaces for BIPOC (Black, Indigenous and people of colour) to ensure that at least 50 per cent of the festival is by BIPOC. I’ve had some interesting conversations with audience members and I’ve moved the needle for some of them in understanding that in a place like Toronto that representation is needed onstage.”

Emergencies

Every festival has its emergencies, but Eveleigh said there’s always a solution.

Last year, for instance, they had to deal with the infamous Rogers internet outage for a day, which meant some check-in systems were down. On the final day of the festival, one venue lost power for a day and so they had to move several performances up the street to a venue they’d used in the past but which was dark that year.

And then there was 2018, the year the Fringe received a bomb threat at the Tarragon Theatre, one of its venues.

“I pride myself on how calm this team is in a state of emergency,” said Eveleigh, recalling that event.

“I was on the subway, so I missed the first calls. Our production manager at the time figured out the situation and soon we got on the phone to the police. We immediately thought, ‘OK, who needs to know?’ Audiences, staff. There’s a process. Dividing up tasks. ‘OK, I’m going to take this on, you’re going to refund these people, you’re going to send out this email.’ (Managing director) Laura (Paduch) and I usually just divide and conquer whatever needs to happen.”

Eveleigh knows that this year’s festival, the biggest since the two-year live pause because of the pandemic, is crucial for the festival’s future.

“Information we get from this Fringe will be the most useful data,” she said. “We’ll see if people are showing up, if they donate and at the end we can go, ‘OK, this is how big this festival should be. This is how many people in this city, based on the budget we have and the marketing we can do, are coming out. Do we stay at the level we’re at or decrease?’”

There will likely be emergencies. Shows might have to be cancelled.

“But there’s almost always a solution,” said Eveleigh. “It sucks if a show gets cancelled and we can’t reprogram it. Companies might lose that money. But we’ve got a protocol in place where we email the audiences for that show and ask if they’d consider not getting refunding and keeping their ticket as a donation to the company.

“We just have to make the best of things and treat everybody with kindness, even in the midst of unexpected things happening. That’s the spirit of Fringe.”

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