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Behind the Fringe curtain: Get creative, or die trying

Behind the Fringe curtain: Get creative, or die trying

When it comes to writing, there are only three rules: write, write, write.
When it comes to writing a play for the Fringe Festival, the rules change exponentially: Write, direct, stage manage, produce, and do the tech if you're not actually on stage performing.
Oh, and sell the hell out of your play.
Hamilton's Brian Morton knows this. He's been doing it almost since the festival started in Hamilton 20-plus years ago.
The first Hamilton Fringe play he ever did was a one-person show in 2006. At the time, Morton was a venue tech, but the Fringe organizers had no budget to pay crew, 'so they gave me a slot and I performed 'Krapp's Last Tape,'' a one-act, single-hander that Samuel Beckett wrote in 1957.
Such one-person shows, Morton said, are the bread-and-butter of Fringe because they're easy to produce, 'but they're hard to market. It's so hard to distinguish yourself.'
Megan Phillips and the team behind 'Cheese Pervert' takes the show to the mother church of Fringe festivals, to Edinburgh, in August.
They're the bread-and-butter because a playwright/director/producer/publicist doesn't have to hire a crew to help. That helps moneywise since 100 per cent of the base ticket price of every show goes to the artists. It also means one person has to carry the load.
Lisa Randall, of Toronto, figures she's up to the task.
Randall comes to the Fringe this year in an almost roundabout way. She and a collaborator won a spot through the Fringe lottery — which plays get to be staged are selected by a Bingo ball machine.
Later, her partner got a spot in the Toronto Fringe and Randall found herself with a Fringe spot and having to go solo. But not to worry: This is her seventh Fringe production, including Toronto and Vancouver.
'It was a good nudge,' Randall said, or a good kick in the pants to finally write 'Sister Sophia Kicks the Habit.'
Randall had two aunts who were nuns. The surviving one is 98 and lives in the Mother House in a small Ontario city.
'I stopped practising Catholicism after my parents divorced, the way many people do. At the time of the divorce one of my mother's sisters told her she was going to go to hell.'
That was more than enough for Randall to disengage from them and the church. But then she 'started to learn things about their lives — and they became so important to me, not as Catholics but as family members. I gained a deep compassion for them. The play is like a tribute.'
Two other solo woman shows are in the works for this year's edition of the Fringe: 'Horseface,' featuring U.K.-born, Toronto-based artist Alex Dallas and directed by Clare Barry, herself a veteran of the Canadian Fringe tour; and 'Catching a Cheese Pervert,' co-written by Kayla Kurin and Krista Rowe (also the director) and starring Megan Phillips.
For Dallas, it seems a lot of the hard work for 'Horseface' (the name comes from the Trump insult against Stormy Daniels) has been completed. The show premiered in Orlando in 2019 and has played in Winnipeg, Toronto, Ottawa, Calgary, Edmonton and Victoria.
'Horseface' features U.K.-born, Toronto-based artist Alex Dallas.
'The show came about after #MeToo and the Weinstein trial. I became so enraged about what was being revealed about women's lives that I started to reflect on my own in relation to the way I have been treated by men — teachers, boyfriends, strangers — and I put that rage and comedy into a show.'
The show's success and Donald Trump's 34 felony convictions are their own publicity. That 'Horseface' won Best in Show awards in Ottawa and Orlando helps.
The Kurin-Phillips-Rowe collaboration also has its origin in the headlines.
'The show is (loosely and unfortunately) inspired by the bizarre real-life case of the 'Swiss Cheese Pervert,' a man who made headlines in Philadelphia in the early 2010s for his … dairy-centric public indecency,' Rowe said. 'We took that strange but true headline and ran it through a feminist glow-up of corporate greed, environmental collapse, and Canada's most ridiculously powerful interest group, the dairy lobby.'
In their case, as well as with Dallas and Morton, collaboration seems to be the key to a successful production. Randall even found that as well as working solo was going, collaborating has kicked it up a notch.
Randall had worked on 'Sister Sophia' for several years, 'monologue by monologue' (even writing three songs for it) before she showed some of them to another friend, Kate Johnston, an award-winning filmmaker.
'She asked questions I hadn't thought of,' which proved helpful in finding the arc of the story.
As for Morton, he's been working with Hamilton musician Chris Cracknell for more than 20 years. 'It's usually his playing Robin to my Batman, but instead, this time, it's me as Robin to his Batman.'
Their play has what can be described as a uniquely Fringe title: 'A Non-Canonical Musical Adventure with Pookamhura: Mistress of B-Roll.' It's based on a 12-episode YouTube series Cracknell created about the gaming world.
The Fringe play is 'noncanonical,' meaning audience members don't have to be gamers or know the web series to follow the story line, which is about self-discovery, gender identity and the complexities of life. Also uniquely Fringe.
The collaboration between Cracknell and his four actors, two of whom are transgender and new to the stage, is a 'creative act of faith, like jumping off a cliff and hoping it will come out OK,' Morton said.
The team behind 'Cheese Pervert' takes the show to the mother church of Fringe festivals, to Edinburgh, in August. They, too, have worked together for some time, first connecting while filming a short comedy, 'Break Up Time Machine.'
They quickly discovered a shared comedic sensibility rooted in absurdism, a mutual disdain for nepo babies, and a love/hate relationship with therapy, Rowe said.
After the show's been written, cast and rehearsed, there's the small matter of publicity. Hamilton Festival Theatre Co., the Fringe's parent organization, has organized online meetings with producers to guide them in getting the word out.
'The Fringe's job is to get 200 people out to the Fringe every day. Your job is to convince those 200 people to catch your show at 4 o'clock,' Morton said.
Yet, in the end, it still comes down to the work itself, what the playwright, director and actor leave on the stage.
Everyone else is invited along for the ride. How uniquely Fringe.
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What It Was Like Inside the 2000s Asian American Cooking Boom
What It Was Like Inside the 2000s Asian American Cooking Boom

Eater

time2 days ago

  • Eater

What It Was Like Inside the 2000s Asian American Cooking Boom

I think as a kid when your family is fucked up, you fantasize about things. You tell stories, you build forts, you do anything to transport yourself from the corner of the home you're hiding in while your parents tear each other apart. At least that's how I dealt with it. One of the few positives in my family was that my mom could really cook, specifically homestyle Chinese Taiwanese food and the things she ate on the street as a kid. Her father and uncle used to sell mantou under a bridge when they first escaped to Taipei, but my mother took it to another level at home, cooking things like oh-ah-mi-shwa (pig intestine oyster vermicelli), zhong zi (sticky rice in bamboo leaves), minced pork stew, lion's head meatballs, and red cooked pork. Even if she said nasty things to my face, I would reason that she had to love me to some degree if she put this much effort into the food she cooked for me. It's well-documented that I grew up in an Orlando restaurant run by my father called Cattleman's Steakhouse. It was a fine steakhouse with USDA Prime meat, offering coupons for $10.99 prime rib and a phenomenal salad bar. Objectively, it was a step above Texas Roadhouse or Outback, but slightly below Morton's or Ruth's Chris due to the cowboy-themed dining room designed by a street dude from Taipei. I started off as a busboy at 15, then prep cook, then grill, then saute, but by the age of 17 I became the expediter. Watching the tickets come through, firing off the orders to the kitchen, slamming baked potatoes and rice pilaf onto plates shouting 'All day!' or '86!' was the best part of my day until I took my break to go buy Xanax from one of the older servers by the dumpster out back. Expediting was the time of my life, but I didn't want to get stuck in a restaurant because it was a hard life. A lot of people were drug addicts. Others were single parents. One of the managers was always disappearing, then reappearing, then one year just died. My dad fired me for fucking around at work. Then a few months later I caught an assault charge and my parents couldn't understand why I kept throwing my life away. I couldn't explicate it either until I saw Good Will Hunting. It was the first time I saw the feelings I had projected in any sort of way besides irrational violence. That's when I decided I wanted to be a writer-director one day. I got my start renting the Rollins College Library camcorder, shot a short film in the parking lot of Lee's Liquor, and my professor, Dr. Boles, submitted it to Columbia's Summer Film Program on my behalf. I got accepted, went, wrote more scripts with Asian characters, but all-Asian cast films or TV shows were a joke. A professor at Columbia told me to my face that 'Hollywood will never make a show with all-Asian faces.' 'My mother took it to another level at home.' Eddie Huang I took it as a personal challenge, but had no idea how I was going to pull it off. Walking out of Columbia the last day of our summer film program, I saw a guy with a blanket selling Sickamore, Black Wall Street, and Green Lantern mixtapes. I copped three for $10 and saw a Burkina sticker on one of them. I looked up Burkina online and discovered it was a mixtape spot near First and First with Army Navy gear hanging from the ceiling, making it feel like a bomb shelter. I went looking for more tapes, but what I discovered were a bunch of bootleg T-shirts with things like 'Stop Snitching' on them. I started wandering the neighborhood and found Nort, Recon, and a bunch of other stores selling what may or may not have even been referred to as streetwear yet, but I started pressing up shirts myself and selling them on the train. That was my portal into downtown NY and I met Asian people that were more similar to the uncles in my dad's Taipei youth gang than the kids at Chinese school in Orlando. I started to sell all kinds of things and it was a lot of fun. I forgot about film and writing for the moment. Then in the mid-2000s David Chang came onto the scene in the East Village selling noodles and gua bao. There was tremendous interest in Asian fusion food all of a sudden, but it really pissed me off that people thought Dave — now my good friend — invented the bao. Since the 1950s, people had been selling gua bao, which employed the sugar dough from mantou, filling it with braised pork belly and pickled mustard greens. As Chang writes in the Momofuku cookbook, he ate 'Peking' duck baos at Oriental Garden, a phenomenal but now-shuttered Cantonese restaurant in New York where you wouldn't get actual Peking duck. The restaurant served the 'Peking' duck with gua bao, which is also a telltale sign you are not eating Peking duck because it would normally come with a pancake or crepe-like carbohydrate. That said, Dave is served this bastardized 'Peking' duck and comes up with the idea to roast pork belly and serve it on a gua bao with hoisin and a pickle using French technique. That is absolutely Dave's innovation. But because the American audience had not seen the original, they believed they were seeing something for the first time. Even though it already existed. The first time I had gua bao was in 1994. I remember it because I went to the last LA Rams game at Anaheim Stadium where they lost to my Washington Commanders. The next day, I went to a bakery with my grandma and she bought me a gua bao. It was glorious and actually gave me the confidence to tell people I was Taiwanese. 'Because the American audience had not seen the original, they believed they were seeing something for the first time.' Being Taiwanese Chinese at the time, most people just said they were Chinese because of the politics. Even if someone was brave enough to say Taiwanese, people just thought you meant Thailand and it wasn't worth it. I could stomach that, but the gua bao thing bothered me. Living in mid-2000s downtown New York, hipsters at places like Welcome to the Johnsons or No Malice Palace would argue with me saying Dave invented them and I absolutely got into some really stupid drunk-high fights over this. I was selling weed and other things off South Oxford Street at this time. One weekend my mom came to visit and a few guys came to the apartment to re-up around 11 p.m. and she figured out pretty quickly what was going on. She cried, couldn't believe what I was doing, and I was like, 'All right, all right, relax.' A few weeks later I took my money and got a lease on Rivington Street to sell gua bao the Taiwanese way. I wasn't plugged into the Manhattan food scene. I ate around my crib in Brooklyn, Chinatown, or took the 7 to Flushing. I didn't even know what No. 7 restaurant was at the time even though my South Oxford-Fulton C train was right on top of it. I didn't think I was welcome in certain spaces because of what I did and how I dressed so I just stayed away. (I ended up being good friends with chef Tyler Kord, who taught me to eat broccoli and helped me stop being so defensive towards hipsters and their restaurants.) The idea for Baohaus was simple: Set up shop across from Alife and a basketball court on Rivington where the customer was a person I understood and sell them gua bao at a good price. I didn't think to change who I was, what I wore, or what I listened to. I was oddly also into Bauhaus and brutalist architecture, but 'bao' flowed better than 'Brutalisthouse' so there it was. I got the lease, then asked my homie who was good with Formica to build a simple counter in the middle and install Ikea shelves. Put some family photos on the wall and boom — we were open. The main event at Baohaus. Baohaus The menu had five to seven items depending on how much energy I had that particular day. The constants were a Chairman Bao, which was red cooked pork belly topped with pickled mustard green, peanuts, red sugar, and cilantro; the Birdhaus Bao, which was five-spice-brined chicken thighs, fried and topped with aioli, peanuts, red sugar, and cilantro; the Uncle Jesse, a fried tofu bao with a different aioli but the same toppings; a Haus Bao that had red cooked skirt steak until skirt steak became too expensive; fried baos with condensed milk; and if we had energy, boiled vinegar peanuts and a Taiwanese beef noodle soup. A couple months in, a white guy who spoke some good ass Mandarin came in with a pregnant woman for lunch. I made them some baos, some beef noodle soup, and the white guy actually put me onto the greatest Taiwanese film I've ever seen: A Brighter Summer Day. I hung out with them for a solid hour as I did most people who came by in the early days. A few weeks later, I get a call from the New York Times, which revealed the pregnant woman was Ligaya Mishan, who wrote an under-$25 column at the time. The white guy was the inimitable Ahrin Mishan, who has immaculate taste in food and new wave cinema. The day after her review dropped, there was a line down the block and I never looked back. This was my chance. To me, Baohaus and the gua bao was a vehicle to tell a story about where my family was from, but you could only say so much through a restaurant. Or at least I thought that. Agents started coming to the restaurant asking me to write cookbooks and such. I told all of them that I wanted to write a memoir about growing up Taiwanese Chinese in America and they laughed at me... even the agent that eventually repped the book. I held my ground, refused to be called a chef, and refused to write the cookbook because I knew that if I got pigeonholed as a chef, I would never get to be a writer-director. A lot of people around me, including my family, thought I was stupid and that my dreams were unrealistic. Ultimately, one agent agreed to read the first and last chapter of this 'memoir,' but if it was no good, I owed him a cookbook and I agreed. I locked myself in my apartment from Friday to Sunday and sent it to him that night. A couple weeks later, he sent it out to five publishers and by the end of the month we had meetings with all of them. The editor we chose was none other than Chris Jackson, who I still work with. That book became Fresh Off the Boat. We got Asians on television. Constance Wu did her thing. Ali Wong got her first job in our writer's room. Awkwafina's first appearance was on the original Vice version of Fresh Off the Boat. Luna Blaise just opened Jurassic Park and everyone has gone on to do amazing things. Eleven years later, I closed Baohaus in the pandemic. The guys wanted to work, but people kept getting sick and I wanted them to collect unemployment before it went dry. I shut down early with dreams of reopening, but eventually relented and gave the lease back to the landlord in October 2020 with no end in sight. I don't regret it. People know where Taiwan is, and it is now confirmed that while Dave Chang is a spectacular chef, he did not invent the gua bao. In his defense, he never claimed to. It was one of those things people said for him. Eddie in his element. Steven Lau While I was writing and directing, a lot has changed in the Asian American culinary scene. Anajak Thai has kind of reimagined Roy Choi's Asian Mexican observation of LA and put it on a tostada pedestal with dry-aged fish and other oceanic offerings. Pairing it with wine in a back alley of Sherman Oaks has cemented it as the restaurant to be at in LA. Danny Bowien can't stop won't stop and his energy on a wok is pretty much unmatched even if he makes fried rice with fresh rice. There's Calvin Eng in Brooklyn doing truly American Cantonese food at Bonnie's and since the Cantonese have been here longer than anyone else you get a real reflection of capital-A America in his cooking. Cory Ng, the proprietor of Phoenix Palace and Potluck Club, has been holding down Chinatown since he was throwing up Twon and bagging up sausages at Kam Man two decades ago. Cory not only puts out excellent food, but he does a lot of community work for seniors, which I gotta shout out. Shoutout Ha's even though I have to dine there at either 5 p.m. or 10 p.m., but I love to see another brother with the jade Buddha and vintage Rolex Date just getting it. The level of difficulty cooking the precise food they're putting out of that kitchen with a combi-oven and one electric burner is Simone Biles-level shit most people wouldn't even attempt. There are also Asian Americans in the Mountain West doing it big like chefs Anna and Ni Nguyen at Sắp Sửa resurrecting his mother's Vietnamese food in a modern setting. Shoutout Naks, shoutout Kalye, PhiLiPPiNES iS PROUD OF UUUU! Where my Koreans at? Atomix, Atoboy, but don't forget Woorijip you feel meeeeeeee. Shoutout David Chang and Roy Choi, who paved the way for a lot of chefs. Writing, film, television are all excellent mediums, but they're group projects in a different way than a kitchen. There are 100 people with notes standing between the script and the screen that film will ultimately be projected on. Every once in a while, someone wins a 1v100 battle and gets a great film across, but if there's one thing I learned the past decade it's that perhaps the immigrant story was actually best told in a kitchen where the line is immediate, direct, and physically digestible. We've come a long way and I'm excited to be back in the kitchen these days. Sign up for Eater's newsletter The freshest news from the food world every day Email (required) Sign Up By submitting your email, you agree to our Terms and Privacy Notice . This site is protected by reCAPTCHA and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply.

Twin Cities weekend guide: Cat video fest, SoMi Art Fair, Fringe Festival
Twin Cities weekend guide: Cat video fest, SoMi Art Fair, Fringe Festival

Axios

time7 days ago

  • Axios

Twin Cities weekend guide: Cat video fest, SoMi Art Fair, Fringe Festival

If you want to see a mind reader, dance to moth-inspired music or watch a show all about flatulence, you're in luck — the Minnesota Fringe Festival has begun. Driving the news: Minnesota's largest performing arts festival returns Thursday for 11 days of unique local live theater productions across the Twin Cities. Organizers choose what submissions get in via a random pingpong ball cage lottery, ensuring the hundreds of performances span a wide variety of genres. What we're watching: One-act "Ted Lasso" parody " The Lasso Way: A Musical," an emotional showcase by American School of Storytelling and a "show" where eight patrons go through a theater-themed escape room set backstage. Regular tickets are $25, or get a $5 discount on every ticket via a one-time, in-person purchase of a $5 Fringe button. More things to do ... 🎬 Watch a flick on wheels at a "roll-in" or "bike-in" movie this weekend. Roseville's skate center is showing "Moana 2" at 7:30pm Friday, or bike to Loring Park at 8:45pm for "Pee-Wee's Big Adventure" — which will be displayed on a large screen on the back of a bike. Both free 🚶Open Streets returns for its first car-free street festival of the season on Saturday, closing Northeast's Central Avenue from Lowry to 14th from 11am-5pm. Expect two stages with performances like lucha libre wrestlers, a beer garden, vendors, art installations and more. Free 🥳 Also blocking off streets this Saturday: the Rondo Block Party, which celebrates the predominantly Black St. Paul neighborhood's rich history and diversity. In addition to the live entertainment, family activities and food, the event will have a Health & Wellness Zone that aims to address health disparities in the community by providing free screenings and one-on-one consultations. Free 🎨 The Uptown Art Fair may have left Uptown, but the "reimagined" event, now called SoMi (South Minneapolis) Art Fair, is this Saturday and Sunday at 60th and Lyndale. Expect over 300 artists, live music and art demonstrations.

Go ahead, binge on Fringe
Go ahead, binge on Fringe

Hamilton Spectator

time16-07-2025

  • Hamilton Spectator

Go ahead, binge on Fringe

Some people say government should be run more like a business — really? — but, if factors like debt and deficit matter, guess what government should be run more like? The Hamilton Fringe Festival. You read that right. On the cusp of the start of its 2025 edition, July 16 to 27, Hamilton Fringe is breathing easier with the exhalation of an outfit that just wiped out a $50,000 deficit. Such a sum of debt can represent an existential threat to an organization of its size — that deficit was brought on mostly by COVID-related challenges. But they paid it off not over the course of an arduously long austerity plan, but lickety-split — in a single year. How many can boast that? Not that that's what the Fringe is about — it's about creativity, experiment, challenge, fun, and access to all. But, says executive director Chris Stanton, the remarkable rebound is notable even more for social than fiscal achievement. It's a testament, he explains, to the Hamilton community and how valued the Fringe is to it. 'I think the real story here is that the community stepped up,' says Stanton. 'Donors came out of the woodwork and different funders. People really came through for the Fringe.' Indeed, Hamilton does love its Fringe, as the crowds illustrate, as does the volume and vibrancy of the programming. Last year, almost 18,000 people attended Hamilton Fringe, coming from all over Canada, the United States and beyond, and this year, one of the festival's biggest ever and the very biggest by some measures, promises much of the same if not more, with some new wrinkles and some alterations to old ones. To get to the actual meat of the matter, the Hamilton Fringe Festival this month will feature more than 55 performances, covering everything from sketch comedy, improv, theatre, dance, puppetry, magic, musicals and more. General information on discount Fringe buttons, ticket orders, prices, dates, times and locations of all performances and other Fringe events (including kickoff party July 16, Mills Hardware 6:30 p.m. start, and closing parties with DJs and music on Fringe Boulevard, 6 p.m. on July 27) see the Fringe website at: Physical schedules are also available at Coach & Lantern, 384 Wilson St. E., Ancaster; Crown and Press, 303 Ottawa St. N.; Democracy, 202 Locke St. S.; Detour Café, 41 King St. W., Dundas; Last Supper Books, 148 James St. N.; Mulberry Coffeehouse, 193 James St. N.; Paisley Coffeehouse & Eatery, 1020 King St. W.; Playhouse Cinema, 177 Sherman Ave. N.; RELAY Coffee Roasters, 27 King Wiliam St.; Tourism Hamilton, 28 James St. N., Village Coffee Roasters, 977 King St. E. 'For one thing, we have two new indie venues,' says Stanton. 'The Gasworks and the Centre for Talking Arts (156 James St. S.), with new partnerships and more players taking part than ever before.' Some of the featured plays/treatments/shows are: 'Minimum' The premier of Ontario finds himself having to live on minimum wage in this outrageous comedy by The Intergalactic Federation of Space Beers production company. 'Brown Noise.' 'Brown Noise' A mix of standup, sketch and storytelling probing the South Asian-Canadian experience from two different sides. Media Arora is first generation Canadian. Rishabh Kalra is older stock, and together they clash, connect and find laughter. 'Once Upon a Pizzeria.' 'Once Upon a Pizzeria' Hamilton's beloved Charly Chiarelli is back with a chase through the city stemming from Nonna Maria's square pizzas and her grandson being bullied because, well, pizzas are round, right? Music, visuals, audience participation. Also featuring Jay Shand. '3 Hours, 10 Minutes.' '3 Hours, 10 Minutes' Two strangers, one painting. What do they see in it? In each other? A look at connection, reflection and the power of shared experience in an age of screens and self-absorption. By Beauchemin Productions. 'Ugly Privilege.' 'Ugly Privilege' An hour of standup comedy by Vancouver comedian Jessica Pigeau featuring discussion of autism, social awkwardness, and growing up gay in rural Alberta. This is just a sampling to give a sense of the wide variety on offer, but there's so much more — as mentioned, more than 55 performances in nine stage locations (Theatre Aquarius, Mills Hardware, Players Guild of Hamilton, The Staircase, The Westdale, Hamilton Theatre Inc., Ringside and, aforementioned, The Gasworks and Centre for the Talking Arts). 'And Fringe on the Streets is back,' says Stanton, 'and we're billing it as a tour (of downtown Hamilton) unlike any other. It starts at the farmers market with performance and fun all the way up King William' to Theatre Aquarius. 'And people can hop on and off as they like and come back later.' Fringe on the Streets, free and in partnership with City of Hamilton and with support from Downtown Hamilton BIA, is an immersive walking experience punctuated with live art and performances along a 75-minute route, featuring music, burlesque, women of vaudeville behind the Tivoli, and a grand finale of dancing at King William. Some of the tour acts are Cesar C. Cordoba (accordion, keyboard, storytelling, bird puppetry); Claud Spadafora (cabaret/burlesque/theatrical comedy/storytelling): Sheep's Clothing Theatre (Pony Girls vaudeville); Flesh & Wire Co. (puppet show celebration of Elizabeth Bagshaw, Hamilton feminist icon/doctor/birth control pioneer); Devin Bateson ('Everything Is a Condo' enactment of time traveller beaming down from the future to give ghost tour of urban development); and Bloom (dance imagining of garden planted in concrete of downtown, with choreographers Skye Rogers and Vik Mudge. Tours depart the Hamilton Farmers Market, 35 York Blvd., at 3 p.m. and/or 6 p.m. most days. Check the festival's website for more, including stops along the route. Replacing single space Fringe Club of the past is this year's more expansive Fringe Boulevard, along King William and James Street North. It is a pedestrian-friendly hub of music, dance, drag, film painting and performance, sprinkled with local artisans in marketplace tents, on both the Saturdays of Fringe (19, 26) and an Indigenous marketplace on Saturday, July 26. The boulevard is designed to maximize integration of the festival with the neighbourhood and area food culture, typified by restaurants like The Mule, The French, RELAY, The Diplomat; HAMBRGR, Undefined, The Standard, Electric Diner, Parma and Piccolo, as well as other businesses and organizations along the strip. A feature of Fringe Boulevard will be the RELAY Licensed Patio, open 6 to 10:30 p.m. every night at RELAY Coffee Roasters, 27 King William St. Two other features of the festival this year: Visual Fringe Work by nine visual artists at RELAY Coffee Roasters. Film on the Fringe Short showcase competition, sponsored by the Downtown Hamilton BIA on Thursday, July 17, after 9 p.m. with entrants' films shown under the stars on Fringe Boulevard.

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