Nae Gatekeepers

The Usher Hall staging of St Matthew's Passion involved 150 chorus members, a full orchestra, and an enormous authentic pipe organ. It was a spectacle beyond compare. And Festival audience members experienced it in the way Bach intended:

... with a big ol' beer in their hand.

If there's one constant the enormous Edinburgh Festival, it's beer. Beer is everywhere. Tenant's Lager, the equivalent of America's Budweiser, Canada's LaBatts or Australia's Fosters, reigns supreme. Yet there is no official beer of the Edinburgh Festival. It doesn't need one. The beer profits naturally fuel the entire Fringe infrastructure.

There is plenty of beer for all, as long as you are 17 years of age. Or look like your 17 years of age. With 250,000 audience members, many from other nations, you think they're gonna check every id? Ha ha.

There are no corn dogs, however. I'm trying to wrap my mind around that. What's a festival, much less the world's largest art festival, without corn dogs?

Therefore Amy and I are opting out of the beer and food. We are living the Festival Life eating peanut butter sandwiches out of our backpack while queuing between shows. (American translation: "queuing" = "lining up").

There are queues everywhere. The shows are packed together so tightly in time and space that the must rush the previous show out of the venue, pull the queue in for the next show, and seat them everyone in ten minutes.

10 minutes! And do it without anyone spilling their beer. That, my friends, is a machine unlike any other.

Putting on a Show

I'm going to focus on The Fringe because it's the largest and weirdest festival. The Fringe is a bunch of shows - comedy, theater, musical, opera, lecture, kiddie, magic, plain music, etc.

Let's take one a show at random - Yozi: No Babies in the Sauna. (Wow, that is really random, you might say. You ain't seen random yet, muh friend.) Anyway here's the catalog pitch:

So I'm going to assume Yozi is the guy in the sauna towel. Yozi decides to do the Fringe - probably around January of that year. He can apply to the Fringe, and no one will tell him no! The Fringe prides itself on having no gatekeepers. And that is absolutely true ... at that level, anyway.

So now Yozi has looks over all the venues in the Fringe catalog, based on the size of the venue, the equipment that they have (does Yozi need an actual sauna? There's a venue for that!).

Here he picks Assembly George Square Studio Four, which is a popular one. He convinces Assembly, the parent organization, that his show fits the roster of shows they are doing. (Most venues specialize in a particular type of show). There are different kinds of contracts, but by far the most popular requires him to sublet the space - i.e. pay money - and in return get a percentage or all of the ticket sales.

Ah ha, so the parent organization is the gatekeeper! Well, sorta. Hang on a sec.

Assembly, having their roster set, decides to put him at 20:00 every day. He takes a day off on the 13th - most performers take at least a day or two off for a much-needed break. Slotting a show for a particular time and particular venue keeps the catalog somewhat manageable. The Fringe is chaotic enough as it is. But having multiple performances helps fledgling or niche performers. People may not know you ont he first day, but if you're good and word of mouth builds, there are enough opportunities to see you for subsequent audience members.

What if the performer cannot find a venue. Then they can make one up! That's how that persons-bathtub-one-audience-member venue was created!

Here's the TL;DR. The performer is the ultimate gatekeeper. If they are willing to put in the money and the work, they can perform at the Fringe. If they aren't, they can't. So if you think The Gummy Bears Great War is the best show that ever existed and must find an audience, and you're willing to spend money to prove it ... you can do it! That's how unknown shows get produced.

Whether they should have been produced is another story.

Showing Up

It's all hard work on the performer's side. Now let's turn to the audience side. It's no picnic either

As an audience member, you are informed of Yozi: No Babies in the Sauna in one or more ways:

• In the printed catalog, which is 348 pages. Gaah.
• On the website or mobile app through a search
• On one of the gazillion posters plastered up all over town
• From a flyer someone shoved into your hand as you're walking around the Fringe
• From a tchotchke handed out to a previous show goer - buttons and wrapped candy are popular
• From your friends and family
• From reviews that start popping up on the Internet after a few days

Gaah. So you get hit from all sides with offers and you must sift through all of these methods to choose shows?

Uh huh. The beer helps, believe me.

But yes, people do the work, choose the shows, buy the tickets on the app, queue up and march their asses into the auditorium. Like clockwork, they fill the chairs front-to-back, packed in like Sardines, apologizing as needed.

Amy and I, for example, have done the work. So here are the shows Amy and I have seen so far. I offer them without explanation.

• The Break-Up Diet
• Tomatoes Tried to Kill Me, But Banjos Saved My Life
• The Greatest Musical The World Has Ever Seen by Randy Thatcher
• The Gummy Bears Great War
• Philip Glass: Music for Organ
• I Sell Windows
• Laughable
• Adam Hills: Shoes Half Full
• Potty the Plant
• Good Luck, Catherine Frost!
• I'd Like a Job, Please
• Dog Turd or Walnut Whip: Making Sense of Edinburgh's Architecture

If these titles sound like clickbait, you are not wrong.

The whole point of the Fringe is to get you into shows. Remember - there are 3,300 shows. There is just 1 of you.

Is it worth it? Mostly yes, but it's all a crapshoot. In the end, you can't really tell reliably from a title, blurb, ad, or recommendation whether a show will be good. And they really do run the gamut. To illustrate the extremes, I'll focus on two shows:

The Gummy Bears Great War - Excellent title ... and it's all downhill from there. The show consists of two performers speaking in Italian (there are subtitles), telling the story of a war between dinosaurs and gummy bears. They use actual gummy bears. They hit them with books. They stretch them (not very far - gummy bears are tough). They bit their heads off. They pour bags of them out onto a table.

Evidently they couldn't get any dinosaurs. It wouldn't have mattered. The story was absolute nonsense, and left Amy and I scratching our heads ... what is the point? It wasn't funny. It wasn't serious.

It was absurdist I guess, but here's the thing about absurdist comedy ... it can only be done once. Namely, Waiting for Godot. Everything else is just a ripoff. Because any absurdity is just like any other absurdity unless it has a point ... at which point it wouldn't be absurd.

It's like John Cage's piece 4:33, which is 4 minutes and thirty-three seconds of complete silence. I could write a piece named 3:44, which is 3 minutes and 44 seconds of silence and it would go nowhere. It would be squashed before it even was performed. Which is what should've happened to The Gummy Bears Great War.

Potty the Plant. On the other hand, ... terrible title and it's all uphill from there. Potty the Plant is a brilliant, modern, hilarious musical. You might think - hey, a musical about plants, isn't that just Little Shop of Horrors? Nope. This is the story of a polite plant sitting in a hospital, while horrors happen around him.

Amy and I were rolling on the floor laughing. The cast was so hilariously over the top. It was also a very professional production - it easily could pass for an Off Broadway show.

It was obvious in the first 5 minutes ... these people have done serious work: serious editing, serious rehearsal, serious workshopping. Potty the Plant was an unmitigated triumph.

If I set all the marketing materials for both of these shows in front of you, you wouldn't have been able to pick the good one from the bad one. You just have to experience it.

And really, The Festival is more than the sum of its parts. It's the vibe. It's the crowds - the Edinburgh crowds are ridiculously tough to please - but they are extremely polite and forgiving to other audience goers. It's the helpers, hired by the organizers, being endlessly helpful and efficient ... effectively leaving it all on the field for three weeks straight.

And of course, the beer helps.