After a rocky post-pandemic recovery, Toronto's Fringe Fest finds stable ground

Kate McGillivray · CBC News

· Posted: Jul 12, 2025 5:00 AM EDT | Last Updated: July 12

It's been a roller-coaster 5 years for the Toronto Fringe Festival.

In 2020, it was cancelled wholly acknowledgment to the pandemic. In 2021, it went digital.

The adjacent 3 years were pugnacious successful antithetic ways: the festival returned to in-person shows with disappointing assemblage numbers, temporarily mislaid a captious provincial grant, and chopped down the fig of shows it presented by a fifth. 

This year, says Toronto Fringe Festival enforcement manager Rachel Kennedy, "I deliberation we're successful a truly bully spot." 

"Fringe has present placed things successful a mode that feels truly bully for us," she continued. "We're seeing the numbers corroborate that … it's decidedly an upward trajectory." 

There are a mates of signs that the Fringe Festival, which began connected July 2nd and runs done this weekend, whitethorn beryllium getting its groove back. 

This year, the festival has expanded backmost to 100 shows, with dependable assemblage numbers, says Kennedy.  And, arsenic of Thursday, it's surpassed $500,000 astatine the container office, each of which goes backmost to the artists. 

"That's fractional a cardinal dollars going straight into creator pockets done the Fringe," each of whom are chosen by lottery, she said. 

"It's much than past year." 

The 'Avengers' of Toronto theatre 

Kennedy spoke to CBC Toronto connected the patio adjacent to Soulpepper Theatre, successful the Distillery District — a caller venue for Fringe, and, says Kennedy, a cardinal portion of this year's success. 

Late past year, Fringe signed connected to a 3 twelvemonth statement with 4 different theatre companies, including Soulpepper, to "try to stock cognition and resources," said Kennedy. 

Called the Creative Collaboration Initiative, the statement besides includes Obsidian Theatre, The Musical Stage Company, and Bad Hats Theatre. 

"We really had idiosyncratic remark online and say, 'this is the Avengers of Toronto theatre,'" laughed Kennedy. 

The festival besides expanded its offerings this twelvemonth erstwhile it comes to genre, with a slate of musicals moving astatine Theatre Passe Muraille arsenic a Fringe outer program. 

A festival that feels 'robust' 

All of the rebuilt momentum means artists similar Vancouver's Naomi Steinberg, appearing astatine the Toronto Fringe for the archetypal time, tin find caller audiences.

Steinberg's show, designed for children and called 'Goosefeather Kamishibai,' builds connected a accepted benignant of Japanese storytelling that uses a woody framework with pictures wrong to weave a performance. 

"I was the precise past idiosyncratic pulled successful the kids' fringe conception [artist lottery]. And I cannot archer you however breathtaking it was," she said backstage astatine Soulpepper aft 1 of her performances. 

Patricia Allison, a erstwhile Fringe performer herself who mentors autarkic theatre-makers and artists astatine a Toronto enactment called Generator, says she tin consciousness a alteration successful the upwind this year. 

"This year's festival has felt truly robust. The shows I've gone to person been truly well-attended," she said — a alleviation aft the "precarity" she watched them navigate aft the pandemic. 

"A batch of artists and a batch enactment comes retired of there," continued Allison. "We request to marque definite that it's astir for years to come."