Fringe Festival 2017 sells record-setting 130K tickets

Organizers report record-setting year at Fringe Organizers of the Fringe Theatre Festival have reported record-setting ticket sales for this year's festival.

Now that the Edmonton Fringe Festival has wrapped for another year, officials are calling it the most successful in more than 35 years, with record-setting attendance.

Officials said nearly 810,000 people visited the 11-day festival in Old Strathcona, and attended more than 1600 live theatre performances at 41 venues – about 400 shows were sold out.

More than 130,000 tickets were sold, meaning the artists made nearly $1.2 million from the box office.

“That’s an area that we’ve never been in before, a territory that we’ve never been in before, the weather could have shut things down in the sense that it was cold, a little bit, it was wet a little bit, but Edmontonians, Fringers, they don’t care,” Fringe Festival Artistic Director Murray Utas said. “They just went under the tent until it stopped raining, then they came back out.”

The festival itself may be over, but the Holdover Series will start Wednesday, August 30 and run until Saturday, September 2.

The series features four shows: Drunk Girl from TMI Productions, Legoland from Blarney Productions, My Love Lies Frozen in the Ice from Dead Rabbits Theatre and Prophecy from Impossible Mongoose, details on the series can be found online.

With files from Jonathan Glasgow