New York City Fringe Festival, the annual indie theater bonanza, is back next month with new shows, new participants, and a whole new borough.
This year, for the first time, the usually Manhattan-exclusive festival is stepping into Brooklyn, where four shows will play a total of 17 performances at The Rat NYC in Dumbo. Three of those shows — “F***ed Up Fairytales,” “Oil & Whiskey,” and “the Kobold Show” – are making their official debuts at the venue starting April 2.
Though the festival’s first appearance in Brooklyn is small — 60 of Fringe’s shows will be staged across three theaters in Manhattan — it’s the start of a natural next step for the 18-year-old event, said festival founder and executive director Erez Ziv.
‘Bring the festival to them’
Ziv and his team started New York City Fringe Festival (then called Frigid Fringe Festival) in 2007. For years, it was a “small boutique festival” with just about 30 shows per year, Ziv said.
But when the larger New York International Fringe Festival shuttered in 2023, New York City Fringe started attracting more attention.
“We kind of had to grow because this is New York City, it’s a theater city, a lot of people come here for theater — to do it or to see it,” he said. “So we did, and they came.”
This year, the festival received more applications than ever before, and grew from 45 shows last year to 64. It started a “Bring Your Own Venue” program, allowing groups of artists to decide where they would like to perform.
“I really wanted to have this festival go outside of Manhattan because when we started our festival 17 years ago, our artists were in Manhattan,” Ziv said. “But they’re not anymore, they’re in Brooklyn, Queens, all over the city, and it would be great to bring the festival to them.”
That’s how The Rat was brought into the fold. The venue opened last summer as a sort of “incubator space” for independent theater artists, said executive director Jennifer Sandella.
“We were really excited when the Fringe Bring Your Own Venue program approached us about doing some Fringe shows here to sort of connect with the larger New York community as a whole,” she said.
Fairytale characters and ex-lovers take the stage at The Rat
The venue is small – with space for about 55 people, including standing room — but more accessible than the festival’s flagship UNDER St. Mark’s and the ability to load in multiple shows a week, Ziv said. Plus, it has a bar.
The bar was a plus for Michael Hagins, Akia Squitieri, and Rachael Langton, the team behind “F***ed Up Fairytales,” which has its first performance at The Rat on April 7.
The interactive show needed an accessible theater where the actors could move on and off stage to interact with patrons — and where both the actors and the audience could access a bar to participate in an interactive drinking game.
“F***ed Up Fairytales” was born during the pandemic, when in-person theater was impossible. At the start, it was fairly straightforward: Hagins, the playwright, reimagined five classic Brothers Grimm fairy tales as wildly different genres, and actors performed all five at every show.
But that didn’t feel engaging enough for audiences who were watching at home, so they added more interactive elements: a drinking game and ongoing conversations with the Brothers Grimm themselves in the chat.
As the city emerged from the pandemic, audiences returned to the theater slowly. They had just spent two years sequestered from their friends, Squitieri said, and didn’t want to spend more time sitting silently in a dark room. But they thought “F***ed Up Fairytales,” pulled off the screen and into 3-D space, could bring theatergoers back in.
“We really wanted to step into a world of fun and a world of joy and play and really have that … spontaneous controlled chaos where everyone is in it together, there’s a sense of community amongst the audience, amongst the cast, and with the cast and the audience,” she said.
The live and in-person version of “F***ed Up Fairytales” debuting at Fringe next month will feature a rotating 14-person cast and five revamped fairytales — including “Rumpelstiltskin” spun into a film noir and “Rapunzel” retold as a spy thriller. At each show, the audience will choose which three stories will be told.
“It’s an interactive show, and it changes every night depending on who’s on stage and who’s in the audience, and what the audience chooses their adventure to be every night,” Squitieri said.
The Rat also drew the team behind “Oil & Whiskey,” a new country-western musical making its New York City debut on April 9.
Just an hour long, the musical is about two ex-lovers reuniting at a bar to relive the best and worst of their relationship — and to ask the question, “should we get back together?”
“Oil & Whiskey” was also a pandemic-era project. Producer Alexa Karas and co-writer Kit Nolan had recently moved to Kentucky and Nashville, respectively, and fell in love with country music.
“I think COVID was really a time where we were all taught a lot about relationships, and the truth is throughout life, certain relationships don’t always serve you,” Karas said. “And what better than country western to tell a love story and a breakup story?”
The show was influenced by artists like Zac Brown Band and the Chicks — but Karas said it was Beyoncé’s 2024 foray into country music that pushed them fully into the genre.
Karas said the team is excited to bring the show to New York, and to The Rat, years after she moved out of the city. Dumbo is “vibrant and wonderful,” she said, and several local businesses are teaming up with them for events connected to the shows.
“While the show is not about returning to an ex, you really shouldn’t return to an ex, we are returning to the stage in New York,” Karas laughed.
As “Oil and Whiskey” and “F***ed Up Fairytales” rehearse in Brooklyn, several local artists are preparing to take their shows to the birthplace of New York City Fringe — Manhattan.
Brooklyn artists branch out
Longtime Ditmas Park resident and writer Amanda Miller is bringing her newest piece, “Quacks and Whacks: A Cancer Comedy,” to the Chain Theater in Midtown starting April 4.
The show follows middle-school teacher Sharon as she deals with a cancer diagnosis and the American healthcare system — all while her puppeteered cancer cells sing and dance their way through her body.
“Quacks and Whacks” was co-written by Miller and her mother, Terry, who was diagnosed with Stage 4 lung cancer three years ago. One day, after a scan, Terry was talking about her cancer cells as if they were campers, Miller said, hiking around her body and setting up campsites.
The image stuck with Miller, who asked her mom if she wanted to write about it. They wrote the show together over Zoom — Miller in Brooklyn, Terry in Los Angeles. Over time, they turned Terry’s other frustrations with the healthcare system into comedy — things like being told she needs an appointment immediately when one isn’t available for weeks, or waiting for a delivery of chemo medicine that never comes.
“It ended up becoming more about navigating the healthcare system, and all the absurdity of that, in addition to the absurdity of having these cells multiplying inside her body,” Miller said. “The cells themselves are played by puppets, and they are total idiots.”
After a well-received reading of the show last fall, she decided it was time to go bigger. Once the show was accepted to New York City Fringe Festival, Miller recruited another performer and a puppet maker, who created the cancer cell puppets with the help of her husband.
“Quacks and Whacks” is “more universal” than other shows Miller has created before, she said. She hopes it will help impress the need for audience members to advocate for themselves and their loved ones in healthcare settings – and highlight the need for change in the healthcare system.
“It’s a very silly show about a very serious subject,” she said. [“It’s] using absurdity and humor to address this topic that can be hard to talk about, and making it more accessible for conversation, and will hopefully inspire people to have more conversations and advocate.”
Fringe benefits
New York City Fringe Festival prides itself on making space for up-and-coming artists and shows, and as theatermakers prepare for opening night, they emphasized the festival’s differences.
“I think one of the things that’s really important for people to know is that the artists get 100% of the box office [proceeds] from the festival,” Squitieri said. “Right now when arts funding is getting cut, and venues are shutting down, and it’s just harder to make art — having a festival that is artist-first and artist-centric … I think that’s really important.”
As “Oil & Whiskey” rehearses at The Rat, Karas said the theater and the festival have provided myriad resources and support.
Sandella said she has been producing theater “for a long time,” and has always loved giving people opportunities to create theater.
“As a New Yorker, when I was a kid coming up I got to see so many cool, weird things in strange places that made a big effect on me, and there’s not a lot of space for that anymore,” she said. “I think it’s really important that if we can provide spaces for work like that, and we can support the community at large, we should.”
New York City Fringe Festival runs April 2-20, 2025, at five venues in Manhattan and Queens. Performances at The Rat, 68-117 Jay St. in Dumbo, begin April 2 at 4:30 p.m. Information about performance times, tickets, and more is available online.
