EDITOR’S NOTE: In addition to the curtain raiser for the 12th edition of the Great Salt Lake Fringe festival, please see this link for more details about other shows on this year’s slate.
After its most impressive showing to date in 2025, the Great Salt Lake Fringe (GSLF) returns for its 12th edition with what promises to be the strongest slate of shows, one-third larger than last year’s offerings. Four venues will be active during the event which will run from July 23 to Aug. 2, in downtown Salt Lake City. The event will take place at the main hall and the Sister Dottie S. Dixon Memorial Black Box at the Alliance Theater, connected to the Utah Arts Alliance, at Trolley Square, as well as the MadKing Fellowship Theater at The Gateway. The newest venue is Lightree Studios (740 W. 1700 South).
This year’s slate is a well-balanced blend of new performers and creative producers, including several from out of state, along with returning GSLF participants, some of whom were award winners. Among the returning producers are Interdisciplinary Arts Collective, Salt Lake Children’s Theatre, Salt Lake Community College’s theater program, Puppets in the City, Salt Monster Theatre Co., Method: Theatre Company, Opera Contempo, Cache Dexter and Laura Elise Chapman. While theatrical plays continue to be bread and-butter offerings for Fringe, this year’s slate features commendable diversity, with opera, contemporary dance, dance theater, one-person shows, comedy, juggling and student-run productions including one with some of the youngest performers to ever grace a GSLF stage. (More about these shows can be found at this sidebar in The Utah Review).
Scanning this year’s slate, it is likely that GSLF can do as well if not better than last year. Total attendance in 2025 was way up over 2024, with 2,631 (not including the three bring-your-own-venue shows that year), which represents an increase of more than 46%. A total of $19,980 was paid out to the artists for 19 shows. The average payout per show was more than $1,000. The top-selling show in each venue was: Welcome to Fat School (Alliance Main Hall), Juan Jose and the Deathly Vatos (Alliance Black Box) and The Resurrection Men (MadKing Fellowship Theatre).
Founded in 2015 as part of a Westminster University enterprise project, GSLF has been admirably resilient. The organization has staged the annual event in three different parts of Salt Lake City, managed through the pandemic and developed a brand that has gained the loyal support of a solid core of members from Utah’s performing arts community. This is the fourth year that the event’s main staging area will be at Trolley Square.
As a creative incubator, GSLF has remained true to the ideals of that first independent festival 77 years ago in Edinburgh, where four criteria are essential: no prior professional performing arts experience required, no juried selection, no pretentiousness or poseurs and no costly, complicated professional production values.
Shianne Gray, GSLF co-director and one of the group of Westminster University students and alumni that founded the Fringe, noted that within 24 hours of opening this year’s application process, all of the initial performance slots were filled and a waitlist was opened. The rapid response led to GSLF adding a fourth venue this year.
To reiterate a point made in past years at The Utah Review, Fringe is a model of artistic equity in terms of treatment and access. All of the ticket sales revenue is paid out to each performer or group, based on their cumulative audience numbers. Because the Fringe model puts every performer on as equal a playing level as possible, it is up to the individual show creators and performers to promote and advertise their work. From year to year, many Fringe participants have stepped up their social media and public relations game, which has whetted the public’s appetite for viewing work that is being presented for the first time. Shows run a maximum of one hour.
“The Fringe fills a unique role in the Salt Lake theater ecosystem because it provides opportunities that traditional theater seasons often can’t,” Jay Perry, GSLF co-director, said. “It adds several things to the local arts scene: A place for new work — many productions are world premieres or original pieces by Utah playwrights and artists. A home for artistic risk and experimentation — you’ll find everything from comedy and musicals to drama, dance, puppetry, improv, and one-person shows — all in the same festival. Accessibility for artists — the Fringe model lowers barriers for emerging companies and independent creators who may not have the resources for a full production at a larger theater. A community gathering — it brings together artists, volunteers, and audiences from across Utah, creating an atmosphere that’s more like a celebration than a traditional theater season. A chance to discover future talent –Many performers, writers, directors, and technicians who go on to larger regional or national work first develop projects at Fringe.”
The event kicks off on July 23 (6-9 p.m.) with an opening night party (free and open to the public) at the Alliance Theatre at Trolley Square, featuring live jazz, teasers from some of the shows slated to be performed during Fringe along with food for purchase and a cash bar.
Ticket sales are brisk since the box office opened just two weeks ago. As of late last week, more than 400 were already sold and sales easily sailed past $6,000. Tickets are available individually, as a three-pack or a ten-pack at the GSLF website.
Several shows will stand out this year. The Utah Review highlights them:
Presented by PYGmalion Productions, Polaroids from the Apocalypse by Sara Alanis Morales and directed by Vicki Pugmire (July 24-Aug. 2) is set in a dystopian future. The play was one of four selected last year, from more than 600 submissions, for the Green Mountain Playwright Retreat, which included staged readings at the former Goddard College campus in Plainfield, Vermont. The program note reads: “It’s 2095, things are not going well. Mom keeps taking Polaroids. Dad is slooowwwwly finishing the long novel Les Miserables. 17 year old Olive is angry and angsty and always has been. Brother Leo charming in a creepy kind of way. There is an impending cataclysm that might bring the family closer together — or tear them apart. One Polaroid at a time.”
Some of Utah’s most elite and beloved actors in the local theatrical community will perform in The Variants (July 25-Aug. 2) by Randall Huskinson. Directed by Teresa Sanderson, the work is a Curious Modern Plays production, in association with Meanwhile Park and with support from Salt Lake Acting Company (SLAC). The full-length version also is scheduled this fall for SLAC’s New Play Sounding Series. The cast is noteworthy, with Annette Wright, Kirt Bateman, Eva TerraNova and Allen Smith. This will be Bateman’s first appearance as an actor after a lengthy hiatus. Wright, who always stands out for her notoriously effective comedic timing, also was Huskinson’s high school drama teacher.
The play stands out for its unique approach which parallels the premise. A mother catches up on family news with her three adult children during routine Zoom chats but when the anticipated in-person reunion is within reach, a son upends the polite restraint atmosphere which has characterized the safe space of remote communication. There is a strong sense of familiarity which permeates a scene which many families likely experienced when the pandemic sidelined opportunities for close communication in person.
For Fringe, Huskinson has significantly tightened the full-length version which will have its staged reading later this year. For the playwright, the experience of the process has generated a serendipitous constellation of creativity and networking in the theatrical community. Fringe audiences will see the fruits of a five-year process which Huskinson has been meticulously shepherding—one that emphasizes GSLF’s impactful role as a creative incubator.
Described by the artist as a surreal, solo clown show, Meat Bar, a Los Angeles-based comedian and performance artist, will present Sugar Mud (July 25–Aug. 2). Not ashamed to call their own show “absurdly stupid,” the artist has drafted a masterly appealing program note: “The show takes place on a floating clod of dirt that hovers in the eye of the storm. You—the audience—get sucked up into this domain, ruled by a crone so ancient, so washed up, they are difficult to distinguish from the rock formations that surround them. Through a vortex of magical surrealism and fringe society wisdom, Sugar Mud explores themes of natural order, oral histories, historical birth orders, family lineage, and generational rock bottoms. The show examines the device of storytelling–how it is used to foist systemic control, and the alchemy that occurs when stories are rewritten–restructuring the imposed order. And because we’re traveling through time in a tornado, much thematic mass gets picked up along the way. The show asks important questions like ‘what’s dangerous and to who?,’ ‘who’s is this?,’ and ‘what’s the dog’s name?’”
Living in Seattle and performing stand-up comedy in venues from San Francisco to Vancouver, J’myle Koretz, a Salt Lake City native, will bring Twink or Swim (July 25–Aug. 1) to Fringe. The show is autobiographical: A 1990s Salt Lake City gay teen enlists in the U.S. Navy and is sent to Japan to join the crew of a 224-foot-long warship made out of wood–the boat, and the Sailors, too.”
Opera Contempo returns to the Fringe stage for the first time since 2022 with three scenes from a new opera This is Jane ( (July 24–Aug. 2) by Angela Elizabeth Slater and Kendra Preston Leonard. Based on actual events and historical archives, the opera opens in 1965, as a pregnant student is seeking an abortion, a procedure which was not yet legalized. This inspired the Jane Collective, which aided more than 11,000 women to secure safe abortion the U.S. Supreme Court decided the landmark case Roe v. Wade in 1973. The story of the Collective has been featured in documentary form (The Janes, HBO, 2022j) and feature-length narrative film, Call Jane (directed by Phyllis Nagy, 2022). The company will perform three scenes from the opera’s second act. In 2022, Opera Contempo’s production of The Combat, in conjunction with the NEXT Ensemble, was named one of The Utah Review’s Top 10 Moments of the Utah Enlightenment that year.