Phoenix festival rises from the Fringe

Melbourne Fringe’s program has been reinvented, with 55 in-person shows swiftly adapted for digital performance.

One month after cancelling 90% of its planned program due to Melbourne’s ongoing COVID restrictions, Melbourne Fringe Festival has launched a revised program featuring dozens of new events created for online audiences.

‘We did have some digital events planned already, so some things were going ahead, but there’s now 127 events happening in the festival, and the vast majority of those have been put together in the last two and a half weeks,’ Creative Director and CEO Simon Abrahams explained.

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Richard Watts OAM is ArtsHub's National Performing Arts Editor; he also presents the weekly program SmartArts on Three Triple R FM. Richard is a life member of the Melbourne Queer Film Festival, a Melbourne Fringe Festival Living Legend, and was awarded the Sidney Myer Performing Arts Awards' Facilitator's Prize in 2020. In 2021 he received a Lifetime Achievement Award from the Green Room Awards Association. Most recently, Richard received a Medal of the Order of Australia (OAM) in June 2024. Follow him on Twitter: @richardthewatts