Greetings from Newark Airport! It’s currently 8:37 pm on Sunday, July 27 and I’m patiently waiting to board my red-eye flight to Scotland; if you’re new here, my name is George Strus (they/them) and I am the founding artistic director of Breaking the Binary Theatre. We are taking the late, great Cecilia Gentili’s Red Ink to Edinburgh Festival Fringe and have partnered with Playbill to document the show’s international journey (and what we learn as first time Edinburgh Fringe producers!).
In late July, the first article in the series chronicled Cecilia Gentili and Red Ink’s history, our producing team, and the Edinburgh casting process. In today’s article, we’ll be discussing some of the key steps we took in advance of getting to Scotland to best set our show up for success.
Naturally, if one wants to take a show to Edinburgh Festival Fringe, one needs a venue! The amount of venues available ranges from year to year (based on how many register to participate), but there are hundreds of venues across Edinburgh that host performances as part of the Festival, ranging from large established theatres to small pubs, eateries, and churches. Four of the most prominent venues, known as the “Big Four,” are Assembly, Gilded Balloon, Pleasance, and Underbelly (Playbill actually put out a great article in February 2024 with more information on these four spaces!). Other venues I explored were Traverse Theatre, Summerhall, Zoo, and theSpaceUK venue. The Fringe website offers up a very helpful Venue Handbook and some guided questions one should consider when choosing the right space for their show.
I had the great fortune of spending a few days in Edinburgh last year, so I had a good sense of the work these venues programmed and which felt right for a theatre/comedy hybrid work like Red Ink. After submitting the show to a handful of venues and chatting with a few folks at each to further discuss, Underbelly had the exact house size and time slot we were looking for, so we confirmed the 99-seat Jersey venue in Underbelly, Bristo Square at 14:30 each day.
Now that we had a venue, we quickly focused our attention on how to fill it! There are thousands of works being showcased at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe each year, and I vividly recalled the hundreds of posters and advertisements that populated the city of Edinburgh throughout the Festival from my visit last year. I also thought about which posters inspired me to research or purchase tickets to their shows.
One of the most helpful assets any production can have is an eye-catching and striking key art design: a poster that manages to capture the tone and essence of the work itself and draw folks in, encouraging them to want to know more. I spoke a great deal with our director (and Red Ink’s co-creator), Nic Cory, about our concept.
“In designing our key art for this run, our top priority was making sure our star, Chiquitita, looked and felt gorgeous—which was not hard to do,” Cory said. “The entire shoot was a collaborative effort between three creative geniuses: costume designer Gogo Graham, graphic designer Oscar Diaz, and photographer Hunter Abrams. Gogo embellished traditional white lingerie to conjure familiar images of kids who find and play dress-up in their mothers’ scanties. The red roses evoke both the traditionalism and the passion in Cecilia’s stories, while the crown suggests her place as a queen in the lives of all of us who knew her. Hunter’s exquisite photos capture the drama, the beauty and, above all, the comedy of Red Ink.”
Once our key art was finalized, we immediately secured some outdoor signage through Out of Hand, who control the largest signage areas in Edinburgh throughout Fringe. They offer tons of different sizes and locations, but we ordered an 8-Sheet, Double Quad, and A3 Poster Pack Wrap which cost £1,452.00 (or just under $2,000 at the time of purchase). This year, the first bookings for signage space went live on April 29, with the artwork itself due on June 2. Some of the most populated locations are scooped up quickly, so it’s important to book these as far in advance as possible.
Speaking of costs, I wanted to also talk a bit about our budget, as that is something I, myself, found little information about online: How much does it really cost to take a show to Edinburgh Fringe?!?!?
I want to be candid about our budget and the strategy behind it, but must also preface it by saying that everyone’s budget will look different; one of the beautiful things about Edinburgh Fringe is that it is possible to produce a show here for as low as $5,000 and, in special cases, as much as $250,000! For us, though, we see this run in Scotland as an investment in our show’s longevity, and while our gross potential (the total amount we can make in our venue should we sell out each performance) is just under $15,000, our total budget for Edinburgh Festival Fringe is $50,000.
Yes, this means it is impossible for us to make our money back on this run (or even half of it, for that matter!). But we are hoping that this run may serve as a springboard to other opportunities that will then provide pathways to profit for the show.
In terms of how we raised those funds, Breaking the Binary Theatre is a fiscally sponsored non-profit, meaning we were able to raise the funds philanthropically with all donors receiving tax-compliant donation receipts. If you are an individual looking to bring a show to Fringe, and want to raise funds via donations (including crowdfunding), fiscal sponsorship is available for single projects at places like Producer Hub, Fractured Atlas, and more. They collect your donations, take a small percentage of what you raise, process the donation receipts, then send the remaining funds to you for the project. (We use and love Producer Hub!)
Breaking down our $50,000 further, nearly half of this budget accounts for fees for our artists: our performer Chiquitita, our director and associate director, our design team, our community engagement team, and more. The other large cost is housing, with flats for the entire month ranging from $2,500 to upwards of $15,000; I found Rettie, Dickins, and EdLets to be helpful resources, though I will note that there are cheaper options available, particularly student halls and university accommodations which are available exclusively to Fringe artists, available on their website. Flights ranged from $600-700 for each of our team members and the remainder of our budget was allocated for Underbelly costs (both venue deposits and some marketing support), rehearsal spaces, insurance, and the aforementioned key art and marketing costs.
Again, everyone’s budget at Edinburgh Festival Fringe will look different! $50,000 is a lot of money, but taking a show to Fringe can cost significantly less, so do not let this figure discourage you. That said, when considering taking a show to Edinburgh, I’d highly recommend thinking through your venue and your budget in tandem. Underbelly was incredibly helpful in calculating and outlining our gross potential in our venue negotiation (as we negotiated ticket prices and venue capacities), so one could easily take that figure and then build a budget around that.
Check back in on Playbill.com in mid-August for the third piece in this series documenting our New York preview, our Edinburgh tech, and our first week of performances (and what we learn!). In the meantime, I have set the lofty goal to see at least 150 shows in the 26 days I am in Edinburgh for Red Ink, an average of six shows per day. If you want to follow my personal journey and see how I fare, I’ll be documenting it all month over at @georgestrus on Instagram.
For Cecilia. ❤️
