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    Edinburgh Fringe Is Back. Is a Smaller Festival Better?

    Locals long complained that the event had gotten too big. This year, because of the pandemic, their wish for a reduced Fringe has been granted.EDINBURGH — The drone of bagpipes drifted down the Royal Mile last Saturday, as members of a student theater troupe walked the cobblestones trying to drum up interest in their show.In a normal year at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe, this central artery of the city’s Old Town district would have been packed tight with young performers and street acts, all competing loudly for the attention of passers-by. But late Saturday morning, there was only one group around.“We were the only ones here yesterday, too,” said Serena Birch, 22, a member of the Aireborne Theater Company, from the University of Leeds. “Usually, it’s like a fight.”Before the pandemic, the Edinburgh Fringe, which opened last Friday and runs through Aug. 30, was surpassed only by the Olympics and the soccer World Cup in terms of audience size. In 2019, the Fringe sold more than three million tickets for 3,841 shows at 323 venues — an increase of 31 percent in five years. Independent researchers estimated that the event generated around $1.4 billion for Scotland’s economy.During the Fringe, the Royal Mile, a central Edinburgh artery, is usually full of performers and street acts jostling for the attention of possible audience members.Iain Masterton/AlamyBut after the 2020 event was canceled, the Fringe was plunged into financial peril. A tentative comeback this year, buoyed by a $1.4 million government bailout, will see fewer than 850 shows presented — a third of them online. Uncertainty around the easing of coronavirus restrictions in Scotland, where limits on audience sizes were in place until Monday, seems to have kept performers and spectators away.This year’s slim, yet typically weird and wonderful, program features stand-up comics, like Daniel Sloss and Jason Byrne; a choral drama about migration staged on an out-of-town beach; and an educational walking tour, led by pelvic physiotherapist, titled, “Viva Your Vulva.”Established in 1947 as a free-spirited alternative to the highbrow Edinburgh International Festival, the Fringe is built on the principle of open access for performers, meaning any acts that pay a registration fee can present a show. It is one of several major festivals that take place in Edinburgh in August, but it is by far the largest.For some in a city with a population of only around 500,000, a break from the Fringe last year, followed by a much smaller festival this year — one that doesn’t clog up roads and sidewalks, or cause short-term rents to skyrocket — has been welcomed.Shulah Stewart, 35, a home care manager, said last year’s cancellation gave locals “an opportunity to just enjoy the city in summer, in a way that they can’t ordinarily.”And even the Fringe’s organizers say the event had become too big.In an interview, Shona McCarthy, the chief executive of the Fringe’s coordinating body, said it was time for a “serious conversation” in the coming months about how to build back in a smaller and more sustainable way. She said that “some kind of regulation” of the Fringe’s open-access policy could be considered for future editions.“Some kind of regulation” of the Fringe’s open-access policy could be considered for future editions, said Shona McCarthy, the chief executive of its coordinating body.Jane BarlowWhile theater and comedy make up most of its program, the Fringe has expanded over the years to embrace a broad range of acts. McCarthy said that some items on the schedule — like open-top bus tours and wine tastings — stretched the definition of performing arts. The Fringe needs to “be brave” and question why events like those have become such a huge part of the festival, she said.Yet the owners of Underbelly, an events producer that runs some of the Fringe’s busiest venues, said in a joint interview that a move away from the open-access policy would hamper the event’s fragile recovery. “As soon as the Fringe became closed access, then a new fringe would just start up alongside it,” said Charlie Wood, an Underbelly director.“No one can control the festival,” he said. “It’s organic.”Ed Bartlam, Wood’s business partner, said many locals’ criticism of the Fringe’s size was based on an “urban myth” that the event was primarily for people from outside Edinburgh and Scotland.According to a Fringe spokeswoman, people from Scotland made up more than half of the audience members at the 2019 event, and Edinburgh residents around 35 percent. About 7 percent came from outside Britain, she added.McCarthy said the digital hybrid model for this year’s festival, with a mix of online and in-person events, would remain for future editions so that audiences and performers could take part in the Fringe “without necessarily having to travel here.”Underbelly’s owners said they would not be presenting any online events in this year’s program. They “can sometimes work,” Wood said, “but you have to spend a lot of money on it, and therefore it doesn’t work for this festival.”Nerea Bello, left, Julia Taudevin and and Mairi Morrison. They are performing in “Move,” a choral drama about migration.Jeff J Mitchell/Getty ImagesOut and about in Edinburgh, the question of whether a bigger Fringe was better drew a range of responses.Claire Mackie, 41, an animator, said the event’s usual “noise and chaos” never used to bother her, even when she lived close to the Royal Mile. “I liked the buzz,” she said, adding that this year’s Fringe seemed “subdued.”Jackie Honisz, 70, a retiree, sitting in her garden beside the Pleasance Courtyard venue complex, said she didn’t miss the Fringe last year, and didn’t want it to return to its previous scale: “Because of Covid,” she said, and because festivalgoers would regularly leave trash in the streets around her home.The comedian Josie Long, 39, made her Fringe debut at 17 and has returned as a performer for 16 of the past 22 years, including this year with a work-in-progress show for limited, socially distanced audiences at the 100-capacity Monkey Barrel Comedy. In a phone interview, she said she felt like this year’s festival was “just about enough Fringe that people can handle psychologically.”But Long added that she hoped the festival would one day return to its sprawling prepandemic proportions. “Making fewer opportunities doesn’t tend to stop the arts being the preserve of privileged people,” she said.“I can’t wait until it’s in a position where I can say it’s annoying again,” she added. More

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    Everything Was Canceled in 2020. What About 2021?

    From the French Open and the Tokyo Olympics to New York Pride, a look at which global events are canceled, postponed or moving ahead (with altered plans) in 2021.Early last year, as international lockdowns upended daily life, they took with them, one by one, many of the major cultural and sporting events that dot the calendar each year. The N.B.A. suspended its season, the French Open was postponed for several months and the Tokyo Olympics were delayed a year. The future of the Glastonbury Festival and the Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival were in doubt. It was a bleak time.Recently, as conditions in many places around the world have slowly begun to improve, and as countries have begun mass vaccination campaigns, some events and cultural staples have made plans to return, albeit with modifications. While few events, if any, have plans to go ahead free of restrictions this year, some are taking a hybrid approach. Others remain postponed or canceled.Here’s the status of some of the major events around the world.The Tokyo Olympics are set to start on July 23.Shuji Kajiyama/Associated PressSports: The Olympics are full steam ahead.The Tokyo Olympics, which were delayed for a year because of the coronavirus pandemic, are scheduled to begin on July 23 with an opening ceremony. The bulk of the athletic events will begin the next day. The first round of Wimbledon begins on June 28 and will run through mid-July. Officials said they were working toward a spectator capacity of at least 25 percent.The 125th Boston Marathon, which is usually held in May, is now scheduled for Oct. 11, and the 50th New York City Marathon is set for Nov. 7.The 105th Indianapolis 500 will go on as planned on May 30. Officials will allow about 135,000 spectators in — 40 percent of the venue’s capacity. The event was organized with state and local health officials and was approved by the Marion County Public Health Department, race officials said.The French Open, one of the premier tennis competitions, has been postponed one week to a new start date of May 24. The decision was made in agreement with the authorities in France and the governing bodies of international tennis, said officials, who want the tournament played in front of the largest possible number of fans.Coachella was canceled in 2020, and again in 2021.Amy Harris/Invision, via Associated PressMusic: Coachella and Glastonbury are holding off.The Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival, which typically draws big headliners like Beyoncé and is an annual pilgrimage for the more than 100,000 fans who trek to Southern California, is canceled again this year.In January, organizers for the Glastonbury Festival said it would not take place this summer.The Essence Festival of Culture, which usually draws more than a half million people to New Orleans over the Fourth of July weekend every year, will host a hybrid experience this year over two weekends: June 25-27 and July 2-4.Headliners like Billie Eilish, Post Malone and ASAP Rocky will take the stage at the Governors Ball Music Festival, which is scheduled for Sept. 24-26 at Citi Field in Queens. Organizers say the event will return to its typical June dates in 2022.Burning Man, the annual countercultural arts event that typically draws tens of thousands of people to Black Rock Desert in Nevada, has been canceled again this year because of the pandemic. It will return in 2022, organizers said.After being canceled last year, the Austin City Limits Music Festival, the event in the capital of Texas, is scheduled to return to Zilker Park on Oct. 1-3 and Oct. 8-10.Lady Gaga at the Met Gala in 2019. The event this year is scheduled for September.Karsten Moran for The New York TimesCultural events: Broadway is coming back.A delayed 2021 Met Gala, the annual benefit at the Metropolitan Museum that draws scores of celebrities and fashion-industry elites, will happen on Sept. 13. A second event is scheduled for May 2022.NYC Pride 2021 will move forward in June with virtual and in-person events. The Pride March, which was canceled last year, will be virtual this time. (San Francisco Pride, also in June, is planning similar adjustments, while Atlanta Pride is planning to hold an in-person event in October.)The Lucerne Festival, which offers a range of events featuring classical orchestras, ensembles and more in Switzerland, will run from Aug. 10. In order to keep concertgoers safe, organizers said events will not have intermissions and its venue will have a limited number of available seats. Similarly, the Salzburg Festival in Austria kicks off in mid-July with modifications.The Edinburgh International Festival, a showcase for world theater, dance and music in the Scottish city since 1947, will run Aug. 7-29. Performances will take place in temporary outdoor pavilions with covered stages and socially distanced seating.E3, one of the video game industry’s most popular conventions where developers showcase the latest news and games, will be virtual this year from June 12-15.The New York International Auto Show, which showcases the newest and latest automobiles from dozens of brands, will run Aug. 20-29. The event last year was postponed and eventually canceled because of the pandemic.The Cannes Film Festival in the South of France, one of the movie industry’s most revered and celebrated events, has been postponed to July 6-17 from mid-May. The 2021 edition of the event, which was canceled last year, is currently scheduled to be in person.After more than a year of no theater performances, Broadway shows will start selling tickets for full-capacity shows with some performances starting on Sept. 14. (Some West End shows will resume as early as May 17.)After being virtual last year, New York Comic-Con will return with a physical event Oct. 7-10 at the Jacob K. Javits Convention Center in Manhattan. The convention will run at reduced capacity to ensure social distancing, organizers said. This year’s Comic-Con International event, which is normally held in July in San Diego, has been postponed until summer 2022. There are plans for a smaller event called Comic-Con Special Edition however, that will be held in person in November. More

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    Edinburgh Festivals Will Go Ahead, in Person and Online

    The Edinburgh International Festival, canceled last year, said it would proceed in August thanks to three specially built pavilions.Three pavilions will be built to host events for the Edinburgh International Festival this summer.Edinburgh International FestivalLONDON — The Edinburgh International Festival, a showcase of international dance, music and theater, will go ahead in front of audiences this August, the festival’s organizers said on Tuesday.The festival, which normally floods the city with tourists, was canceled last year because of the coronavirus pandemic. But events will be staged Aug. 7-29 in three pavilions across Edinburgh, Fergus Linehan, the festival’s director, said in a telephone interview.The pavilions will be specially built to maximize air flow and allow social distancing, he added.The festival’s program will be released in June, Linehan said; the organizers are still waiting for a decision from the Scottish government about how many people will be allowed to attend. But the ongoing pandemic and the limits it has placed on international travel mean it will have a different flavor from normal.“In terms of the people onstage, we’re not going to be flying in a big dance company from the U.S., or an opera company from Paris,” Linehan said. “But there are individual artists coming.”The festival, which began in 1947 with the aim of uniting people through culture after World War II, is known for large-scale performances, especially of big classical and operatic works. The 2019 festival, for instance, featured the Orchestre de Paris performing epic pieces by Beethoven and Berlioz, as well as several presentations by the Komische Oper Berlin. That will also change this year. “We can’t have that many musicians onstage, and we can’t have those big choral bits,” Linehan said, but he insisted smaller works would be just as exciting and innovative.Many performances will be streamed free for international audiences, he added.Coronavirus cases have fallen rapidly in Scotland this spring thanks to an extended lockdown and a strong vaccination program. On Monday, there were only 199 new cases reported among a population of around 5 million, and no deaths within 28 days of a positive test, according to Scottish Government figures.But many restrictions are still in place, including on cultural life. Museums cannot reopen until Apr. 26. Other cultural activities cannot restart until May 17 at the earliest, and even then, only with small audiences.The Edinburgh International Festival is one of a host of arts events that normally take place in the city each summer. The festival’s organizers insist the others will occur in some form, too.A spokeswoman for the scrappy Edinburgh Festival Fringe, which normally features thousands of small theater and comedy shows, said in an email that organizers were working toward an event to run Aug. 6-30. It was still unclear if the Fringe would be “digital, in person, or both,” she added.The Edinburgh International Book Festival will also proceed from Aug. 14 with in-person events “if circumstances permit,” a spokeswoman said in a telephone interview.The Royal Edinburgh Military Tattoo, a popular series of parades involving bagpipe performances by armed forces from around the world, is also set to go on. It started selling tickets last October but has not provided any updates since. On Tuesday, its organizers did not respond to a request for comment.Linehan said he hoped the International Festival’s announcement would give confidence to other events to press ahead with plans. His festival won’t make any money, he said, but that didn’t matter. “This is a really momentous moment for us,” Linehan said, adding: “It’s really important we get back to live performance.” More