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EDINBURGH FRINGE FESTIVAL. Edinburgh, Scotland. 8-30 August 1999.
1999 marked the fifty-third year of the annual Edinburgh Fringe Festival, the world's largest arts festival, which was started alongside the Edinburgh International Theatre Festival only to eventually overtake the latter in size and popularity. The first year, eight theatre companies participated in what truly was a spontaneous and unorganized alternative to the "official" festival. This past three-week festival included 607 theatre companies that together produced 1,346 different performance pieces ranging from stand-up comedy, millennium-themed productions and musicals, to Shakespearean adaptations and modern dance. Drawing its performers, employees, and spectators from around the globe, the eclectic nature of the festival makes it the most distinctive of the six festivals that consume the capital of Scotland throughout the month of August. The other festivals, the Military Tattoo, the lazz and Blues Festival, the International Film Festival, the Book Festival, and the International Theatre Festival provide a more select and thus smaller number of offerings for the mix of foreign and local spectators.
The spontaneity and asceticism of the first Fringe Festival has faded, clearly demonstrating that in the last fifty years the Festival has in part turned into the very thing against which the original companies fought. Three of the largest Fringe venues, The Gilded Balloon, The Observer Assembly Rooms, and The Pleasance, form a virtual triumvirate and have the money and commercial puissance to overpower the other 163 smaller venues. Stand-up comedians, ranging from amateur to professional status, have also become the most visible and ostensibly the most popular fare of the festival, pulling authences away from the "legitimate" theatre productions. However, the Fringe Festival could hardly have achieved its international status without becoming a more established commercial entity, and the authences who come to Edinburgh to see comedians Greg Proops at the Assembly Rooms or Rich Hall at the Pleasance inevitably find their way into the smaller venues. One of the most popular productions at the festival for the past few years, the Star Wars Trilogy in 30 Minutes, has, in fact, been performed at one of the smallest venues. The commercialism of the larger theatres has aided the success of the more numerous smaller spaces and their amateur productions, and most venues are still put...