Letter From The Editor

After chatting with various performers and organizers of the upcoming Oahu Fringe Festival, I have decided this: Some of the fest’s lineup sounds outright weird.

And I mean that as a good thing.

I mean, listen to this description by Basil Considine of his Game of Thrones: The Musical that is part of Fringe: “It’s a pro-feminist parody of the hit HBO TV series and the source novels, delivered in the format of Sesame Street as a children’s show for adults.” How could you not want to see that?

Getting weird is, it seems, embedded into the very ethos of Fringe Festivals. (It started basically as a side project of a bunch of lesser-known artists that couldn’t get into a mainstream festival in Scotland.)

As Oahu Fringe Festival founder Misa Tupou says, “The folks who come, they are coming to see something that they have not seen before.”

Tupou started the festival as a way to offer a platform for local artists to perform with very little restriction. It’s a place for budding performers to give their work a try, and for seasoned veterans to experiment with new forms of expression. For anything, really, Tupou says.

After taking 2016 off, Oahu Fringe Festival is back this year, Jan. 12-15. You can learn more here.