How to Survive (and Maybe Conquer) the Edinburgh Fringe Festival

Nadia Quinn had been warned about bringing her show of wacky comic songs to the Fringe Festival in Edinburgh. Facebook groups, Reddit posts and friends suggested that taking on the 77-year-old festival as an unestablished performer was too daunting.

One episode of “Baby Reindeer,” the hit Netflix series that took off at the 2019 Fringe, mines the humiliation that Richard Gadd, the show’s creator, faced performing there in a pub. With nearly 3,500 shows and with comics and clowns vying for attention throughout the month of August, how would Quinn find a venue, housing and people to fill her seats for even a week? She had never even been to the festival, which has the potential to turn unknowns into stars.

“Everyone is telling me you can’t understand the Fringe until you go to the Fringe,” Quinn said earlier this month before flying to Scotland from New York. “I’m hoping to make the right decisions and I’m very excited, but I also feel like throwing up every day, which I guess is part of the process.”

You may have seen Quinn, a vibrant, vocally gifted actress in Steven Spielberg’s “West Side Story,” or on Broadway in the 2010 production of “Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson.” Maybe you’ve seen her on “Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt” or in TV commercials, or at 54 Below, the Midtown cabaret venue. She has worked in New York for 22 years, performing original songs with Aaron Quinn, her husband. (A recent one, about making bongs out of just about anything, was a huge hit on TikTok before censors took it down.)

Most of the performers at the Fringe are hoping to get discovered and reviewed, and to find bookings and producers. Here is a look at how one festival rookie took on Edinburgh last week with hustle and chutzpah, all while trying not to lose her shirt, voice, humor and nerve.

Money makes the Fringe go ’round.

Many people who must self-produce their shows make Fringe plans a year in advance. Quinn, egged on by audiences in June after one of her shows in Los Angeles, decided to go less than two months before. She figured she would need $15,000 for a week, which would cover a venue, promotion, travel, food and a cheap hotel (she brought her own pillow) for herself, her husband and another musician, Matt Cusack, who are both part of her show. She already had experience throwing together projects, and raised $11,000 on GoFundMe. “After college when I wanted to move from Wisconsin to New York City, I put on a show,” she said. “So I’m used to it.”

Location, location, location.

Shows take place everywhere: at formal theaters, basement bars, courtyards and even yurts. On the Fringe website, Quinn found venues with last-minute availability. She thought she had booked a bar that was appropriately small (which is ideal for new performers fighting to fill a room) and located in Old Town, the heart of the festival.

Then the venue’s manager canceled. “He told me I was asking too many questions,” she said. So she booked the basement of a social club in New Town, perilously far from the festival’s core, and with a capacity for 80 people, which was too large. “When I first saw it, I thought it looked like a banquet hall at a Ramada Inn where your saddest cousin had her wedding,” she said. “But it grew on me.”

Teamwork, scheme work.

When Alex Malaos, a comedian who once made a TV pilot with Quinn, donated to her GoFundMe campaign, he texted her that he had always wanted to play the Fringe but was intimidated. She invited him to be her opening act. “I never would have done it on my own,” he said. Quinn also sent a video of her performance to “compilation” events that showcase acts. She received 10 offers.

At an all-female showcase (“Edinbra Mad Cow”), she put her two male musicians in wigs and they sang in a karaoke room with a leaking air-conditioner. “This is my lesbian wife,” she said about her unassuming husband. She also got Malaos, a droll but retiring man, booked on comedy panels, including one about dysfunctional families.

“You need someone like Nadia on your team,” he said. “She’s a natural at this, and I’m happy to ride her coat tails.”

Sell your shtick.

Some Fringe performers sell their shows with topical or eye-grabbing titles like “Sexy Incontinence,” “Taylor Swift Eras Drag Party” and “Gwyneth Goes Skiing.” The more benignly titled “Nadia Quinn Show” had to depend on eye-catching selling points on fliers.

Quinn, who bought some wild vintage clothes and sunglasses to stand out in crowds, hired an Edinburgh company (with a policy of not printing anything too explicit or violent) to produce her colorful ads and fliers. Under her name in bubble-gum pink, she looks as innocent as a girl next door. Her text is less innocent, with racier enticements such as “smoking,” “butts,” “boobs” and “death.” There is no specific reference to the cheerful little ditty she sings about anal intercourse.

Flier till you drop.

Unless you’re a star comedian like Hannah Gadsby or a festival darling like Rose Matafeo or Natalie Palamides, a clown from Los Angeles, you have to promote your show by handing out fliers to fill seats. “Some people hate it, but it comes naturally to me because I like to connect with people,” said Quinn, who wasn’t listed in the hefty festival catalog because she had planned her show at the last minute.

She had many ways of compelling overwhelmed pedestrians to take her fliers. On one walk, her husband held her poster above his head as she followed with fliers saying, “Look, that’s me!” She told some people that her show had inappropriate humor. “I can tell from your sunglasses that you like that,” she said to one man.

With her ukulele and two guitar-playing backup singers, she made up songs on the street for anyone who would listen. “Don’t get hit by a bus or you can’t come to our show,” she sang on a narrow sidewalk. “No, no, no, they don’t want to come to our show,” she belted with tragic inflection when others refused her fliers. All kinds of distracted people ended up laughing and taking them. Some promised they would come see her. “You have to find a way to relate if you want to engage people,” she said. “And I’ve been doing that since I was born.”

It paid off. By her second show, she had gone from selling two seats in advance to 24, with enough walk-ups to make her banquet hall feel full. Kate Stephenson, her venue manager, was delighted, but warned Quinn to remain persistent. “The Fringe is very fickle,” she said. “You can never count on an audience — you have to bring them in every night, and finding a way to pitch a show when you’re only here for a week is a huge task.”

Expect nothing and say yes to everything.

Quinn had been told by experienced Fringe performers to pace herself, not to stay out late or run around too much. She ignored the advice and busked and cajoled at all hours, turning plazas and park benches into her cabaret. She approached families and young women at cafe tables, widened her blue eyes like high beams and told them she was giving out prizes at her show and would sing about cats.

Her delivery was pied-piper pitch perfect. When she led her trio in the Proclaimers’ hit “I’m Gonna Be (500 Miles),” known as the Scottish national anthem, onlookers clapped and stomped just as audiences did at her show. “Sing along, everyone,” she yelled.

She also saw everything she could, to support new and old friends from New York and Los Angeles. She mingled and met producers who offered her gigs (in Vermont, New York and on Vancouver Island), just as she had hoped.

But as the days passed, her original goal of promoting her career hardly seemed to matter. “Now it just feels like the experience of being here is enough because it’s reminding me why I love the theater so much,” said Quinn, who finished off her week opening the nearby, Fringe-affiliated Leith Comedy Festival. “New York was starting to wear me down, but here I’m feeling alive and hopeful as a performer for the first time in a long time.” She said she already wanted to return next August, “but with a show in a smaller space closer to the action and with a producer who isn’t me.”

Love your audience, and it will love you back.

Quinn packed her hall only once out of five shows, which included participatory dancing and tossing out cigarettes after a song that glamorizes smoking. Even the smallest audiences filled her outsize space with laughter, applause and cheerful heckling.

Later, attendees posted reviews and messaged her on her festival review page. “I think what I loved most is how much you could tell she loved being there,” one reviewer wrote. Another described the show as “a warm hug of an evening.” In fact, after each show, Quinn was at the door hugging every attendee and thanking them for coming. “Anyone want free cigarettes?” she asked on her last night. Then she was out the door to see more shows.