Hollywood Fringe 2025 offers new theatre on the edge

This month, the 2025 edition of the annual Hollywood Fringe Festival offers another season of theatre on the edge. As always, the basic vibe is that of an indie-cult film festival but with the added attraction of live performance. With aspiring creators presenting their work, and few if any guardrails, the small-scale productions frequently push the envelope into uncharted territory, including numerous excursions into horror, fantasy, and science fiction territory, along with lots of gender-bending LGBTQ subject matter (sometimes cross-pollinating into something like Bottoms & Bones: A Hererosexual Horror).

The festival begins with a week of “previews” then continues through the end of the month, with the closing awards celebration on Monday, June 30. This year’s genre offerings include One Man Poe (solo renditions of four tales), Toy Gory (a comedy about some of your favorite killer dolls), A Haunting Revue (a Night Gallery-type anthology of three short tales), Shockfest Adventure: Hollywood Haunt (an interactive escape room type of experience), Come See Saw (someone obsessed with the puppet from the Saw franchise), Solo (a female astronaut awakens from hyper-sleep to find her mission has been changed and a man is now in charge), Venus Express (male astronauts on a mission to mars rerouted to Venus), and Worlds Collide (Last Call Theatre’s mashup of themes and characters from previous productions). Other interesting titles include The Time Machine, Her Ghost, Antony Zioni: Tales of the Ancient East, Space Rock Opera, Sentience, The Visitor, The Creature, St. Nicolas, Prom Queen from Hell, All Cats Go to Hell, The Server Slasher Massacre, Trunk, Bela Lugosi Meets Edna St. Vincent Millay, Is There Work on Mars? and The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring: Extended Edition: Part 3 (we reviewed part one two years ago).

The above are productions that have at least one foot firmly in genre territory. Many other Fringe Fest plays reference genre elements, often for metaphorical purposes. It’s impossible to see all of them, so we have tried to name-check titles which seem of particular interest to us and our readers.

As always, attending Hollywood Fringe Festival can be daunting. With so much to see at multiple locations scattered around the Hollywood area, it can be difficult what’s worth checking out and whether you can get to it on time if you are trying to catch more than one show per day. Best advice is to plan in advance and purchase tickets early – shows that do well during preview week can generate word of mouth and sell out. In way, it’s a little bit like the mad rush to visit haunted attractions during the Halloween season but with the added restriction that the Hollywood Fringe plays are performed only a handful of times scattered at random (i.e., no play gets a regular Friday at 8pm time slot). But the vexations of scheduling are worth navigating, because you will see some great stuff.

Get more information at hollywoodfringe.org.