Meet James 

FringeArts: Hey there, welcome to the blog! Why don’t you tell us a little about yourself. What’s your name, where are you from, where are you now, and how did you hear about the 2024 Philadelphia Fringe Festival?

James: Hi! My name is James Glasgow, and I’m from Upstate NY. My collaborator Mario Moroni is originally from Italy but now lives in New York as well. We originally performed at the Philly Fringe in 2018, and we’ve been performing along the Fringe circuit in other cities and countries since then. We loved our time at the Philadelphia Fringe, so we’ve been looking forward to returning!

FringeArts: Nice to meet you James! Welcome back, we are so happy to have you again, what are you presenting in this year’s Fringe Festival?!

James: “Do You See What I Hear?” is a dramatic combination of Mario’s immersive poetry, my experimental algorithm-based compositions on electric cello and digital drums, and video elements which are generated live by the cello audio and projected over the performance. It’s wild, and hopefully something you’ve never seen before.

Do You See What I Hear?, Strange Fangs Song Factory
September 26-28th at Philly PACK
Music, Spoken Word & Storytelling

FringeArts: I bet! It sounds awesome, it’s an interesting and definitely must be fun to create both like pre and during the performance. So, what’s your story in how you got into the arts?

James: The combination of creativity for myself and the process of helping other people tell their stories. Composing music (and co-writing) is all about amplifying the beautiful ideas that already exist in a piece of art, writing, or other media, and that human expression aspect is super fulfilling.

FringeArts: Definitely agree, it’s quite powerful! So when you’re not working on your show, what are some things you like to do with your spare time in Philly?

James: The Magic Gardens is a great spot to practice photography, but I’m also planning on getting a snack from Tartes pastry shop in Old City and walking around the cobblestones for a bit if there’s nice weather!

FringeArts: Love the Magic Gardens! Every time you go there’s always something new or unseen from last time. I really could get lost and stay there the whole day. Alright back to the other questions, are there any shows you have or really want to see in this year’s festival?

James: Lee Minora is incredible so of course Nosejob, and The Listeners is at the top of my list as well.

FringeArts: James you have great taste. Both fantastic shows. Well before we close out this edition of the blog, we’ve got two final questions for you. First, is there anywhere we can find you on social media to keep up with yours and Strange Fangs Song Factory’s work?

James: Keep an eye on us at strangefangs.com and @strangefangs_songfactory!

FringeArts: And lastly, what has been your most favorite part in working on your show for this year’s festival?

James: Planning on how to utilize the space. We’re so excited to bring something that feels dynamic and immersive to a venue (Philly PACK) that is the absolute ideal for our show.

FringeArts: Nice! Yeah it’s always interesting being in the space for the first time and then morphing the art to really encompass the space into your performance to bring the audience in as well. Thank you for joining us James! If you’re looking for a music show, you’re definitely in the right spot. Visit Do You See What I Hear? to get your tickets today!

Meet Stacey

FringeArts: Hey there, welcome to the blog! Why don’t you tell us a little about yourself. What’s your name, where are you from, where are you now, and how did you hear about the 2024 Philadelphia Fringe Festival?

Stacey: My name is Stacey Strange, I’m originally from Minnesota but was seduced by the East Coast in my college search and have been out here since 2007. Currently I live in Connecticut. I first heard about Philly Fringe last year when I had several friends (local to Philly and not) present works as part of the festival.

FringeArts: Awesome, yeah Philly will do that to you! So Stacey, please do spill the tea on the show you’re presenting in the 2024 Philadelphia Fringe Festival!

Stacey: I’m the producer of (and a performer in) LAYOVERS – a comedy about suitcases, gravity, and time; which is about the universal joy about being stuck in an airport, possibly forever.
Joking aside—though there are plenty of those in the show—LAYOVERS is about three very different individuals stuck in a Sartre-ian sort of airport purgatory who are forced by circumstance to connect with each other and discover their shared common ground or risk going insane alone.
One reviewer described the show as ‘descending inexorably and entertainingly into chaos,’ and I really couldn’t ask for a better tagline. This show is about the most mundane sort of hell there is, but because it’s staged through a really absurdist framework, and performed with circus and juggling it’s exciting and terrifically fun. There are play pit balls, and confetti, and zithers, and chair dance, all of which we definitely think of as notoriously run of the mill airport fare.
Originally we conceived this show by thinking about deconstructing the nature of juggling and object manipulation, and mapping that onto three people, but it’s evolved a ton since we started working on it two years ago. We’ve really honed this show into the scientific opposite of sleeping in an airport overnight, while making it about sleeping in an airport overnight.

LAYOVERS – a comedy about suitcases, gravity and time; Air Temple Arts 
Sept 28th at 7 & 9:15 PM at Circus Campus 
Theater, Circus & Dance, Part of Circus Campus

FringeArts: That sounds amazing! Well not so much on being stuck in an airport forever… get me on that plane, I will not miss my flight. Well Stacey could you share with us how you got into the arts community?

Stacey: The most honest answer? I graduated in the recession and couldn’t get a job to save my life, so I figured if no one was going to pay me to work I might as well not get paid making art! But honestly, the arts have always been a huge part of my life, from community theater as a kid, and creative writing as my major in college, and circus and music as passions early on, so I think it was less of a choice and more of an inevitability.

FringeArts: Great way to think about it! I mean hey if it’s meant to be, it’s meant to be. And so picture this, somehow you’ve gotten the magical ability to teleport, meaning you can stay away from the airport and save the hassle of checking in all those suitcases, anywhere in the world, where would you go?

Stacey: Japan for sure. Sign me up.

FringeArts: Ooo, Japan is definitely on the list for me. Well, here’s another question I’d be intrigue dto hear your answer for: if you could be any food, what would you turn yourself into? And why???

Stacey: A steamed dumpling—bite sized and delicious, much like how I aspire to be in real life.

FringeArts: Yummy! That’s a great choice. Stacey if you could be apart of any show or film, what would you pick?

Stacey: Getting to be part of something that really captured the cultural moment like Game of Thrones at its peak would have been wild. Also I’m a huge, (albeit now embittered) fan of the books so I think that would be hard to top.

FringeArts: Great taste, and before we let you go two final questions. One being: where can we find more info about your show and the artist behind it?

Stacey: Show insta: layovers.circus, show website: layoverscircus.com, personals: @seriffim, staceystrange.com

FringeArts: And lastly, what has been your most favorite part in working on your show for this year’s festival?

Stacey: When we first started working on this show we didn’t know if we could cobble together enough material for a thirty minute based juggling show, much less an hour, and now we have to cut down the run time to keep it to 60 minutes! We’ve all grown a ton as technical artists and performers (this is my first time doing comedy and it’s been a blast) in a way no other show has facilitated and that’s been really incredible.

FringeArts: Thank you for hanging out with us on the blog Stacey, it was great to have you and learn a little bit more about LAYOVERS, in a fun way! Everyone get your tickets to HERE and find out what can just happen if you find yourself juggling and struggling through the airport.

Meet Excess and Sir

FringeArts: Hey there, welcome to the blog! Why don’t you tell us a little about yourself. What’s your name, where are you from, where are you now, and how did you hear about the 2024 Philadelphia Fringe Festival?

Excess and Sir: Excess and Sir are our names and utopian clownfoolery is our game! We both are from NY and live there now together in a dreamy trans artist house. But Sir had an extended interlude in the UK from childhood until two years ago. We have many loved ones in Philadelphia, and heard about it from fellow clowns in both NYC and PHL.

FringeArts: Amazing, great names, and tell us about the show you’re presenting in this year’s festival?

Excess and Sir: The Trash Sommeliers is an absurdist drag clown musical about two timeline interventionists who use trash to try and stop timelines from reaching the same fate as their own- garbage dump apocalypse by the time of the Victorian era. Audience interaction, live looping, original music, anachronism, sci fi, punk. Hopeful, and grimly utopian.

The Trash Sommeliers, Excess Materials and Sir Cum Sized
September 26-27th at the MAAS Building Garden (Outdoors)
Theater, Part of Cannonball

FringeArts: And for either or both of you, what makes you most interested or passionate about the arts?

Excess and Sir: We simply can’t not. Creation is life itself. It’s the stuff our brains and souls are made of. Plus we hope to change how people think- including ourselves.

FringeArts: Question for you both, if you could be apart of any show or film now or from the past, no explanation, what would you choose?

Excess and Sir: Brave Little Toaster

[FringeArts notes: This show was and is iconic! Cannot and will not explain why, just please watch the movie! ]

FringeArts: Good answer, good answer! Now unfortunately we left our role in Brave Little Toaster to be in the semi-real world: what food would you describe yourself to be or want to be?

Excess and Sir: A dumpling. Compact, efficient, juicy, surprising.

FringeArts: Honestly what a great description! So before we let you both go, where can we find you after the festival?

Excess and Sir: You can find us on social media @sircumsizeddrag @excessmaterials  and check out or next show at Exponential Fest in NYC

FringeArts: Lastly, what has been your most favorite part in working on your show for this year’s festival?

Excess and Sir: Working with incredible collaborators and expanding our dreams.

FringeArts: Well that’s about all we have for you both. Wishing you both the best of luck on The Trash Sommeliers. Everyone get your tickets to have a night full of clownfoolery and be taken back into a garbage dump apocalypse in the Victorian era. Might feel like a fever dream!

Meet Alize

FringeArts: Hey there, welcome to the blog! Why don’t you tell us a little about yourself. What’s your name, where are you from, where are you now, and how did you hear about the 2024 Philadelphia Fringe Festival?

Alize: Hello! My name is Alize Francheska Rozsnyai and I have been living in Philly for 12 years since starting undergrad here at The Curtis Institute of Music in opera and voice. I am originally from San Diego. They’re too passive there, and life is a beach vacation. I love passionate, angsty Philadelphians and their dumpster pools, greased poles, and tight-knit communities. It is the best environment for making art. When I first discovered the Philly Fringe Festival I became ABSOLUTELY OBSESSED, and one of the main reasons I love Philly and why I’ve stayed here so long is the wealth of new, beautifully weird, and experimental theatre happening in this city. After graduating, I felt that traditional opera was full of stuffiness and energy that turned folks my age off, and I started writing libretti and co-founded an experimental opera company called Alter Ego Chamber Opera, and we’ve been doing Fringe shows mostly ever since (took a hiatus in 2022 and 2023). We produced Alcina REVAMPED, a re-imagined LGBTQ+ fantasy take on the original baroque Handel Opera (written in Italian in 1735) complete with electronics, beats, and electric guitars and saxophone. We are passionate about developing brand new works and helping composers and librettists to realize production, and have a voice and platform for current issues. As an individual, I am a professional freelance opera singer and writer working along the east coast mostly, as well as internationally, and so proud to call Philly my home and artistic home, where I can write and collaborate with like-minded folks and bring new works into being from a place of very inspiring roots. As a gay woman, I am also particularly interested in making sure that queer voices and women get a prominent place on stage and in my stories. West is Best 😉 where I live with my partner and our 6 cats. We love to rescue as well, and help animals find loving homes after they’ve been dumped in Cobbs Creek or some other place, post-pandemic.

FringeArts: It’s great to meet you Alize, hi to all 6 cats! Well tell us about the show you’re presenting in this year’s festival?

Alize: This year, I am really proud to present my original work as librettist, the Philly premiere of A Pregnant Pause, with music by Garth Baxter, as part of a larger evening called OF FIERCER ORIGINS, which also includes two World Premiere songs by local composer Cerulean S. Payne-Passmore, and Tori Lavan, as well as songs from Libby Larsen’s The Birth Project. This evening is all about the experience of pregnancy from the perspective of the person about to give birth, and what goes through their head. It also encapsulates reflections over time with Adrienne Rich’s texts as part of our songs, a feminist poet who was credited with bringing “the oppression of women and lesbians to the forefront of poetic discourse.” We have some amazing Philly-based artists as part of this show as well, with Vanessa Ogbuehi Directing, Hannah Han, current DMA student at Temple on the keys who collaborates with me weekly and also played my recent opera workshop premiere, Souls Unscreened (music by Roger A. Martinez) in NYC and Philly, and Marcelle McGuirk singing in A Pregnant Pause and the songs by Libby Larsen. I am also singing! And we are joined by our lovely Baltimore-based colleague Katherine Boyce who sang in the premiere in Baltimore in April 2024. We are so excited to make this show raw and intimate, presenting on the small stage at SideQuest Theatre at the Adrienne (where we performed Alcina REVAMPED – feels strangely like our home!), where our voices will bounce off of the brick walls, and the audience up close can feel our emotions vibrating through our operatic sounds. Operatic singing is the most raw and connective singing, in my opinion, because of the depth of the vibrations and how deeply in one’s gut they can root — the audience can literally feel the sound and the emotion sympathetically due to how the sound travels through muscle and bone and organs. So the fact that we will sing up close in this space with a minimal set should make for beautiful story-telling.

Of Fiercer Origins: An Operatic Double-Bill, Alter Ego Chamber Choir
September 27-29th at SideQuest
Theater Theater, Music, & Opera

FringeArts: So Alize, to get to know you a little more can you tell us a little bit of how you found yourself in the otherwordly arts?

Alize: I’ve simply always done this and cannot imagine not being in a theatre. Since I was 4 I performed for people, and at 5 and 6 I was in my first full productions. I feel most at home backstage and in the community of a cast. There is nothing else that gives me the same rush of putting together a production, with every element from the performance jitters to the props and lights. My mom is a freelance violinist and conductor, and I saw her work hard to piecemeal an income together that would support me and my ailing grandmother. She showed me it could be done, and one could be happy in it. She just turned 65 and she is still entering conducting competitions, and excitedly planning all of her next projects with her orchestras in San Diego. That level of inspiration and dedication is lifelong, and one never retires from it. I cannot imagine doing something that I wasn’t that excited about for the rest of my life, complete with the challenges.

FringeArts: If you could teleport to anywhere you would want to be in this world, where would you go?

Alize: The Moon! I say this because since I am not training to be an astronaut, this would be my only chance to go to space. Everywhere else I want to go, I will eventually buy a ticket to. I think it would be the most humbling experience to see the Earth from the Moon. I wish everyone could do it, because I wonder whether wars would continue. We are so small, and so fragile. I wish we could all get along.

FringeArts: Alright now you’re teleporting yourself into fantasy land. You can be apart of any show or movie, which one peaks your interest?

Alize: Pirates of the Caribbean. It has been my childhood fantasy to be a pirate, and that would have just been so incredible. I would have required a sword fight in my contract, in which I got to climb to the top of one of the masts, and then swing around during an epic storm and swing on a rope all the way down and land on my evil enemy knocking him to the ground, then hovering over him with one final blow of the sword.

FringeArts: Alize, where can we find you after the festival?

Alize: www.AlizeSoprano.com, www.AlterEgoChamberOpera.org, The_Singing_Alize (on instagram), AlterEgoChamberOperaPHL (AECO’s Insta), and Facebook: Alize Francheska Rozsnyai or Alize Francheska Rozsnyai,Soprano

FringeArts: Oh how prepared, she’s got it all! Last question, what has been your most favorite part in working on your show for this year’s festival?

Alize: My favorite part of THIS show in particularly was writing it, back in 2022 and 2023. I spent hours pouring over my computer thinking about the best way to phrase these words and the language of it, so that we didn’t alienate anyone on any side of the birth/abortion conversation, but rather, to draw people from all walks of life into this discussion in a way that enables them to truly have compassion for the pregnant person’s perspective. Only by being able to hold people of vastly different beliefs together in the same room, when presenting a work of art, are we able to change hearts and minds and lead to greater peace and understanding in our world. So, as the librettist, I knew that this was a highly sensitive and important task. I feel truly honored to have been able to tell this story. As a singer singing the main protagonist, it feels deeply personal. When I hear my colleagues sing back to me the words I wrote with such love, I am filled with deep emotion and gratitude. This is a really important work for me, and I know that we are giving voice to many of the issues women face, worldwide, in this opera.

FringeArts: Alize thank you for joining us on the blog, happy to have you here, and we hope the performances go well. Great to hear the creation of this show and where it lies in today’s timeline! Tickets are available for Of Fiercer Origins HERE!

Meet Noam

FringeArts: Hey there, welcome to the blog! Why don’t you tell us a little about yourself. What’s your name, where are you from, where are you now, and how did you hear about the 2024 Philadelphia Fringe Festival?

Noam: Hi I’m Noam Osband, and I’ve lived in Philly during graduate school many moons ago, and I recently moved back here with my family to be closer to friends and relatives. I have seen many Fringe shows in the past when living here, but I only started performing in fringes around 7 years ago, after I moved away. So it’s really fun to be performing this show in Philly for the first time!

FringeArts: Love to track time by how many moons have passed, makes it feel less distressing. Well, let’s get going, we want to hear you spill some tea about the show you’re presenting! Give us the run down.

Noam: Brother Love’s Good Time Gospel Hour – it’s a musical tent revival satire, a church service for people who maybe don’t like church. IIn this year’s show, Brother Love and Sister Alice are teaching about the importance of God-centered adult entertainment. We’re trying to put the Lord back into adult films where he belongs because, as we sing in the show, “There ain’t no porno I know better than the Bible.”
I first performed this show in 2020, and I’ve been honing it ever since. It’s a real thrill getting a whole room of people standing up and hollering “Amen” and “Hallelujah” to some wacky stuff.

Brother Love’s Good Time Gospel Hour, Noam Osband
Sept 28th at 9 PM at Studio 34 
Comedy & Improv, Music, & Immersive/Interactive

FringeArts: So we all agree, the arts are amazing and have heard many perspectives on what’s most enjoyable and thrilling in not working but getting the chance to create. What’s your take?

Noam: There’s no greater feeling that a crowd coming together to laugh, and to the degree I can do that, I feel blessed!

FringeArts: A gift indeed. So Noam what you do you like to do in Philly aside from working on Brother Love’s Good Time Gospel Hour?

Noam: I do this wonderful loop in the evenings sometimes where I bike through Woodland Cemetery, down to Penn Park, and back on Walnut St. It brings me joy. Especially when the bike lane is empty.

FringeArts: Are there any shows in particular you have seen or are looking forward to from the festival?

Noam: War and Play – I’m a sucker for a thoughtful clown show!

FringeArts: Well, before we go, where can we find you after the festival?

Noam: I’m on social media as: @noamosband 

FringeArts: Awesome! And last official question, what has been your most favorite part in working on your show for this year’s festival?

Noam: I’ve only performed this show on the West Coast, so it’s nice to finally bring it to places closer to where I live.

FringeArts:  Thank you for hanging out with us on the blog Noam. For more information on Brother Love’s Good Time Gospel Hour click HERE!  See y’all next time!