I asked Ann Sabbah what’s new at the Denver Fringe Festival this year, and she told me the clown community of Denver has jumped in feet-first. 

Given that clowns wear, like, size 24 shoes, consider those big feet all-in.

“And they are just loving it,” said Sabbah, the festival’s co-founder and executive director.

The rapidly expanding Denver Fringe Festival, which will be tickling brain cells through Sunday in 19 venues spanning northwest Denver to Aurora, is an annual unjuried and uncensored showcase of 75 wide-ranging original shows. And 12 of them this year are classified as clown shows.

“There is definitely an emerging clown community in Denver, but there are so many different kinds of performance that can be categorized as clown – and every city’s clown scene is different,” said Sabbah. “Clown is absurd and it is unexpected, and it is hard to categorize. Here in Denver, I would say there is essentially no fourth wall – meaning there is a lot of interaction between the clowns and their audiences. You are part of the show.”

Take, for example, “Prospero’s Black Box,” a solo clown show that explores the absurd connections between Shakespeare’s Prospero – the exiled magician from “The Tempest” – and Geoffrey Hinton – the so-called “Godfather of AI.”

Or “Jet & Anatasha,” an unlikely pair of classical artists who say they have come together “to follow absurdity and face the great unknown with truth and presence.” (The Anatasha half of that duo – Anatasha Blakely – recently played Rosencrantz in the Denver Center Theatre Company’s “Hamlet.” Jet Eveleth was a professor of comedy studies at Columbia College.)

The four-day Fringe lineup, once concentrated primarily in the RiNo Arts District, is now more spread out to East Colfax Avenue with several funky new venues filling in the space between. They include The Learned Lemur, Hope Tank; The Shop at Matter, Manos Sagrados and Hooked on Colfax. Rise Comedy has added a second venue.

Fringe offerings span aerial, immersive experiences, standup comedy, dance, puppetry, magic, virtual reality and even a few good old-fashioned theater plays. For better or worse, almost half of them are solo performances. Nothing is more than an hour, and nothing costs more than $20.

There are also free sidewalk pop-up performances, free “Kids Fringe” activities at both the Savoy Denver and the People’s Building in Aurora, and two FringeART shows featuring dozens of local artists. Overall, the 2025 lineup will feature about 275 participating artists – a third of them traveling from outside Denver.

It’s becoming a really big deal. For artists and audiences alike. 

“There is a lot going in our country today, and I think this year’s festival is really responding to that in all kinds of ways – uplifting, inspiring, humorous and gut-wrenching ways,” Sabbah said.

While the Denver Fringe is uncurated, that does not mean the lineup is entirely random. Sabbah calls the process “a combination of lottery and strategy.” Every artist applies to get in – “We didn’t recruit anything,” she said. But certain lineup choices are made based on the requirements of a given show and the limitations of the available venues.

“Our goal is to be able to accommodate as many productions as possible – within reason,” Sabbah said. “I believe in seeing who comes to us – and I believe in supporting the local community as well.”

What’s your strategy?

The bigger the lineup, the more daunting your decisions. So what is a first-time fringer to do? With so many different types of performances spread out over so much terrain, it’s useless to aspire to see a little bit of everything. Plus, you want to keep driving to a minimum. So the best strategy might be to start by choosing either a genre or a venue, and then build your schedule around that. The Fringe website makes it easy to filter your choices to a manageable level based on your interests and availability.

For example, you can filter by genre among 24 possible choices, including standup comedy, dance, BIPOC, LGBTQ, burlesque, family friendly or free shows.

A more adventurous tactic would be to pick your personal strategic HQ venue and go from there. Mine is always the classy Savoy Denver (2700 Arapahoe St.), which has two performing spaces and therefore twice the offerings. You can walk to several other Fringe venues from there in less than a mile, including Redline Contemporary Art Center, Rise Comedy, and The Shop at Matter bookstore.

However you choose to build your itinerary, some advance planning does pay off. Because while your affection for fringe assumes your openness to experience just about anything, let’s be honest: Not everything is for everyone. And you can’t really know what you’re missing out on if you don’t do your homework. That’s how I ended up in the middle of an imaginary ping-pong championship match last year. (That was epic.)

That’s how, this year, I already know the show I most want to see is “The Greatest Garage Sale Ever,” a one-woman play by Danielle Anderson, better known as singer-songwriter royalty in the Colorado indie-music scene for more than a decade performing under her appetite-stimulant stage name of Danielle Ate the Sandwich.

Anderson’s comedy cabaret combines catchy original songs and characters both bizarre and endearing. It has been received by audiences with pure delight.

“I debuted this show last summer during KC Fringe and am cleaning out the cobwebs and dusting off the surfaces to perform the show at the Denver Fringe,” said Anderson, who goes on at 6:30 p.m. Saturday and 5 p.m. Sunday at Rise Comedy (1260 22nd St.). The show, she says, “celebrates the power of nostalgia to remind us who we are and what we’ve lost.”

Here are a few other titles that have caught my attention on the eve of Denver Fringe 2025:

‘Prison Boxing’

Leah Joki, who went from the Juilliard Drama School to falling in love with producing theater in a maximum-security prison, takes the audience on a journey into prison culture and bureaucracy by introducing 14 different autobiographical characters. 6:30 p.m. Thursday, and Friday, 8 p.m. Saturday at the Savoy.

‘MK + A Rewatch Podcast’

Imagine two baby twins who rose to stardom before they could even walk by sharing a role on a popular 90s sitcom. It’s now 30 years later, and they are about to make their first public appearance in a decade in front of a live studio audience. Philadelphia actor Morgan McKenzie Kauffman plays both roles in this part-podcast, part-horror show that has been described as “a stinging dive into the lucrative business of remakes, reboots and rewatches.” 4:30 p.m. Friday, 6 p.m. Saturday and 4:30 p.m. Sunday, at Rise Comedy, 1260 22nd St. Denver.

‘Control Freak’

If you dig music, clowning, stage combat, puppets and a healthy dose of rage, check out this “Heart of Darkness” meets “Sesame Street” journey of a children’s TV host (and puppeteer) who spirals just when he’s gaining TV traction. 6:30 p.m. Friday, 5 p.m. Saturday, and 6:30 p.m. Sunday at the People’s Building, 9995 E. Colfax Ave.

‘REEL’

Denver-raised Sam Theobald’s latest Fringe offering is a tense psychological drama that follows a woman who discovers her online boyfriend is actually another woman. Now, she’s demanding answers in a piece that explores identity, control and intimacy in our tech-reliant world. When I asked the Denver School of the Arts grad what makes him “fringe,” Theobald responded: “Love and drama and catfishing… oh my!” 6:30 p.m. Thursday, 5 p.m. Friday and Saturday at the Bug Theatre, 3654 Navajo St.

‘Transduction’

Many are convinced that people are being indoctrinated into being trans. Um … OK. Sam Charney’s darkly playful, multimedia solo piece muses on what an indoctrination might actually look like. Charney invites audiences to experience both the joys and perils of being trans. “This is a time when the very act of being transgender is a political statement,” Charney told the Denver Gazette. “Denver Fringe has provided me with the important space where my voice can be heard when trans identities are being erased by the federal government by denying our existence, removing laws and protections and making it unsafe to live our authentic lives. I will always create art that sparks a revolution.” 8:30 p.m. Thursday, Friday and Saturday at The Shop at Matter, 2114 Market St.