The inaugural Fort Lauderdale Fringe Festival was like an all-you-can-eat buffet of theater. Three separate Broward College classrooms were converted into black-box-style theaters that would house ten hours of more than 20 plays — largely crafted by local talent. Vanessa Elise, a playwright and Carbonell-nominated actor, was brought on by Broward College (which hosted the event) as a consulting artistic director. "That's the beauty of the fringe: Every piece is absolutely different," she told New Times. "We have one that is a musical in Spanglish. We have a theatrical composition that was submitted as a proposal — they built the script as they rehearsed. There's even a Noh [Japanese musical drama] play written by Cynthia Joyce Clay — it's very slow and poetic and quite beautiful." All that variety helped fill a hole in the Broward arts scene that has been sorely missing for, like, ever. And we really hope the festival returns, bigger and better than ever, in 2016.
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