"People will complain there are too many things," Cromie says. "That's a great complaint to have."
So what's a cutting-edge Philly arts-seeker to do? Here are some strategies:
1. Stick with the tried and true Fringesters of past years. This would lead you to, perhaps, Applied Mechanics, which staged Portmanteau last year and is returning with Overseers, a "dangerous new tale of power, persuasion, and perpendicularity." Or to Dancing Dead, a macabre comedy (macabredy?) from festival wower Brian Sanders' Junk dance theater company, to be performed in the subbasement at 444 Lofts.
The Bright Light Theatre Company, another veteran, returns with All Places From Here at the Loading Dock on Frankford Avenue, a mashup of music, dance, and projections of Moroccan kids. Ranging even farther afield is perennial fave Thaddeus Phillips, whose Whale Optics washes up in Antarctica.
2. Consult the experts, who point to the world premiere of choreographer John Jasperse's Canyon at the Wilma as a can't-miss, for example. Or limit yourself to the small, professionally curated Live Arts portion of Live Arts/Fringe, with sought-after international artists like Traces' Montreal-based acrobats, and such highly touted local performers as Headlong's dancers, on Mars in Red Rover, or Pig Iron's actors, grooving to Gypsy rock in Twelfth Night.
For that matter, you could use the latter as a jumping-off point for a Shakespeare bender - Underground Shakespeare Company's Wars & Whores: The Henry IV Musical, Swim Pony's Lady M, a dark, all-female riff on Macbeth, and 11th Hour's Bomb-itty of Errors, a revisit of the company's 2007 comic rap (rap-edy?) version of A Comedy of Errors.
