By Howard Shapiro
INQUIRER STAFF WRITER

A whopping 59 new productions opened here Friday — the onset of the yearly end-of-summer arts festival that mixes experimentation with tradition, cutting-edge with rough-hewn, the smart, the dumb and occasional surprises about which is which.

The day’s openings represent about a fourth of the shows in this 15th year of the Live Arts Festival/Philly Fringe, almost all of which will open within the next two weeks and close by Sept. 17, the last day of the festival. The Live Arts shows are invited productions by the festival organization, and the Fringe shows are a free-for-all by producers who invite themselves, and almost everyone calls the 16 days of works, simply, the Fringe.

Experimental or not, most of the shows that opened Friday — 26 of them — premiered at the most traditional (and popular) curtain time, 8 p.m.; the earliest opening was One Peace at a Time, a free show at the Central Free Library, a 10 a.m. movie project that asks audience members to participate with their flipcams or digital phones — unorthodox and typically Fringy, indeed. The The last show to open Friday was PRO-MANIA!, at 11:30 p.m., Philly Improv Theater’s look at wrestling and its accompanying trash talk.

Most of the shows were — and will be — in Center City and adjoining neighborhoods, and frequently in odd venues no usually seen by theatergoers other times of the year, but on Friday shows also opened in South Philly, Fishtown, Kensington, University City and Elkins Park.

And late Friday came the opening of the Festival Bar, this year at the RUBA Club on Green Street in Northern Liberties, where audiences, performers, stagecraft artists and producers mingle into the night, and an unofficial late-night Fringe cabaret in the performance area of the basement at a place called Underground Arts at the Wolf Building, on 12th Street near Callowhill.

A few shows snuck in previews under the radar — two as early as Wednesday night. A dozen were previewing Thursday. Dead Dancing, one of the two Wednesday night performances, was an invited event for Brian Sanders’ dance company, called JUNK.

Whether or not Sanders intended it, the performance — set in not just a basement but a sub-basement, in a old industrial building that is now lofts on Fourth Street near Spring Garden — unleashed an early buzz for a company that this year performs as part of The Fringe, but in the past has been invited onto the Live Arts roster.
Sanders’ piece, was an apt early festival opening for two reasons: It is bizarre, and it involves a subject that has been done now and again forcefully in the festival: the undead. It’s set in a fresh, green portion of a graveyard, and the dance troupe of ghouls and zombies plays out its scenarios to songs of love and loss that have become staples of easy-listening FM stations.

As a theater critic, I found that it had a tension nicely driven by its staging, and its magnetic, leavened morbidity reminded me of an unforgettable 2007 festival show by Pig Iron Theatre Company: Isabella, a version of Shakespeare’s Measure for Measure, set in a morgue, that also previewed that year two nights before the festival. (This year, the company is adaptating The Twelfth Night.)

Sanders’ dance piece is being reviewed by Inquirer dance critic Merilyn Jackson, who has followed his troupe’s work extensively, after its official opening this weekend. But isn’t it just like the Fringe to have the undead bring out the first rush of the living?