By Odin Rasco
Chicoans looking for entertainment this Labor Day weekend are sure to be spoiled for choice, as the Legacy Stage Fringe Festival is returning for its second year, bigger and better than before.
Inspired by the legendary Edinburgh Festival Fringe, where non-traditional, unpolished and avant-garde artists of all stripes perform shows that a more staid, “proper” event would never allow on the docket, the minds behind Chico’s Legacy Stage are out to capture that very same spirit for the second year in a row.
Following a flurry of positive feedback from 2024, Legacy is at it again, with this year’s festival set to run Aug. 29-31, with a Kick-Off Party Aug. 28 at Museum of Northern California Art (monca). The list of acts has grown — up to 27 now — and the variety of what’s on offer at the five different venues across Chico has also exploded.
“Those [acts] range from plays and musicals to puppet shows and to burlesque; we’ve also got an aerial artist performance happening,” notes Legacy Stage co-founder Erin Horst. “There’s a couple of improvisation groups, some stand-up comedy, and we’ve got dance. It’s just a really large variety of types of performing arts from across the county.”
The headliner show involves the world premiere of “Burn Ban,” a horror musical written by Chico State University musical theatre professor Matthew Miller, with music by Uncle Dad’s Art Collective co-founder Josh Hegg.
Miller has been involved with Legacy since its earliest days, when it was still a series of “what-if” conversations between co-founders Horst, Jami Witt Miller and Lara Tenckhoff, all of whom wanted to create an opportunity to foster professional theatre in Chico.
“Burn Ban” isn’t a typical musical, Miller warns. Musical theatre doesn’t typically do horror, and when it does, it almost always leans into the campy, over-the-top blood and gore spectacle. Hegg and Miller wanted to do something actually scary, so they started the three-year process of creating the show.
“He and I set out to do this creative experiment, to make a musical that is scary, because the thing about horror is it’s a really interesting way to explore themes and ideas that are coming up in culture,” Miller explains. “Scaring people about things in our culture but setting it in a different environment so that we’re dealing with things by taking the themes of reality and fictionalizing them.”
Some of the ideas integrated into the show had been percolating since Miller’s time in grad school 10 years ago. The quick pitch for the show is straightforward: A family goes camping in a remote part of Northern California at a spot where nobody has a phone signal. Reliant on their phones for so long, they’ve forgotten how to communicate without them, an issue made only worse when strange events and eerie happenings begin to unfold around them.
“I will say this: it’s not a feel-good musical,” Miller admits. “I mean, it’s pretty dark. When people hear the phrase musical theater, they expect ‘Guys and Dolls’ or a big tap dance number. That’s not the kind of musical this is. It’s going to challenge the audience to grapple with some dark themes and some heavy things. But it is hopefully going to provoke conversation and thought, which I think musical theater does when it’s at its best.”
Since its inception in 2019, Legacy Stage, a 501(c)3 nonprofit, has endeavored to create more opportunities for professional theatre in the region. In addition to the Fringe Festival, Legacy resurrected Chico’s Shakespeare in the Park in recent years.
“I love the analogy of us adding to an equation, because we are all doing the same thing, but we’re each part of a sum, and that sum is Chico having a kick-ass arts scene,” says Legacy Stage Board of Directors President Marquita Goodman. “What kind of makes us stand out is that we really dedicate ourselves to serve an artistic vision; we put a lot of thought into our season. The productions that we choose, and how those productions are going to provide opportunities for artists in Chico to improve their craft and to have a professional experience so they can go off, whether it’s here in Chico or in bigger markets.”
A roving theatre company, Legacy doesn’t have one stage or theatre that it calls home, instead putting on the yearly Shakespeare productions at Cedar Grove Meadow and staging other shows, such as “A Christmas Carol,” at other venues like Chico State’s Laxson Auditorium.
“It’s really nice to have an established theater space to work in, but it’s also limiting in some ways because it confines you to what that space is capable of,” Horst reflects. “What we really love is the creativity that pushes us towards more site-specific productions. When we do Shakespeare in the Park every summer, even though we’re always using that outdoor space, we literally create something from nothing every year. It looks a little bit different for each show that we do. We find that to be super exciting and artistically fulfilling because we can tailor the look of the show to the concept or the artistic vision for that particular year.”
After the festival, Legacy will close out their 2025 season with “Rocky Horror Picture Show” at the Laxson Auditorium Oct. 17-19. The announcement for next years’ season is also set to come out in September or October, though some things are sure bets; Goodman assured that Legacy plans to do Shakespeare again next summer, and hopefully will bring back the Fringe Festival for a third year. In the longer term, Legacy leadership wants to continue to build a solid foundation for a theatre group that’s ready for the long haul.
“Why we settled on the name Legacy is because we had this dream of creating a company that would outlive the individuals that started it,” Horst observes. “What was really important to think about as we were forming Legacy was what we can leave behind for the next generation or the next leaders that come up and step into this legacy that we’re creating. That’s the crux of everything that we’ve decided to do.”
Chick here for tickets, schedules and about the Legacy Stage Fringe Festival in Chico.
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