What Reviewers Are Actually Dealing With, And How to Work With Them
I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again:
If you want to make money, run a venue.
If you want power, write reviews.
If you want to be desperate, do a show.
I reviewed 19 shows at Edinburgh Fringe 2025. There were nearly 4,000. What follows is what I learned about being on that side of the table and what artists can do with that information.
Before we start: a resource
If you need guidance on how to be your own PR rep, or want to understand what PR reps actually do, I highly recommend Peter Michael Marino’s Pete’s Get Press Workshop. It’s a few hours, affordable, and gives you a clear roadmap. This post is a complement to that, not a replacement.
What it’s actually like to be a reviewer
Everyone wants a piece of you.
I asked the Fringe Society not to share my email address on their list of reviewers because I’d heard it’s normal to get hundreds of press releases a day. I’d rather go through the program myself and choose that way.
Out of nearly 4,000 shows, I reviewed 19. There is no version of this math that works in your favor.
Every reviewer has their own selection process, but here’s what I can say for myself and what I observed in others: we review shows we actually want to see. That sounds obvious, but follow it to its conclusion. Your show may be spectacular and I may not care. It may not be in a genre I work in. I may have found out about it after my schedule was full. It may be on at midnight and I have a strict 10pm bedtime. I may have gotten sick and had to cancel. I may not be able to physically get from where I am to your venue in time.
It’s kind of remarkable that shows get reviewed at all when you think about how many conditions have to line up.
One thing that follows from this: you only want reviews from the right reviewers for your work. If it genuinely doesn’t make sense for me to review your show, you don’t want me there. A confused review from someone who doesn’t understand the work isn’t worth it. You won’t like it, and then it lives on the internet forever. That’s a person with perceived “power” on record saying your work wasn’t great.
Reviewers are not special. They’re people, subject to all the same variables as everyone else. At the end of the day, this is one human being commenting on the work of another. That’s it. They’re also, and this matters, mostly volunteers. Like a lot of performers, many have paid their own way to Edinburgh and are paying to work there. While performers get paid last, most reviewers don’t get paid at all. They do this because they love supporting Fringe theater. Which also means it can become exploitative, and they know it. They do not owe you anything. Invite them to your show on their terms; in exchange, they’ll consider your work on yours.
How to actually engage a reviewer
The most important thing, by far, is relationships.
If you meet a reviewer, find out what they like to review. Many have at least a rough sense of what they’re looking for, like female-led plays, LGBTQIA+ work, only improv comedy. Whatever it is, pay attention. If your work aligns, pitch it. It’s a sales conversation, but keep the human connection at the center of it. If they’re bought into you as a person, they’ll remember you. They’ll try to show up.
The same logic applies to PR. When you pay a rep, you’re not just paying someone to send a million emails. You’re paying for their already-established relationships with reviewers. You’re paying not for your press release to be sent, but for it to be opened. For the phone call to not just be placed, but answered and respected.
Do follow up. Be pleasantly persistent. Always offer a free ticket for their preferred date.
Be easy to reach. Don’t make a reviewer chase you or work to reach the right person on your team. You and your show are not that special. If it takes more than 24 hours to get a response, we’ve already moved onto someone else who’s more communicative.
The cultural moment is part of the pitch
This next part might be risky to say, and I’m going to say it anyway. Consider it an observation from someone with anthropological training.
Something I noticed in Edinburgh: some shows did little to no PR and still got significant review attention. The pattern was this: if a show’s subject matter, or the identity of the artist making it, aligned with what’s currently considered urgent in progressive circles, it moved to the front of the queue. Remember, reviewers are mostly volunteers operating on instinct and often have genuinely good intentions. Many are also quietly trying to be on the right side of history. They want to use their platform to do something that matters. That impulse is real, it’s human, and it affects who gets covered.
I’m not going to comment here on if that’s fair, if it’s right or wrong. What I will say is, it’s a mechanism, and when you understand how it works, you can use it to help position yourself.
So, take a step back and think honestly about who you are, what you’ve made, and where that sits in the current cultural moment. Who delivers a message is at least as important as what the message is. If your identity or your subject matter aligns with what’s considered urgent right now, say so clearly in your pitch because it will help you. Don’t make reviewers work to figure out why your show matters to them. If it doesn’t align, that’s okay. It just means you need to find the reviewers whose interests genuinely match your work, rather than casting a wide net.
One more thing, and it connects to your overall experience: if your show or your identity engages with a live social issue, expect that issue to be present at the festival while you’re performing. While the Fringe tends to be a very liberal space, it is not a fantasyland that shields you from reality. It’s open to the public and the public brings all their crap there, too.
The audiences carrying a similar experience or wanting to understand that experience will be in your room. The reviewers writing about it are thinking about it too. This is both a warning and an invitation to know what you’re walking into, and to be ready to engage in the conversation your show is part of.
A note on the quality problem
In a normal context, like reviewing a show in New York, a reviewer sees that show and writes the review before moving on to another show. In Edinburgh, they may see five shows in a day and need to write reviews for all of them within 24 hours. It’s too much. I found it takes at least two hours to write a considered review. A plot summary that essentially says “the show was good” isn’t worth anyone’s time, but there’s a lot of that, and it’s much easier to churn out.
You put real work into your show. You want someone to give it the attention it deserves. The honest truth is that the conditions of the Fringe don’t always make that possible, even when the reviewer cares.
What this means for you
Don’t give reviews more power than they have. People over-weight them, and it distracts from the work. You’re there to put on a show. Good reviews, bad reviews, no reviews… as best you can, don’t let it distract you from what you know about your work and why you made it.
From my vantage point, the goal isn’t to get reviewed. The goal is to get reviewed by the right person, at the right time, who actually gives a damn about the kind of work you do. That’s a harder target, but it’s the one worth aiming for.
