Within my own city, there's a growing trend towards "converting" Fringe shows: during the last pure-Fringe festival, a good dozen or so productions were picked up by larger companies for polished remounts in larger venues. (With luxuries like designers, salaries, professional PR, etc.)
And on the one hand, this appeals to me. Theatre is one of the most meritocratic professions in the world: if you don't pull your weight, your phone will stop ringing. and this process of upgrading from Fringe to "real" theatre definitely appeals to that side of my personality. Put on a good show and the money will find you. I like that.
But I'm also thinking about some of the people I graduated with.
The summer we graduated, 4 of them got together and produced a Fringe show.
It wasn't very good.
And that's not surprising. On any other career path, we wouldn't bat an eyelid if someone took their first kick at the can and failed: of course you're going to make mistakes and need to learn and be trained by others and gradually master a skillset. That's why we have internships/apprenticeships/Junior and Assistant positions/etc. Even if you've got a specialized degree in the field, the assumption is that you're going to need time to master "real-world" skills and gradually get into a position of mastery.
But for actors, well. Some of them are going to land a small number of apprenticeships and artistic internships and be invited to join Junior Companies, and they'll earn their stripes that way.
Many of them don't. These 4 students had to go straight into the "workplace". And when the Fringe show tanked, their careers effectively ended. This was demoralizing and frustrating and life-shattering in many ways: your first "real" production, and you blew it. I'm led to understand that they lost about $2000 on the adventure, factoring in the Fringe fees, production expenses, the shifts they had to cancel at work to rehearse and perform, publicity, photography, and all the rest.
The good news is that one of them was able to recover. She's currently teaches improv classes while promising herself she'll break into theatre eventually.
The other three have left the industry.
They weren't untalented as such, and given time to mature as artists might have made worthwhile contributions. If we treated actors the same way we treat accountants and lawyers (take your time, master your skillset gradually, here's an apprenticeship, etc.), they might have been able to tough it out, and could have become useful, productive and interesting members of the artistic communities.
If they had had even just a trickle of income or profit while working on that Fringe show, it might not have ended as it did. But the business model doesn't support it: either your show is profitable, or you don't get paid. They tried, and all it got them was credit card debt equivalent to a month's rent apiece--making it much harder to try again, even if you can get over the demoralization and the failure and the discouragement.
Instead they're paying down their student loans with the low-skill service jobs which are the only positions they're qualified to land after a 4-year BFA.
I don't think that's good for the industry, for the economy, or for the artistic community.