As March settles in, making no signs of forgetting February’s weather, it seems crazy to think that it might be almost time to embark on another year of Edinburgh Fringe adventure. The next couple of weeks will prove busy ones in the offices of Fringe venues and producers across the UK and around the world as the reduced price Fringe registration deadline rolls around on Friday 19 March.

If you are bringing a show to the Fringe this year and don’t have all of your ducks in a row just yet don’t worry too much, Fringe registration only opened on 1 March and the final deadline for inclusion in the Fringe programme isn’t until 21 April 2010. So what is the cost of missing the early deadline a week on Friday?

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News has slowly spread that Musical Theatre @ George Square will not be operating as a dedicated musical theatre venue again this summer. No official announcement seems to have been made but companies looking for venues for their 2010 Edinburgh Fringe run have had the news confirmed by the Edinburgh University Festivals Office. The Festivals Office, which previously played a large role in the running of the venue advised looking to other Fringe venues.

Operated as a dedicated home for musical theatre on the Fringe, the venue first opened it doors for the 2008 Fringe with programming and leadership from then Head of Musical Theatre Matters UK and ex-Head of Licensing with Cameron Mackintosh, Chris Grady at the helm. Chris has since moved on to become Head of External Relations at the Theatre Royal Bury St Edmunds whilst his job administering Musical Theatre Matters UK has passed to Laoise Davidson. Chris retains chairmanship of the organisation but presumably does not have time to programme and manage a Fringe venue in addition to his new job.

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No sooner was the idea of a London Fringe floated in the press yesterday than the soapboxes were quickly assembled and shouted from. The first article I read on the subject was in The Standard who obviously swallowed the London Fringe press release wholeheartedly, describing the idea of trying to run a large scale festival in London in August as “throwing down the gauntlet” to Edinburgh, an event with a 60 year history and international reputation.

Swiftly followed a Gruniad piece on the subject penned by Veronica Lee which pretty much covered my main concerns -  that trying to set up a fringe festival in direct competition to Edinburgh would be a fruitless endeavour because the majority of companies, arts journalists and dedicated fringe theatre goers will have made the 400 mile trip north.

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I spent most of this morning slowly thumbing throught the executive summaries of applications for the Ideas Tap Innovation and Edinburgh funds. I say slowly thumbing not because there is a lot of reading to do, the summaries are limited to 100 words, but because the wesite really is a mess. The entire thing seems to be crippled by JavaScript. You can’t open summaries, or “responses” as they are called in some parts of the site, in different browser tabs because they are all tied back to original query meaning that trying to get any grasp of what the applications contain, there are 180 for the Edinburgh fund alone, is near impossible.

I did spend enough time on the site to see that there are some very interesting applications. I admit that I spent more time on the Edinburgh fund’s pitch page as the Innovators Fund offers applications from just about everything under the sun and seemed to include a lot of applications from the film and TV development side of the industry.

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The BBC are reporting this evening that the troubled Royal Bank of Scotland, getting ready to sell a fifth of their business, are also going to be drawing their purse strings when it comes to sports and corporate sponsorship.

The original article is linked here

Some of the numbers are pretty staggering, and although they are not listed in the BBC article this evening’s 6 o’clock news gave viewers an idea of some of the figures involved.

The BBC’s Sports Ambassadors, including stars such as Andy Murray, cost the business around £200m.

The RBS 6 Nations receives funding in the region of £20m although this relationship has only recently been resigned and is expected to run until 2013.

The F1 William’s team is the big focus of the article this evening with funding in the region of £20m expected to be dramatically cut.

But where does this leave the performing arts in its relationships with big business? The boom years have seen many organisations adjust to fund their artistic activities through sticking a few corporate banners around the place.

In another article in this weekend’s Observer, linked here, Venessa Thorpe covers news from Arts and Business that a third of business who give more than £1m last year are expected to slash budgets this year.

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