What is The Crush Bar?
The Crush Bar is a weekly newsletter about emerging theatremakers written by me, Fergus Morgan, and published here on Substack. Usually, it is published on Friday morning, arriving straight into subscribers’ inboxes at 11.45am-ish.
Regular issues feature in-depth interviews with exciting, early-career directors and designers, dramatists and dramaturgs, artists and actors, and more. These issues give those theatremakers a chance to be explicit about who they are, what they want – and what help they need to get there.
There’s more. The last issue of every month features fringe theatre picks for the following month: five upcoming shows worth buying a ticket to. And, every now and again, there is an international issue: a dispatch from elsewhere featuring an interesting artist or company working abroad.
Around the big UK theatre festivals – VAULT, Brighton and, of course, Edinburgh – The Crush Bar mixes things up a bit. Every now and then, it hosts promotional content, too. And that, pretty much, is it. If you want more info, then you can read a post I wrote last year using the button below.
Who is Fergus Morgan?
I am Fergus Morgan. I’m a freelance arts journalist and critic specialising in theatre. As well as publishing The Crush Bar, I write regularly for The Stage, The Independent and Stage Directors UK. My stuff has also appeared in The Scotsman, TimeOut, Fest Magazine, Exeunt, WhatsOnStage, Vice, and elsewhere over the years.
I’m a member of the UK Critics Circle. I was shortlisted for the Allen Wright Award at the Edinburgh Fringe in 2019. I was born and raised in Suffolk originally, went to the University of Oxford, then rented in London for a bit, and now live in Edinburgh with my partner and my dog. That’s about it!
My email is fergusmorgan@hotmail.co.uk if you need it. You can find me on Twitter as @FergusMorgan, too. And you can visit my extremely basic website using the button below.
How can I support The Crush Bar?
Well, thanks for asking. The Crush Bar takes up quite a bit of my time and is – and will always be – totally free to read. I do need a bit of support to keep it going, though, and there are a few different ways you can do that:
1) You can become a paid subscriber. Chances are, if you’re reading this, you are already a free subscriber and already get The Crush Bar in your inbox every Friday. If you wanted to be a legend, though, you can become a paid subscriber via the button below.
This doesn’t actually get you anything extra content-wise – but it does give you the warm, fuzzy feeling of satisfaction that you are doing your bit to support independent theatre journalism. It’s £5 a month, or £50 a year if you want. A bargain, in my humble opinion.
2) You can make a one-off donation. For a while, I used the platform Ko-Fi to accept donations to support The Crush Bar. In order to keep everything in one place, I have stopped those donations. If you made regular donations to me via Ko-Fi, you should have been contacted by me already to let you know that your donations have been cancelled.
If, though, you’d rather make a one-off donation, instead of becoming a paid subscriber, then you can still do so via Ko-Fi. It is all pretty straightforward. Just hit the button below.
3) You can share The Crush Bar. I started The Crush Bar in January 2020 with zero subscribers. As of the time of writing this, 20 months later, it has nearly 1300 free subscribers. It has got there through people sharing it far and wide – and that really means a lot to me.
Tell your friends about it. Tweet about it. Forward the issues to anyone that might be interested and encourage them to subscribe, too. That would be brilliant. In fact, you can share The Crush Bar right now using the button below.
4) You can promote with The Crush Bar. As I explained above, The Crush Bar does include promotional content every now and then. It is always relevant to subscribers’ interests and I never take money off people that can’t afford it – but it does help keep all this going.
If you are interested in using The Crush Bar to promote something – a show, a season, a service, whatever – then have a look at the information sheet below, or feel free to get in touch with me directly via email. That’s fergusmorgan@hotmail.co.uk, again.
Subscribe to The Crush Bar
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