Five shows to see at the Edinburgh Fringe, vol. 8
A prize-winning comedy musical, a one-man play about The Sun and Elton John, a piano lesson from an Aussie comedian, and more. Plus: news and views on the festival elsewhere.
Welcome to The Crush Bar, a newsletter about theatre from Fergus Morgan.
Throughout July and August, The Crush Bar will be focused on the Edinburgh Festival Fringe, with twice-weekly issues featuring updates from the festival and recommended shows. Here, in case you missed it, is Friday’s issue.
If you want to support The Crush Bar, you can sign up as a paid supporter. Outside of Edinburgh Fringe, that gets you another email - Shouts and Murmurs, a round-up of theatre news, reviews, interviews and more - in your inbox every Tuesday.
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The festival has seventeen days left…
The first round of Fringe First Awards were handed out this morning at a ceremony at Pleasance Courtyard. They went to She’s Behind You and Red Like Fruit at the Traverse Theatre, Monstering The Rocketman at Pleasance Dome, and Kanpur: 1857 and Eat The Rich at Pleasance Courtyard. There is more here. Also on the awards front: the shortlist for the 2025 Popcorn Writing Award was revealed this week, and the first round of the Skinny-Fest Festival Awards is tomorrow.
Oasis have arrived in Edinburgh ahead of three gigs at Murrayfield, starting tonight. There has been a lot of chat about how it has affected the Fringe, with the band blamed for both soaring accommodation costs and slow ticket sales. Comedian Marc Burrows has labelled it “the Oasis effect.”
The Fringe Society has signed up to the UK government’s Brand Scotland scheme, which aims to promote Scottish interests abroad and attract inward investment. No word yet on whether the Keep It Fringe fund will continue.
Arts Workers For Palestine Scotland has renewed its efforts to get Edinburgh International Festival to cut ties with Baillie Gifford over its investments in fossil fuels and arms, urging people connected to the festival to sign this open letter. Separately, Fringe Artists For Palestine are inviting festival participants to meet in The Meadows every day of the festival. Follow them on Instagram here.
The brilliant Khalid Abdalla - familiar from The Crown - arrives at the Traverse Theatre with his solo show Nowhere next week. I spoke to him about his acting and his activism in The Stage. You can also catch up with all my reviews for The Stage here, for The Scotsman here, and for The Financial Times here.
Finally, I am hosting a panel discussion on the state of Scottish theatre at the Traverse Theatre on Monday afternoon. The panel includes Traverse Theatre artistic director Gareth Nicholls, plus playwrights Apphia Campbell, Isla Cowan and Michal John O’Neill. You can get tickets here.
Jeezus! - Underbelly Cowgate, 6.50pm
This musical comedy is another winner of this year’s Untapped Award, the prestigious prize run by Underbelly, Concord Theatricals, and the New Diorama Theatre that has a strong track record of helping interesting experimental work reach the festival.
Produced by Alpaqa, a theatre collective comprising artists Sergio Antonion Maggiolo, Garcia Lueches and Laura Killeen, it focuses on a young Peruvian man struggling to reconcile his sexuality and his Catholic faith, until he meets a manifestation of Christ himself and starts a relationship with him.
The Stage’s Paul Vale gave it five stars and called it “a deliciously subversive, wholly irreverent, multi-layered musical that explores themes of Catholicism, colonialism and queerness.” You can read that here, watch the lovely moment when Maggiolo proposed to Lueches live on stage last night here, and get tickets via the button below.
Chopin’s Nocturne - Summerhall, 10.20am
Australian comedian Aidan Jones was a decent pianist in his youth, before turning first to MDMA - his joke - and then to stand-up. During lockdown, though, he rediscovered his love for the piano, and particularly for Chopin’s famous Nocturne In E Flat Major. Look it up on YouTube or Spotify: you will definitely recognise it.
In this charming solo show, Jones delivers a music lesson, sitting at an upright piano and taking his audience through Chopin’s piece, note by note, chord by chord and section by section, weaving in autobiographical anecdotes, interesting historical information about Chopin and contemporaries, and a lot of stupid, adult humour.
Jones is an playful and puppyish performer with an infectious chuckle, and he plays the piano beautifully, too. It is in an awkward timeslot at 10.20am, but Chopin’s Nocturne is well worth getting up early for. You get tickets via the button below.
Monstering The Rocketman - Pleasance Dome, 4.10pm
Writer, director and performer Henry Naylor is an Edinburgh Fringe stalwart with a festival history stretching back decades. In his early years, he staged award-winning comedy shows with Andy Parsons. More recently, he has turned to drama, earning acclaim for a series of hard-hitting political shows, often about the Middle East.
This year, Naylor has been forced to vacate his usual mid-afternoon slot at Gilded Balloon Teviot due to the building’s redevelopment. Instead, he is at nearby Pleasance Dome with Monstering The Rocketman, a one-man play about The Sun newspaper’s relentless and homophobic vilification of Elton John in the early 1980s.
The Scotsman’s Joyce McMillan called it “brilliantly entertaining and rivetingly well-told monologue” in her four-star review, and, this morning, Naylor picked up his fourth Fringe First Award for it. You can get tickets via the button below.
Wilde Women - Greenside @ George Street, 2pm
Lillie Langtry was a socialite and stage performer well-known in late-nineteenth and early-twentieth-century London. She was also great friends with Oscar Wilde before at the time of the witty writer’s arrest in 1895 and subsequent public disgrace.
The one-woman play Wilde Women imagines Langtry backstage at an Edinburgh theatre in 1900, planning a show that would both celebrate the extraordinary, boundary-breaking array of female characters Wilde created – from Cecily to Salome to Lady Windermere to Lady Bracknell – and restore her friend’s damaged reputation.
It is written and performed by Krista Scott, a professor of theatre at Texas Christian University, whose acclaimed adaptation of A Christmas Carol has had a long life in Chicago and Minnesota, and directed by Jennifer Engler. Wilde Women previewed in Fort Worth and now runs at Greenside’s new home on George Street for the first fortnight of the festival. You can get tickets via the button below.
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A Teen Odyssey - Summerhall, various times
La Mecànica is a female-led, Mallorca-based company that collaborates with theatres and artists across Europe to create visual shows that are both playful and profound. These include The Little Things, its award-winning co-production with the Spain’s Teatre Principal de Palma, and Water Falls, its acclaimed street circus show co-created with the Czech Republic’s Mime Prague. Since 2024, the company has also been responsible for staging international iterations of The Second Woman, Nat Randall and Anna Breckon’s durational work that Ruth Wilson performed in London in 2023.
This August, La Mecànica arrives at the Edinburgh Fringe for the first time with A Teen Odyssey, a technologically ambitious show created with Kalliope, a smartphone app developed by influential Spanish company La Fura dels Baus, which explores intergenerational divides and connections. Audiences arrive, scan a QR code, and are then guided by two performers through a series of interactive experiences that sees their smartphones co-ordinate as speakers, screens and more.
Conceived by Pau Bachero and performed by Sienna Vila and Joan Maria Pascual, the show evolves with every city it visits. For its Fringe run in Summerhall’s Dissection Room, it will feature contributions from students at nearby Tynecastle High School and a voiceover from actor Maxine Peake. You can get tickets via the button below.
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That is it for this issue. I will be back on Tuesday. If you want to get in touch about anything raised in this issue - or anything at all - just reply to this newsletter.
Fergus