Introducing The Crush Bar Live
Please come to my thing! It will be embarrassing if no-one comes to my thing! Plus: five shows to see at the Fringe, vol. 3, and news and views on the festival elsewhere.
Welcome back to The Crush Bar, a newsletter about theatre by Fergus Morgan.
For the rest of July and August, The Crush Bar will focus on the Edinburgh Fringe, with twice-weekly issues, each featuring five show recommendations, plus round-ups of festival news. If you know someone heading to the Fringe, please forward.
In case you missed it, here is Friday’s issue, recommending a play about a pub, a solo show about alopecia, a clown reworking of Frankenstein, and more…
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 weekly round-up of theatre news, reviews, interviews and more - in your inbox every Tuesday.
Theatres, companies, agencies and other organisations can also sign-up as champion supporters of The Crush Bar, which gets their name in this dedicated tab on The Crush Bar’s Substack homepage and in the footer of every Friday issue, plus full access to The Crush Bar and Shouts and Murmurs for ten different emails.
Hey! What are you up to on the morning of Thursday 13 August?!
If you are at the Edinburgh Fringe, or within a 200-radius of the Scottish capital, then I can think of no better use of your time than coming to The Crush Bar Live. Of course, you could be working, but maybe say you’ve got the dentist or something?
That’s right. With unprecedented levels of hubris, I have persuaded Pleasance Courtyard to give me their Cabaret Bar space for an hour from 11am, and corralled three of the UK’s smartest, sharpest and most stylish critics into joining me on stage.
Holly Williams (Exeunt, The Times), Tim Bano (The Standard, The Financial Times), Mickey-Jo Boucher (MickeyJoTheatre on YouTube) and I (The Stage, your inbox) will be chatting about the best and boldest work we have seen at the festival so far. Don’t know what to go and see? Come along and hear what we think is worth your time!
After we have rambled for a while, we will throw the conversation open to the room so the audience can share their thoughts and make recommendations as well. What did you think of the shows we discussed? What have you liked? What have you not liked?
Oh, and it’s totally free (although I may shove a SumUp machine in your face at the end). You do need to reserve a spot, though, which you can do via the button below. So, please, please, book a ticket, grab a coffee, come along, and chat theatre with us.
The festival is ten days away…
Assembly has shifted its George Street operations, including two venues hosting seventeen shows, to St Andrew Square, due to the Princes Street fire diverting buses onto George Street, thus making its pedestrianisation impossible. Beyond The Joke’s Bruce Dessau reports here.
Trams are not running from the city centre down to Newhaven as a result of the fire, too, and venues down in Leith are worried about the impact this will have on ticket sales. More from me soon in The Stage.
The council has warned festival participants to “prepare for potential disruption” and suggested “walking or cycling wherever possible.” It has not provided an update on when Princes Street will reopen since mid-July, when it said works to make the former Debenhams building safe would continued “into August.” The Herald’s Brian Ferguson reports here.
On the plus side, North Bridge has opened both pavements to pedestrians for the first time in eight years. Read more in The Edinburgh Minute.
If you can’t bear to be without your cats for a month, are you sure you’re cut out for the Fringe? Although, if you can wangle an article in The Times about your insane journey to get them from NYC to Edinburgh, maybe you are.
What does the continued importance of the Edinburgh Fringe, despite the exorbitant costs involved with presenting work here, say about the UK’s touring ecology? Lyn Gardner answers in The Stage.
The Telegraph’s Tristram Fane Saunders has listed some of the weirdest, wackiest shows at this year’s festival, from on-stage lie-detector tests to early-morning oboe raves. A real journalist would go along to it all.
One more list for today: The Nerve asked me to recommend ten festival shows for their newsletter on Friday. You can find them all here.
Common Tongue - Scottish Storytelling Centre, 2.45pm
This one-woman play focuses on Bonnie, a Paisley lass whose native Scots dialect (a rapid and articulate patter full of slang and swearing) is variously ridiculed, fetishised and admired when she leaves home for St Andrews then America.
Written and directed by Fraser Scott (one of Scotland’s most exciting emerging theatremakers, who is also directing Jack MacGregor’s new play Prophets at Assembly Roxy), Common Tongue is a perceptive examination of the complexities that come with speaking Scots, and an entertaining celebration of the power and humour of the language. And it features a tremendous performance from Olivia Caw and a tartan-upholstered set from Mela Adela.
The show premiered in 2024, toured Scotland last year, and now runs at Scottish Storytelling Centre throughout the festival. You can read my four-star review in The Stage here and get tickets via the button below.
Copycat - Pleasance Dome, 4.10pm
Fringe favourite Joe Sellman-Leava has spent over a decade crafting careful, insightful shows about important topics through his company Worklight Theatre. 2015’s Labels was an absorbing autobiographical exploration of migration and prejudice. 2022’s Fanboy was a warm and witty examination of the complexities of fan culture. And 2024’s It’s The Economy, Stupid was an entertaining and accessible economics lesson.
This summer, Sellman-Leava is bringing It’s The Economy, Stupid back to the Fringe, and premiering a new show about how big tech and AI are reshaping society, incorporating audience interaction inspired by classroom games.
Written and performed by Sellman-Leava, directed by Katharina Reinthaller and designed by Dylan Howells, Copycat runs at Pleasance Dome throughout the festival. You can get tickets via the button below.
Bigfoot Ripped My Dog In Half I Saw It - Summerhall, 21.10pm
Xhloe Rice and Natasha Roland are one of the Fringe’s stand-out success stories of recent years. The New York City-based duo, who perform as Xhloe and Natasha, arrived at the festival in 2022 for a week-long run with And Then The Rodeo Burned Down, their meta, queer, clown show about storytelling and the Wild West.
It unexpectedly sold out and won one of The Scotsman’s prestigious Fringe First Awards, as did their subsequent shows, 2023’s What If They Ate The Baby? and 2024’s A Letter To Lyndon B Johnson Or God: Whoever Reads This First, which took a similarly lurid, lucid approach to 1950s domesticity and military masculinism.
This year, the duo are back with a fourth Fringe show about another insidious aspect of American culture, Bigfoot Ripped My Dog In Half I Saw It, which tackles conspiracy theories and mass misdirection. It transfers to Soho Theatre in September, after running at Summerhall all festival. You can get tickets via the button below.
Lifelong - Assembly George Square Studios, 12pm
The relationship between Pepperdine University and the Edinburgh Fringe is long and rich. The California institution’s department of theatre first started staging work at the festival in 1985, then established the Pepperdine Scotland exchange programme in 2012, under the aegis of which several influential Scottish theatremakers have collaborated with students at residencies in both Malibu and the Highlands to create shows for the Fringe.
Backed by Playwrights Studio Scotland and the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland, the programme has produced several hit shows at the festival, from Peter Arnott’s Why Do You Stand There In The Rain? in 2012 to Lynda Radley’s The Interference in 2016 (both of which won Fringe Firsts), to Morna Young’s Americana: A Murder Ballad in 2022.
This year, Pepperdine is working with Radley again on Lifelong, a dystopian thriller set in a facility where “lotus-eater” residents have been enjoying centuries-long lives thanks to an AI-dictated regime of life-extending therapies. Produced in association with Glasgow-based company Scissor Kick, it runs at Assembly George Square Studios for the first half of the festival. You can get tickets via the button below.
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Little Pink Dress - C Aquila, 5.35pm
In 2020, during the pandemic, at 4am one morning, a song popped into Joey Jennings’ head, a song he knew was destined to be performed on stage. Over the following five years, the New York City-based actor and musician wrote twenty more, recording them in sessions in Portland, Oregon and Nashville, Tennessee, and the result is his debut one-man show, Little Pink Dress.
Billed as a “gay coming-of-age country/rock opera one-man musical traumedy”, Little Pink Dress is an autobiographical account of Jennings’ life, encompassing his addiction-scarred adolescence in California, his turbulent time navigating queer culture, and his decision to abandon his acting career in Los Angeles for the bright lights of New York City post-pandemic.
Directed by Brooklyn-based Coral Cohen, Little Pink Dress premiered in NYC in May and now arrives at the Edinburgh Fringe, running at C Aquila throughout the festival. You can listen to three tracks from the show on Spotify here and get tickets via the button below.
This is promotional content.
Thanks for reading
Thanks to all 5129 subscribers, to all 150+ paid supporters, and particularly to The Crush Bar’s champion supporters, whose contributions make all this possible.
The Royal Court Theatre, Francesca Moody Productions, Raw Material Arts, Jermyn Street Theatre; Hampstead Theatre; Storytelling PR; Premier Scotland; Ellie Keel Productions; The Women’s Prize For Playwriting
Your organisation can become a champion supporter of The Crush Bar, join that list, and help keep its independent coverage of theatre going via the button below.
That is it for this week. If you want to get in touch about anything raised in this issue - or anything at all - just reply to this newsletter.
Fergus