SIX the Musical has six queens. Bliss the Musical has four princesses. But I’d like to bet they’re going to give Henry VIII’s former wives some stiff competition! Produced by the people behind Cabaret at the Kit Kat Club and The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, Bliss boasts 17 West End performers, electric vocals and […]
This is a show which makes the climate crisis hot! Everyone should want to be part of fighting to save the planet if it was this much fun. It’s loud, colourful, has great songs and even greater characters, but it is also provocative and deeply moving. If everyone embraced the problem like this perhaps the […]
While thousands of people sit sweating on buses stuck in traffic jams, quaff pints of beer in plastic glasses or down another burger, a group of theatre professionals this week got together to discuss how theatre in general can be sustainable in our changing world. For the climate crisis isn’t just something that’s a myth […]
I could listen to Olivier Award winner Nichola McAuliffe all day. Her talent for speaking regional dialects is a wonder to behold, and so is her ability to inhabit women of all ages and backgrounds, as she demonstrates in this solo show. Annie Wobbler was written for her by playwriting legend Arnold Wesker 45-years-ago when […]
Scaramouche Jones cuts a tragic, almost grotesque, figure as he drunkenly stumbles onto the stage in, appropriately, the Bijou Spiegeltent, feeding my lifelong fascination for clowns and my childhood terror of them. But although a stock clown character from the 16th century commedia dell’arte, associated with Harlequin and, later Punch and Judy, Justin Butcher’s Scaramouche […]
Anything with Cora Bissett’s name on it gets my vote. And as she both wrote and directed this show her genius runs right through it. But it’s not just her that makes The Singer so special. Originally a short film, her then co-writer Jamie Rea now takes centre stage, in a role so beautifully acted […]
I don’t think I’ve ever encountered anyone as famous as Alan Cumming. His books are in my bookcase; his face stares out at me from the magazine covers on my coffee table; he is on our screens both big and small as an actor and presenter, and he has introduced me to the wonderful Pitlochry […]
Jono Darby should be applauded, not just for playing 28 characters in Emily Steel’s tender, heartfelt account of an aspiring Australian actor trying to make it in New York at the time of 9/11, but because he stepped into the role at the last minute when the original actor couldn’t make it. And he has […]
The Scottish Storytelling Centre is a bit off the beaten track as regards other Fringe venues, but the well established Theatre of Widdershins has been selling out with its enchanting classic tale of a shoemaker who is helped by elves – and a cheeky mouse – when a factory moves in on his patch to […]
I well remember falling in love with an acorn when Half a String brought their puppet show, Breathe, to the Fringe two years ago. Now they are back with another star in the shape of Alma, an intergalactic space baker who, on his way to deliver a wedding cake, crashes on a dried out tiny […]