Edinburgh for just about everyone is always a triumph of hope over experience: every year those of us on the professional end of it all – whether as performers, producers or even critics – come back, and are reminded mainly of why it’s a relief it happens only once a year. I hit the bottom level of mediocrity almost immediately, just two shows in after arriving yesterday, and suddenly remembered how worn down one becomes by the constant possibility of making bad choices. No wonder some stick to the “brand” names of comedy – at least you know that you’re going to get what’s on the label.
On the train up yesterday, a couple who joined at York with their teenage son were on their way to Edinburgh to pursue what dad said was his son’s interest in “wacky comics” – and they were going to see seven of them in a two-night stay. They were staying at the city centre Novotel Hotel, and reckoned that – with the cost of the accommodation, train tickets and three tickets to each show – their brief stint on the Edinburgh fringe would set them back £1,000. “But it beats sitting on a beach!”, said mum.
Right now, I’d prefer to be on a beach myself (It’s currently resolutely grey and there’s the constant threat of drizzle that I arrived in yesterday, too – typical Edinburgh weather). But the joy of Edinburgh, too, of course is always the possibility of discovery – though with some 2,050 shows to choose from, it could take a lot of digging. Yet something else strange happens up here: there’s a gravitational force, it seems, that draws most of us commentators to similar things. Yesterday The Scotsman published its first round of Fringe Firsts to new work – and I realised that I’d already made plans to see four of the six shows they honoured.
I knew I had arrived in Edinburgh, of course, when I saw my first fellow critic – and inevitably, it had to be Ian Shuttleworth, who was seeing his 33rd show already this festival, while I was seeing my first! Later in the day, I ran into The Stage’s own Nick Awde (though this was cheating, since he’s doing triple duty here – as well as writing reviews for The Stage, he’s also written one play and co-written another, and it was at one of these that I saw him); and saw Dominic Maxwell of The Times on the street.
But though Edinburgh is full of familiar faces and places, one should always try new experiences here. Yesterday was the opening night for the International Festival, and although I’m giving tonight’s theatre premiere of a new production of The Bacchae with Alan Cumming a pass (since it comes to Lyric Hammersmith next month and I’ll be able to see it there), I went to the Festival’s opening concert last night. And I realised that though I’ve been coming to the Edinburgh Festival for 23 years now, this was the first time I’d ever been inside Usher Hall!
What finally lured me in? The Festival was launched with a concert performance of Bernstein’s Candide – yet another in the ongoing colonisation of all things cultural by the forces of the Broadway musical that has already this year seen another Bernstein show, On the Town, revived at English National Opera and Carmen Jones produced at the Royal Festival Hall, as I was blogging about last week. (And the night before I came to Edinburgh, I caught the latest Sondheim gala concert celebration at Cadogan Hall, where a company that included Daniel Evans and Maria Friedman were accompanied by the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra). It is indeed wonderful to be able to hear these scores so ravishingly rendered with full orchestral accompaniment, not the feeble, heavily amplified bands that often pass for orchestras in the West End nowadays.
There’s nothing, of course, lowbrow about Bernstein, and a concert performance turned out to be the perfect opportunity to savour this score, since the show itself is virtually unplayable in the theatre (though it hasn’t stopped both John Caird at the National in 1999 and Hal Prince attempting to do so on Broadway again two years before that). But the great thing about hearing it again in Edinburgh, too, is also the kind of juxtaposition that is only possible here: I went straight from Candide to the Gilded Balloon for a late-night show called Discotivity, which replays the Nativity story to a camp pop soundtrack of disco hits from the Village People’s ‘YMCA’ to ‘Can’t Take My Eyes Off You’, starring 2003 Pop Idol winner Michelle McManus. I’d say it was as camp as Christmas if it wasn’t, in fact, trying to put the camp into Christmas. At just 40 minutes long, it doesn’t outstay its welcome, either, but sends you happy into the night…. just what the fringe is about.
