Even for a theatrical obsessive like me - and any regular readers of this blog will know that at least that judgement of myself is accurate! - Edinburgh is too much of a good thing (as well as too much of very bad things). Maybe I’m just overdoing it - and it’s hard to resist doing so with so much being promised everywhere, and so little time to see them all - but after seeing five shows yesterday (and seven ahead of me today), it’s hard to maintain emotional connections with everything I’m seeing. (Trying to stay awake for them all — or fed between them - is also a challenge that I must frankly admit I sometimes lose; thank God for lots of caffeine, plus the creperie outside the Gilded Balloon, whose banana and cinnamon crepe is always a daily treat for me up here! I’ve not tried “Well Hung and Tender” yet, though give me time. And no, I don’t mean a visit to the New Town bar - it’s the name of the outside Aberdeen burger bar outside the Gilded Balloon, too!)
As one London critical colleague I ran into late last night admitted to me, it’s not easy to write about anything from the heart anymore after such an overload; though funnily enough, the show we were both seeing had actually come from just such a place, and was one of those developmental discoveries that the fringe is all about.
Yes, we’d both seen more fully-formed (and much more fully-staged) shows elsewhere; but here, in a dull university lecture hall (complete with writing desks in front of us), was a departure, in every sense. Young British musical theatre actor and writer Dougal Irvine’s Departure Lounge has been taken from showcase presentation as part of the inaugural Perfect Pitch showcase season at Highgate’s Upstairs at the Gatehouse in 2006 and two further West End workshops into what’s being billed as its world premiere production, that at last perhaps also puts us in a departure lounge, too, for getting new musicals up on the feet and audiences into the seats. The set is just four plastic chairs and the band just two guitarists (one of them the composer himself), but this unadorned staging makes a perfect pitch for appreciating some terrific original songs, terrifically performed. Maybe they still need fuller anchoring to a stronger story; but the most important thing is that the talent is clearly there.
Producer Andy Barnes, who is moving the Perfect Pitch season to the West End’s Trafalgar Studios this year, is also behind the new branding of George Square Theatre - and three more spaces near it, including that nearby lecture hall - under an umbrella season called Musicals at George Square. And if the four current Edinburgh megavenues - Assembly, Pleasance, Gilded Balloon and Underbelly - have branded their comedy together to make what they are billing as the Edinburgh Comedy Festival, it’s fantastic that musicals, too, at last have a distinct home of their own, too. Of course, just as there is comedy outside those four venues, you’ve also always been able to find musicals on the Edinburgh Fringe, but they’ve often been the work of American high school students - and never with the density and intensity of the offerings here.
There are some safe choices, of course - they’ve got one of three fringe productions, for instance, of I Love You, You’re Perfect, Now Change - but there’s also plenty of original work, and I’m looking forward to catching at least four more over the next couple of days. One I won’t be able to see, unfortunately, is Mathilde, since it doesn’t begin its run of four concert performances till August 21, but with a cast that includes Frances Ruffelle, Sally Ann Triplett and I’d Do Anything finalist (and one-time Witches of Eastwick child actor) Sarah Lark, and a score by Conor Mitchell, I really wish I could.
Leave a comment