Reviews 

Most sixteen year old boys dream of being footballers, pop stars, or social media influencers. But Jamie New has very different aspirations. There is only one thing that he can imagine doing with his life, and that is performing as a drag queen. Adapted from the stage musical of the same name, which was itself inspired by a BBC three documentary ‘Jamie: Drag Queen at 16’, the movie musical ‘Everybody’s Talking About Jamie’ follows school boy Jamie (Max Harwood) as he sets out

Its been 20 years since a full scale musical has been produced at the Exeter Northcott, but as a producing house it has come back kicking and screaming with a new production of Howard Ashman and Alan Menken's Little Shop of Horrors, a black comedy meets sci-fi meets horror adventure of a blood thirsty plant and its meek shy botanist owner Seymour. And this production fully sells the Northcott as a small but mighty power in musical creation, filling its quaint space with colou

As Glinda (or is it Galinda?) states, pink goes good with green, and on the 26th September the green foyer of the Apollo Victoria Theatre was flooded in pink as fans excitedly gathered for the Glinda pink performance celebrating Wicked’s 20th anniversary. The prequel to The Wizard of Oz, Wicked explores the time before Dorothy and her flying house dropped in, taking us into the lives of Glinda and Elphaba before they were the good and the wicked witch of the west; their schoo

If you were hoping for a fairy tale full of bright colours, talking animals, happily ever afters and just something more ‘Disney’ shall we say, then you are in the wrong place. This adventure into the woods won’t take you to magical places where fairies dance and children play, no, these winding paths venture into shadows, into places where even flowers can be dangerous and lights at the end of the tunnel can feel dim. If you are, in fact, looking for what most would perhaps

How do you take of the biggest Netflix mega hits, one that has a huge following and countless fans, and put it on stage without feeling copycat like and being presented as some jumping on the bandwagon of popularity game? A difficult task, but one that Kate Trefry and Jack Thorne alongside the Duffer Brothers have tackled head on, taking Stranger Things and diving deeper into the world of Hawkins, monsters and the upside down. Stranger Things The First Shadow isn’t the story

Running for just two weeks at the Theatre Royal Drury Lane, one of London’s most vast and grand theatres, The Last Shop was hotly anticipated as it sailed into town in a cloud of excitement to conclude its large scale world tour. With a book by Barney Norris, reworked from two previous versions and music and lyrics by Sting who also stars in the production, The Last Ship tells the story of a close knit community where life revolves around shipbuilding and evenings in the loca

Agatha Christie, the queen of crime as she is known and loved, called the seaside town of Torquay her home and as the area celebrates its annual Agatha Christie festival, it seems most apt that perhaps her most famous whodunnit 'The Mousetrap' was calling the beach side Princess Theatre its home for the week. In the second stop of its 75th anniversary tour, The Mousetrap continues to prove that no one could construct a murder mystery like Christie, and perhaps even now that n

A single figure stands on a lonely bare stage, surrounded by nothing but a simple wire frame bed, a scattering of scratchy sheets and a backdrop of the countryside. But is that backdrop the rolling hills of home, childhood days spent playing in the woods and water, or a daunting danger laden sparsity of no mans land? For young soldier Private Tommo Peaceful, it is both. He’s counting down the hours, spending the night awake and alone as he thinks about his life, looks back on

It takes great skill to construct a story from just one single suggestion, making that story last an hour between just two performers and a pianist takes that skill to even higher levels. But this is Graham and Steen, named by Broadway World as the cool guys of improv, and here they are to construct a story so silly, so hilarious and so bonkers that your sides will ache from laughing. Performing at the Edinburgh Fringe for three nights only, I feel extremely lucky that I was

With the Edinburgh fringe, you find yourself desperately trying to see as much as possible and in doing so you have to be quite picky. And when you need your schedule to work out just right, there can be those shows that slip through the cracks simply because the timing just doesn’t work out right. That was the case for me and 5 Mistakes That Changed History, a show I wanted to see but could never make work. But this year, the stars aligned and it finally fit into my schedule

PowerPoints. You hear that one word and suddenly you’re flooded with flashbacks of your school days, work meetings and even that dreaded ‘next slide please’ from the Covid days. But this is PowerPoints like you’ve never seen them before, used not to feed us data and information but instead used in the most creative of fashions to make us laugh. This is PowerPoinDexter, the new show from PowerPoint comedian Ted Hill fresh from his golden buzzer on Britain’s Got Talent. He reac

With thousands of shows covering numerous genres available to choose from at the world famous Edinburgh Fringe, there are countless styles of shows to enjoy and you never know there might be something different and altogether unique that might catch your eye all because you are a fan of the genre. That is exactly what happened to me with the brilliant Solve Along Murder She Wrote as a lover of a good old murder mystery. Murder She Wrote ran for 12 seasons between 1984 and 199

Remember, remember, the 5th of November, gunpowder, treason and plot. That’s the rhyme that everyone knows, about the story that everyone knows. But why would you want to know the truth when you can instead enjoy the chaos that comes with WIT Theatre Company’s hilarious retelling that plays wildly with what we know and flips it entirely in its head? Remember, Remember has been talk of the town this fringe season, selling out the Queen Dome and delighting with its absurd, over

With a little bit of this, and a little bit of that, through several variations, improv could quite possibly be one of the most said and most heard words in the entire Edinburgh Fringe, especially in the flyering zones, but it remains one of the most popular genres out of everything that is on offer. Improv done well can see tickets flying out the door, and if you are lucky enough to have a ticket to see Murder She Didn't write by Degrees of Error burning a hole in your pocke

One of the many things about attending the Edinburgh Fringe year after year is the opportunity both to discover shows and/or performers that you become a fan of and to revisit them year after year. It was a couple of years ago that I first attended a Christopher Hall stand up show, then in Gilded Balloon at the Museum, and it was one of the funniest things I saw that year. So when I found that Hall was returning this year with his new show Pizazz, I knew I simply had to be th

What do you get when you combine two actors with several moments in history, high levels of audience participation and even higher levels of silliness? You get The Past, an hilarious whistle stop tour through history from Cleopatra and the Christmas Football match in no man’s land, to Henry VIII and cavemen. Sean Wareing and Freddie Walker of the Fishing4Chips theatre company don victorian style striped bathing suits and rattle through sketch after sketch, flying with moment

Comedy is perhaps what the Edinburgh Fringe is best known for, and with that comes the flurry of stand up comedians that flock to the city each summer, so many that it can be near on impossible to choose. You have your big names, established and most likely seen on our television screens, and the new talent just starting to make a name for themselves looking up to those big names with admiration. Then somewhere in the middle you have the names that some know and some don’t ne

The story of Noah, his ark and the animals marched in two by two is pretty well known and you wouldn’t think that, with the exception of the 2007 film Evan Almighty, it would be a story that could be converted into a comedy never mind one that is so silly, so ridiculous, so stupid in the best way that it will have you laughing out load and turning around in your seat just so you can try and take it all in. But here we are with our host Nathaniel Jones, playing Noah with a shi

A stalwart of the Edinburgh Fringe for many, many years, News Revue takes the hot topics of current affairs and turns them into comedy skits often including parody songs played out by a small cast who swap and change between characters. It’s a popular choice for fringe goers who, perhaps bogged down by the news (and let’s be honest, who isn’t at the moment), wish to see it turned on its head and to be given a chance to laugh at it. News stories being covered and joked about i

After becoming one of the hottest tickets in town during the 2025 Edinburgh Fringe, the sea-faring, all singing, all dancing musical Shantify returns to Assembly’s Palais du Variete with new songs, a slightly reworked story and more energy than ever. With the story set in a fishing village, we are introduced to six young men who outside of their daily lives most look forward to their evenings in the local pub where they perform as the Barnacle Bouys, turning hit songs into se

The Edinburgh Fringe gives those wanting to use theatre and art to tell a personal story a stage (literally) and there are lots of moving, important and exciting stories out there to be told. These type of stories can be windows into the lives of the performers, glimpses into moments of their lives that touched them, meant a lot to them and perhaps even changed the way in which their lives were heading. And all of this is brought to life in My Grandpa Doesn’t Follow Me on Ins

What happens when you activate a super spy making machine, in the depths of the Second World War, without realising that there is a moth trapped inside the mechanism? Well, what doesn’t happen is the creation of a super spy. Instead, out steps a beast, part human part moth, 100% mystery and a creature that becomes a myth, lurking in the woods of West Virgina, hunted for years but never found. Flash forward and three friends following in the footsteps of the explorer they love

The beauty of the Edinburgh Fringe lies not only in the sheer amount of shows on offer but also in the recommendations of others. Someone may suggest seeing a show that hasn’t even come across your radar, but let me tell you, sometimes a recommendation can lead you to something great. Afronauts was a show that I hadn’t come across in the vast lists of available productions, but upon a recommendation I decided to give it a go, and it was one of the greatest surprises of the fr

With the Edinburgh Fringe, there is always so much to see, so much to choose from and I’m here to tell you that sometimes it’s just worth giving something a go, because you might just stumble across a gem that stays with you. That is exactly what happened to me during my first ever trip to the fringe in 2022 when I found a show called The Importance of Being…Earnest? By a company called Say It Again, Sorry? Since that day this show, now called simply …Earnest? Has become a hu

The local pub can often be seen as the community hub, a home away from home and a second family, and for Alan it’s where he grew up. Surrounded by his father’s nicknamed friends, as a young teenager he becomes the guard of their favourite chairs, the runner to the bar and back and their companion in the Jolly Fisherman pub. But times are changing for young Alan (Alex Hill) who delights in having the same forehead as his same named father and adores Lil the barmaid who looks o