10 Standout Acts From This Year’s Edinburgh Fringe Festival

A cohort of American comics including Cat Cohen, Jaqueline Novak, and Steven Phillips-Horst cut an inspired swath. Cohen’s Broad Strokes, a hilarious recounting of the stroke she suffered at 31, has the sharpness and warmth of her nights at Joe’s Pub and Club Cumming in New York, while Novak’s stand-up hones her ponderous, ad-hoc observations on topics ranging from the human body and ghosts to the existential dilemma of not being Tom Cruise. Phillips-Horst, the co-host of the Celebrity Book Club podcast, went high concept with The Last Mad Man, a delicious and occasionally poignant study of an ad man hired to rebrand the apocalypse, complete with dystopian pitch decks and awkward Zooms before the world ends.

Footballers’ Wives: The Musical, based on the campy British drama from the aughts, is a delightful send-up of the beloved program, playing at Edinburgh’s storied Assembly Rooms. Perhaps too local in theme to translate in the US, its brassy dames, soapy plot twists, and blinged-out costumes make an argument for the inevitability of a Real Housewives musical stateside in due time.

At a sleepy shopping center in the port neighborhood of Leith, away from the bustle of Fringe proper, the dancer Matthew Hawkins performs a solo piece called Ready. A veteran of Michael Clark’s iconoclastic dance troupe in the ’80s, Hawkins’s meditative choreography, set to a Beethoven piano concerto, happens inside a play area within the mall. Children play with toys or bang on a nearby piano while Hawkins’s quiet motion, sometimes to no audience at all, proceeds undeterred. The background din of the setting, combined with Hawkins’s total calm, combine to make one of the more moving moments of the Fringe.

The acclaimed theater director John Tiffany lends his Tony-winning hand to She’s Behind You, starring Johnny McKnight, a one-man show about the perfomer’s time as a “panto dame.” For all its flamboyance, pantomime—the thoroughly British musical-comedy style that draws on fairy-tales and features stock characters in the style of commedia dell’arte—remains conservative, and McKnight’s effort to bring the genre into modernity, particularly as a gay man, is touching and wonderfully camp.

Priyanka Shetty performing #Charlottesville.

Photo: Cameron Whitman Photography