On Broadway, “Paranormal Activity” opened, “Here There Are Blueberries” will open, and “Six The Musical” will close. Dolly Parton and Tim Curry died on the same day, both at age 80. Much happened during the waning days of summer. This also happened to be the peak days of the Edinburgh Festival Fringe, which is where “Six” began nine years ago.
“Six” was not the first successful Broadway transfer from the Fringe. The first was “Beyond the Fringe” way back in 1962; remarkably, four years later, the Edinburgh Fringe launched the playwriting career of the great Tom Stoppard, with “Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead” transferring to Broadway two years after Edinburgh and winning Stoppard the first of his seven Tony Awards. But the success of “Six” has created something of an Edinburgh-to-New York pipeline, which has surged this past season Off-Broadway, with transfers of “Weather Girl,” written by Brian Watkins, starring Julia McDermott; Natalie Palamides’ “Weer,“which officially reopened the Cherry Lane Theater; “The Least Problematic Woman in the World,” written and performed by Dylan Mulvaney, and the three Fringe shows by the duo Xhloe and Natasha.
This seems sure to continue, with several shows in the 2026 Edinburgh Fringe – including several that I write about below – destined for New York. (One 2026 Fringe show is already scheduled: “Hole!” at Playwrights Horizons in December) Below is one person’s critical assessments, which is perforce limited (as any critic who is being honest — or even an entire newspaper staff — will tell you): As the official Edinburgh Fringe blog post points out, there were “some 4,232 shows from 77 countries who undertook 61,277 performances across 306 venues.”
The Week in Edinburgh Fringe Reviews
(Listed alphabetically by title, with titles linked to my reviews. I placed an asterisk* next to those shows that I expect New Yorker theatergoers will get to see in the city, eventually — most due to such factors as the artists’ track record and the shows’ backing, but the last four coincidentally because I like them so much I hope they can make it to New York.)
*Alex Edelman: What Are You Going to Do?
The last we heard from Alex Edelman, the Jewish comedian had won a Tony and an Emmy for “Just for Us,” his account of attending a meeting of neo-Nazis in Queens. There are several echoes of that adventure in “Alex Edelman: What Are You Going to Do,” his new show at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe.. But such stories do not dominate Edelman’s hour at the Fringe. It’s as if he wants to break free from his recent success, which has had its downsides…For 17 years, he tells us, he was just a “silly clown.” Now his joking is expected to have deeper meaning. He doesn’t seem sure he wants the responsibility.
*Bigfoot Ripped My Dog in Half I Saw It
Like [Xhloe and Natasha’s other shows, which transferred Off-Broadway), “Bigfoot…” is a distinctive work of theatrical clowning that, underneath the clown makeup and the synchronized acrobatics, takes a serious look at a moment in American history and culture. In this case, it is the 1990s obsession with conspiracy theories. Ironically – and maybe not coincidentally? — a different show entitled “Bigfoot” ran Off-Broadway earlier this year. It was a joke-filled musical, but in its own campy way told a story of political corruption and state-sanctioned scapegoating. I say maybe not coincidentally, because one could interpret both Bigfoots as oblique critiques of what’s been happening now in America.
Big Stuff
Matt Baram and Naomi Snieckus, a professional comic duo, are also a married couple who have polar opposite attitudes toward…stuff: She wants to keep stuff; he wants to throw stuff out. It’s cause for friction in their relationship, but on stage it results in…well, humor of course; they’re comedians, after all. But it soon becomes clear that the title has a dual meaning. “Big Stuff” actually focuses on grief — their own grief (they tell stories about the deaths of their parents), and the grief of the people in the audience (
boobytrapped
one of the five plays at the festival written by and starring a trans artist, this one using the “Freaky Friday” plot to illustrate the challenges of a trans life
Depths of Wikipedia
An entertaining lecture and slide show about the massive non-profit volunteer Internet encyclopedia
Embro
“Embro” is how people from Edinburgh pronounce their city, as poet Ken Cockburn explains at the beginning of his ninety-minute walk through wondrous sites like Dunbar’s Close Garden and Queen Mary’s Bathhouse and The Stones of Scotland, a lovely and enlightening excursion (each site accompanied by an apt poem recited from memory) that is officially a part of the Edinburgh Fringe, but also feels like an antidote to it.
Garrett Millerick: We Tried It Your Way
Garrett Millerick fed his 15 years of jokes to an AI expert, who built a computer replica of the long-time stand-up comic that Millerick named G-Dog 2.0. In this show, Millerick and G-Dog alternate telling jokes. This felt momentous to me, a modern-day version of those early 19th-century races between horses and early automobiles.
*Glob
a gentle, sweetly-scored, wordless, and whimsical showcase for the elegant Jean-Félix Bélanger and impish Rémi Jacques of the Montreal-based Les Foutoukours acrobatic clowning company, both in red noses and fluffy, furry white onesies. Belanger and Jacques are the Vladimir and Estragon of the clown world, waiting around passing the time in a barren landscape with scraggly trees; they even have a bit involving their shoes.
January 6th the Musical
A misfire that’s not really about the January 6th attack on the Capitol nor really a musical.
Judy Garland is Fat at Carnegie Hall
Nobody can possibly be surprised that a show entitled “Judy Garland Is Fat at Carnegie Hall” is silly and in bad taste. What is more surprising is that the show works. I’ve seen it twice now. The audience was rapturous both times, as the two lip-syncing Judy-dressed performers, whose drag names are Xena Fauxbia and Soda Pressed, riff off of Judy Garland’s famous 1961 comeback concert at Carnegie Hall with an endless stream of visual fat jokes.
*Linus Karp Was Hit With An Umbrella
In his true account of his violent attack by a stranger in a street in London, Linus Karp applies much the same campy and comedic approach that he has used in his parodies (staged in New York as well as at the Fringe) “*Gwyneth Goes Skiing,” “Diana: The Untold and Untrue Story” and “The Fit Prince.” – such as enlisting members of the audience to portray various roles. But rather than a parody, “Linus Karp Was Hit With An Umbrella” is both a factual story and a personal story.
*The Singer
In this musical about a Deaf man who loves music, all four members of the cast perform at least part of the time in sign language, and every moment of the show is captioned at every performance. This alone would make “The Singer” stand out at a festival with very, very few of the other 4,000+ shows offering either sign language interpretation or captioning, much less incorporating them inextricably into the production.
But “The Singer” has also proven to be an immense crowd-pleaser, featuring a sensational performance by Jamie Rea, one of the two Deaf performers in the cast, as Joe, who can feel the music in his soul, especially when he puts on his haptic vest, and has a book full of his lyrics, just waiting to be turned into songs.
*Stand Up If You’re Here Tonight
This is an absurdist, interactive play that swerves into trickster theater in a way that I’m required to keep mum about, a code of silence that critics have apparently respected through years of previous productions in Los Angeles, Paris and Massachusetts. But there are plenty of other odd and edgy pleasures in “Stand Up If You’re Here Tonight,” not least a terrific, persuasive performance by Broadway veteran Jim Orlieb. Written and directed by John Kolvenbach, the title reflects the play’s humor, which largely depends on audience confusion and discomfort. T
*Tether
A Scottish woman sings Arirang. A Korean man dances in a ceilidh. Both words were new to me – the first a traditional Korean folk song; the second a traditional Scottish gathering that features group dancing — but both quickly felt familiar, rather than foreign, in “Tether,” a remarkable collaboration between Scotland’s Wonder Fools and South Korea’s Theatre SAN. “Tether” presents a romantic, bi-lingual, cross-cultural, multigenerational saga in a lively, tuneful, often humorous production
Twitch
Joslyn DeFreece impressively portrays Pam and thirteen other characters in this play that, on the surface, is about a mother searching for her missing son, but is really an unsettling portrait of a disturbed woman, beset with nightmares, hallucinations and delusions
Whatever Happened to That Guy? and *Down to Chance
One is based on the true story of Genie Chance, a woman who steadied the city of Anchorage during the Great Alaska Earthquake of 1964. The other is clearly inspired by another true American story, a famous literary hoax. the faking of the autobiography of aviation pioneer and reclusive billionaire Howard Hughes by author Clifford Irving, who served jail time for the crime.. Both are productions of the Maybe You Like It theater company, based in Cornwall, England. There is no maybe about it; I definitely do like them, “Down to Chance” was one of my favorite shows at last year’s Fringe, and it returned this year along with their new show. This forces a contrast. While the actors exhibit the same quick-change artistry, none of it is done with as much sparkle or to as much purpose.
Women of Will
“Women of Will” owes its inspiration and even its title to Tina Packer, the founding artistic director of the acclaimed Shakespeare & Company theater company of Lenox, Massachusetts, who died earlier this year at the age of 87, having spent much of her life studying Shakespeare’s female characters. In this new play written by Siofra Dromgoole, a bartender (Ella Loudon) is preparing for an audition to get into drama school, when one of her customers, an aging actor (Nigel Gore), offers to assist her…If the circumstances of their conversations and the setting in a working bar feel at best unnecessary, the performances and discussions of the Bard’s scenes and soliloquies themselves are engaged and engaging — and clearly meant to pay tribute to Packer.
Other Reviews
Paranormal Activity Broadway Review Roundup
The Week in New York Theater News
“Here There Are Blueberries” will open November 9 at Broadway’s Barrymore Theater for a ten-week run through January. The play by Tectonic Theater Company’s Moises Kaufman, which ran Off-Broadway (my review), dramatizes the true story of how the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum responded when it received a photo album of Nazi officers and office workers at the Auschwitz concentration camp, capturing their leisure time activities in-between their job of murdering at least a million people.
The play brings to 22 the number of shows with confirmed venues and official opening nights in the Broadway 2026-2026 season.
Broadway Week 2-for-1 Tickets On Sale Now
SIX: The Musical will play its final performance at Broadway’s Lena Horne Theater January 3, 2027. As of closing, the original musical will have played a total of 2,178 performances.
The cast of “The Fantasticks,” which opens November 16th at Broadway’s Hayes Theater reimagined as a gay love story,, will feature Maxim Chlumecky as The Boy (Matt) and Nathan Levy as The Boy Lewis (originally The Girl Luisa) as well as Kevin del Aguila , David Patrick Kelly, Leslie Rodriguez Kritzer, Ruthie Ann Miles, Zane Phillips making his Broadway debut and Ahmad Simmons.
Joining Bill Irwin for “The imaginary Invalid,” opening Oct 22 at Roundabout’s Todd Haimes Theater: Brooks Ashmanskas, Dylan Baker, Rachel Bloom (her Bway debut), Hiram Delgado, Crystal A. Dickinson, Daniel Croix Henderson, Ava Lalezarzadeh
Theater Blog Roundup: Summer Theater Reading Lists and Summer Theater Outrages
“Theater kid” revived as an insult; Superagent Ari’s takeover of ATG; AI taking over everything; a controversial casting choice; a eulogy for non-profit theater. There is no dearth of outrage and obsession among theater bloggers/substackers over events this summer. But this is also traditionally a time to relax and read. “Reading is one the most reliable pleasures in my life,”…
In Memoriam
Dolly Parton, January 19, 1946 – August 25, 2026, “a rags-to-rhinestones daughter of Appalachia who for six decades ruled country music and beyond with an outsize personality and down-home wit that enshrined her as one of America’s most cherished originals” Her music and lyrics were the basis of the Tony nominated musical “9 to 5.” “Dolly: A True Original Musical,” a musical about her life scheduled to open January 19, 2027 at the St. James Theater, now takes on an unexpected resonance.
Tim Curry, Apr 19, 1946 – August 25, 2026. Best-known for The Rocky Horror Show both on stage and screen, he had an extensive movie and theater career (on Broadway: Travesties, My Favorite Year, Amadeus, Spamalot)
The Week’s Theater Videos
the most popular one:
Two more, a pitch, and a curtain call:
Xhloe and Natasha
