As we slam into the middle of June, Festival-related news nuggets are flying into our inbox with server-slowing regularity. This week, we’re covering a bundle of launches, spying a new subscription scheme for the Festival, revisiting an award-winning stand-up, and much more.

Edinburgh Festival Fringe Society launches its 2024 brochure… 

… featuring 3317 acts across theatre, cabaret, comedy, music and more. A few of the major themes highlighted by this year’s programme include climate and sustainability, world heritage, the female experience, neurodiversity, AI, capitalism and mental health. The brochure may not be a comprehensive collection of every show playing this August, but it remains a bible for anyone embarking on a cultural binge at the Festival. Read our full coverage of the brochure launch here. 

Festival subscription scheme unveiled…

… the proceeds of which will go directly to artists, producers and venues putting on the Festival. Created by EdFest and the Fringe Alliance, Love The Fringe will ‘offer festival-goers unparalleled access to free tickets, exclusive discounts, and a host of other benefits at participating venues and businesses across the city of Edinburgh.’ It’s split into five price tiers, with benefits including access to exclusive Fringe performance discounts and discounted access to the Scotsman online for the month of August.

Anthony Alderson, Director of the Pleasance and representative of the Fringe Alliance stated, ‘Love The Fringe is more than just a subscription scheme; it’s a unifying initiative to align the interests of the diverse organisations and individuals that make the festival happen. The Edinburgh Festival Fringe remains the world's most prominent festival, open to anyone with the determination to participate. With over 50,000 people contributing to the shows, we want to celebrate this extraordinary event and ensure access remains open to all that wish to take part.’

Have a look at the Love The Fringe site for more information.

Ahir Shah discusses escalating cost of the Festival for performers… 

… while compering the Edinburgh Festival Fringe programme launch. The comic, who won last year’s Edinburgh Comedy Award for his show Ends, discussed his first visit to the Festival in 2008, pointing out that he needed only £500 in spending money for the entire month. Prompting laughs from the crowd, he went on to emphasise the vastly inflated cost of putting on a show in the present day, thanks to a combination of rising accommodation rates, performance fees and utilities. Speaking to the room of Edinburgh’s biggest cultural figures, Shah vowed to help better nurture acts, saying, ‘The Edinburgh Fringe changed the life of a 17-year-old boy from Wembley. I want to see that happen again.’

Shah’s comments come in the same year as television personality Gail Porter took to Instagram to announce that she wouldn’t be returning to the Festival in 2024. She wrote, ‘Edinburgh… you have priced me out the market. I can’t afford to do a gig at the festival. All these new lovely hopeful humans that want to perform, make people think, smile, cry, laugh… they can’t afford to stay in my hometown. I’m so so incredibly gutted. Greed is never nice.’ 

In many ways, Edinburgh appears to be reaching a tipping point in the struggle between sympathy for performers and business interests, the former being dominated and outpriced by the latter. Time will tell if that changes soon. 

The Willy Wonka experience sets its sights on Edinburgh...

… recreating the shonky viral sensation in an all-singing, all-dancing musical titled Willy’s Candy Spectacular. In case you’ve been living under a rock this year, the inspiration for the forthcoming musical comes from a Willy Wonka experience in Glasgow a few months ago which advertised magic but, in reality, delivered a dank warehouse with depressed-looking Oompa Loompas, slapdash sets, a stingy ‘two sweetie per child’ policy, and a mysterious character called The Unknown. Soon, imagery from the event went globally viral, turning sad Oompa Loompa Kristy Paterson into a minor celebrity and inspiring ironic recreations of the event for adults to enjoy. 

Willy’s Candy Spectacular’s creator Daniel Mertzlufft said of his parody musical take, ‘As an avid TikTok addict, the Glasgow fiasco was my entire FYP for a solid week, and nothing was more intriguing than The Unknown! Who is he? Where did he come from? I never thought my obsession over these questions would lead to writing a horror song for puppets about The Unknown starting the apocalypse, but that’s the fun of Willy’s Candy Spectacular! When else do you have the ability to truly just explore the unknown!?’

The opportunism is strong in this one, but it may very well be a true spectacular. 

Four stars or more 

Former comedy award winner Lara Ricote is returning to the Festival with Little Tiny Wet Show (baptism), which explores the comedian’s personal and romantic relationships. Ricote said of the show, ‘I think I might love this show. I worked on it with my whole heart and I think I managed to make something that is both so honest and so stupid, and hopefully it keeps feeling as alive as it feels now.’

We were fans of the comic’s 2022 outing GRL/LATNX/DEF, awarding it four stars and writing, ‘There follows a few well-aimed jibes at white patriarchy, but most of her comedy centres around herself, culminating in a routine about kidney theft (not talked about enough, in her opinion) which doesn’t exactly fit with what’s gone before, but is funny enough to be forgivable. Engaging, relaxed and confident, she can add “one to watch” to that Twitter bio.’ Read the full review here.