Musicals should have chandeliers that come crashing down from the ceiling. They should have dashing farmhands singing about corn, vast kicking chorus lines, swooning romance, and they should be three hours long. What they should not be is 55 minutes in a damp-riddled underground car park in Edinburgh with a budget that would barely cover the weekly shop.
But every time the Edinburgh Fringe rolls around, it brings with it a brave new cohort of composers, lyricists and despairing producers hoping to ‘do a Six’, and match the success of the plucky little pop musical about Henry VIII’s wives which developed such a word of mouth following in Edinburgh in 2017 that it has now dominated the world, with smash hit runs on the West End and Broadway as well as tours in North America, Australia and the UK, and a production in Holland.
“Six came to Edinburgh asking the question: what should be out there, what are we not seeing?” says Hannah Sands, who directs a new musical called Public, about four strangers who get trapped in a gender-neutral toilet. “And they were having such a good time on stage when they were doing it.”
“We didn’t start this project with the aim of ‘let’s make this the next successful musical,’ says Public’s co-writer Kyla Stroud. “I went through a mental health dip during the pandemic and I was looking to bring some joy back into my days. One of the last times I was happiest was doing am-dram musical theatre when I was a kid.” So they decided to write a musical, and just a few months later it’s premiering at the Fringe.
That’s one of the beauties of staging a show in Edinburgh: new musicals often go through years of development and workshops before ever getting in front of a paying audience, but anyone can apply to put on a show at the Fringe – there are more than 3,000 in the programme this year – and within months the curtain can rise on Edinburgh’s dazed, rain-soaked audiences.
That whirlwind is something Jessica Wu knows only too well. She’s the lyricist for the satirical new musical Hello Kitty Must Die, adapted from the novel by Kate Kamen (formerly Angela S Choi) about a woman desperate to destroy the cutesy Hello Kitty stereotype that gets attached to Asian-Americans.
“I was brought onto the project three months ago,” says Wu. “I’ve been walking around in a little bit of a dream state, like ‘wow, this is happening, people are saying my words out loud now, and we’re going to Edinburgh’.”
Unlike the shoestring budget of many Edinburgh shows, Hello Kitty Must Die comes with some hefty backing. It’s being produced by Alchemation, a company run by Kevin McCollum whose Broadway productions include Rent, In the Heights, Avenue Q and Mrs Doubtfire – essentially, he’s got an ear for the next big musical hit. It was McCollum, too, who helped take Six to Broadway as its American producer.
Wu reckons the reason for making a new musical and taking it to the Fringe is simple. “Theatre needs a new audience. Musical theatre is a 100-year-old art form that often has 100-year-old audience members. We need to change, we need to evolve. What are the stories we want to hear now, as opposed to just feeding up audiences the same thing they’ve been eating for the last 100 years?”
Levi Roots agrees. His musical Sound Clash: Death in the Arena is a dystopian love story set to Jamaican sound system music. “I want to bring new audiences to the theatre. People who listen to sound system and young people that love music and DJing, they’re not typical theatregoers. I want to inspire these young people to see something they are in tune to.”
Although better known as the inventor of Reggae Reggae Sauce – still the most memorable Dragons Den moment even 16 years later – Roots explains that being a chef was always a side order for him. “I’ve spent my life in the back of a sound system truck for nearly 45 years, and anyone that knows me will say that Levi isn’t really about Dragons Den, he’s a sound system man.”
Roots came up with the idea while taking a shower. “I thought, what about a sound play, which marries Jamaican sound system and a stage play. It was a light bulb moment.” In sound system, a sound clash is “a kind of gladiatorial battle” between two rival sound systems, each with huge speakers, playing exclusive mixes of mostly reggae and dancehall music.
“You’ve got two groups with big speakers each playing music that says ‘you can’t play what I’ve got’. It’s really a drama. In the original days everyone used to dress up. Sound system always had a bit of theatre in it, with characters calling themselves kings, princes.”
Roots contacted acclaimed author Alex Wheatle to flesh out the story. While having a checkup for a toothache, his doctor happened to mention he knew Adrian Grant, producer of Michael Jackson musical Thriller. “It was Adrian’s idea to premiere at the Fringe. We’re doing what Six were doing, in the sense that they were a crazy sound that people hadn’t heard on stage before. It’s a big inspiration for me to see people do what Six did because it’s what I’m known for: tearing up the rule book. Nobody wanted me to go on the Den with a guitar because it had never been done before. Sound Clash is a similar thing. It’s breaking the mould.”
The legacy of Six hangs heaviest, perhaps, over Palindrome, a new show being staged by the Cambridge University Musical Theatre Society (yes, CUMTS for short), the group responsible for taking Six to the Fringe back in 2017.
“It doesn’t add pressure,” says Neve Kennedy, who has written the show along with Jas Ratchford and Maddy Power. “We’re so proud of Six. We don’t feel like we need to meet that crazy high. It sort of feels like the distant past and we’re the present.”
“A show that was put on last term feels like a long time ago to us,” adds director Flo Winkley. “I saw Six at the Fringe when I was much younger. I can’t believe that was a CUMTS show and now we’re doing the CUMTS show this year. It’s exciting, it’s chaotic, it’s crazy. We’re all doing multiple roles. I’m directing and I’m also the set designer. We’re working out how to get a drum kit to Edinburgh.”
Set in the Scottish Highlands, Palindrome looks at the fast-changing pace of life. “The show is about a tension between the world moving forwards, and everyone needing to slow down and look backwards. I’m not going to say it sounds like Six, but it’s the same kind of high energy songs with a couple of ballads,” says Kennedy.
Hello Kitty and Public have that pop sound, too – while also hoping to tackle big themes. Much of Wu’s career has been as a performer. She’s appeared in Broadway productions of Miss Saigon (”One of these slits here will be Miss Saigon” runs one line), The King and I (”Western people funny, of that there is no doubt, they feel so sentimental about the Oriental”) and countless other productions whose depictions of Asian characters have been written by white people.
“The whole canon leans really heavily into exoticisation, and Hello Kitty Must Die is pushing against that. As someone who has spent a lot of years inside these productions, doing these shows eight times a week, it’s really exciting to push back against them.”
For Stroud, “I was going through a lot of gender discovery, and my queerness has always been a big part of my adult life. I wanted to have queerness at the heart of this show, but not let it be surrounded by a negative storyline.”
Public has a strange link to Six, too: Six superfans may recognise the name of cast member Annabel Marlow, whose brother Toby Marlow co-wrote Six with Lucy Moss. Annabel played Katherine Howard in the show’s first Edinburgh run.
“I knew Toby was writing a show, he played a bit of it at home,” says Marlow (who also performs her solo show Is This Okay?? at the Fringe this year). “I was like, ‘this is so cool’ and he said ‘It’s an open audition, get the train after school and come and audition’. So I lied to my friends because I had promised to go Interrailing with them and if I got the part I knew I wouldn’t be able to. So I told them I had to visit my grandma. A lot of the audition was about embodying a pop star and being really sexy, and we had to go up to Toby in the corner of the room and be as sexy as possible. In my head I was just like ‘it’s ok, it’s not Toby, just go for it’. Toby says he doesn’t remember that bit. He obviously blocked it out.”
A musical about Jamaican sound systems, gender neutral toilets, a palindromic Highland love story and a murderous satire about Asian-American stereotypes. Four vastly different ideas, but what brings them all together is the hope that Edinburgh is the place where new audiences will be curious enough to take a punt on untested material and big ideas.
“The beginning is the best time,” says Stroud. “It’s the time when you’re working your bum off and you have no money. That’s the time that feels the most exciting and the most rewarding.”
Public the Musical is at Pleasance Two at Pleasance Courtyard on August 4-8, 10-20, 22-28 at 6.30pm; Hello Kitty Must Die is at Pleasance Two on August 4-7, 9-14, 16-21, 23-27 at 4.50pm; Sound Clash: Death in the Arena is at Pleasance One at Pleasance Courtyard on August 4-7, 9-20, 22-28 at 4.10pm; Palindrome is at theSpace @ Nidry Street on August 14-26 at 4.50pm
