Theater News

Steven Berkoff, Simon Callow, John Malkovich, Anthony Rapp, et al. Set for Edinburgh Fringe Festival

The lineup for the 2011 Edinburgh Fringe Festival has been announced. The event, running August 5-29, will feature a total of 2,542 theater, dance, music, comedy, and cabaret offerings.

Among the notable theater productions are Julian Sands in a Celebration of Harold Pinter, which will be directed by Academy Award nominee John Malkovich; Simon Callow in Tuesdays at Tescos, an adaptation of a French play about a transvestite caring for her father; and Steven Berkoff’s Oedipus. The theater portion of the Fringe will also include Michael Murpurgo’s Private Peaceful, adapted and directed by Simon Reade.

Shakespeare will be represented not only with productions of the plays as written, but also with such revisions as the previously announced 3D Hamlet: A Lost Generation, which will feature Anthony Rapp and Sam Underwood alternating in the title role, along with other such stagings as Another Macbeth, The Curse of Macbeth, Hamlet House of Horror, A Mid-Semester Night’s Dream (For Puck’s Sake), and Much Ado About Nothing – The Dogberry Diaries.

Among shows that have been seen in New York that will be part of the Fringe are Baby Wants Candy, Banana Bag & Bodice’s Beowulf – A Thousand Years of Baggage and Stephen Fales’ Confessions of a Mormon Boy.

American musical theater will be represented with dual offerings of such tuners as Alan Menken and Howard Ashman’s Little Shop of Horrors, Joe DiPietro and Jimmy Rogers’ I Love You, You’re Perfect, Now Change, Jason Robert Brown’s The Last 5 Years, and Duncan Sheik and Steven Sater’s Spring Awakening, as well as Stephen Sondheim and James Lapine’s Into the Woods, Stephen Schwartz’s Pippin, and Jonathan Larson’s Rent.


Among the highlights of myriad cabaret offerings will be a series of performances by Amanda Palmer and Jason Webley as well as a new show from the trio Fascinating Aida. Comedy offerings will include appearances by the previously announced Margaret Cho, as well as such performers as Jason Byrne, Rich Hall, and Gareth Richards.

For more information and tickets, click here.