Welcome back to The Crush Bar, a newsletter about theatre by Fergus Morgan.
For the rest of August, The Crush Bar will focus on the Edinburgh Fringe, with twice-weekly issues, each featuring five show recommendations, plus round-ups of festival news. If you know someone heading to the Fringe, please do forward.
Today, though, is a bonus promo issue, dedicated to the House Of Oz Showcase.
If you want to support The Crush Bar, you can sign up as a paid supporter. Outside of Edinburgh Fringe, that gets you another email - Shouts and Murmurs, a weekly round-up of theatre news, reviews, interviews and more - in your inbox every Tuesday.
Theatres, companies, agencies and other organisations can also sign-up as champion supporters of The Crush Bar, which gets their name in this dedicated tab on The Crush Bar’s Substack homepage and in the footer of every Friday issue, plus full access to The Crush Bar and Shouts and Murmurs for ten different emails.
One of the best things about the Edinburgh Fringe is how international it is. Every August, the streets of the Scottish capital fill with extraordinary artists from all over the world, bringing work that impresses, inspires and expands horizons.
One of the best ways to discover this work is through the international showcases. There are sixteen official ones this year, hailing from Belgium, China, Denmark, Korea, Luxembourg, Singapore, Taiwan, France, Ireland, Canada and elsewhere.
One of the best-loved programmes, though, is the House Of Oz showcase, a philanthropy-funded operation that transports a variety of brilliant and boundary-breaking work from Down Under to Edinburgh every year. In recent years, House Of Oz has been responsible for bringing Two Strangers Walk Into A Bar, A Migrant’s Son, The State of Grace, Ten Thousand Hours and other celebrated shows to the Fringe.
This year, the House Of Oz showcase features eight shows. Here are five of them…
Alex Hines is a Melbourne-based comedian and actor who exploded onto Australia’s comedy scene in 2022 with celebrated show To Schapelle And Back – a surreal exploration of the Schapelle Corby case – then continued to earn acclaim and awards for her stand-up, her television series Dee-Brief, and her frequent appearances as celebrity alter-ego Juniper Wilde. Sarah Stafford, meanwhile, is a Brisbane-based theatremaker, performance artist and musician, known for absurdist documentary Again You Have Trusted Me, her durational performances as Poly Lez Slut and for being one third of electro-pop trio Architects Of Sound.
Together, though, Hines and Stafford are Sons Of Susan, the duo behind Birds, a camp and crazy climate crisis satire about two absurdly attired women – five-time divorcee Shayna and mother-of-twelve Beverley – who escape to the beach while the apocalypse is wreaking havoc around them. One critic hailed it as “Waiting For Godot meets Kath and Kim.”
The show has been a huge hit Down Under, winning the Best Comedy Award at the Melbourne Fringe, the Golden Gibbo Prize at the Melbourne International Comedy Festival, and a bunch of other accolades. Now, it arrives in Edinburgh. You can get tickets via the button below.
Have you ever imagined what it might be like to perform with an orchestra? Well, in this 20-minute virtual-reality experience from The Sonicrats – an Australian team of musicians, researchers and technologists led by Ciaran Frame, Alon Ilsar and Erick Mitsak – you can.
No musical experience is required. Participants simply strap on a VR headset and find themselves on stage with the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra, playing along with Beethoven’s Symphony No. 7 with the help of an AirStick, a wireless gestural instrument that translates movement into music, offering users a range of six futuristic instruments, from the breathy stings of a Cellaris to the crystal plucks of a Velaphon, to deep drones of a Gravitone.
Developed with Melbourne Symphony Orchestra and Monash University’s pioneering SensiLab research facility, the project now arrives in Edinburgh, where wannabee virtuosos can experience it at Summerhall throughout the festival. You can get tickets via the button below.
This hit comedy pokes fun at fame, fandom, ghosting, gaslighting and other absurdities of contemporary online dating culture through the lends of a parody pop concert: the final gig of Fuccbois, the world’s biggest boy band, made up of Brenden, Brandon, Tyler and Brenden.
Written and composed by Sydney-based actor and comedian Bridie Connell – contributor to Tonightly with Tom Ballard, Australian improv champion, and co-creator of comedy play The Plan (and Other Plans) – Fuccbois: Live In Concert first ran to acclaim in Syndey in 2024, then returned to Adelaide Fringe and Melbourne International Comedy Festival last year.
Now, produced by Soft Tread Enterprises, directed by Richard Carroll, and featuring a five-strong cast of cross-dressing female and non-binary performers, the show now arrives in Edinburgh, running at Assembly George Square Studios all festival, ahead of a transfer to London’s Soho Theatre in September. You can get tickets via the button below.
Shortly after graduating from drama school in 2001, Wales-born, Adelaide-based playwright Emily Steel moved to New York. Three weeks after she arrived, 9/11 happened. Two decades later, Steel’s experiences of the tragedy and its aftermath inspired a one-person play.
How Not To Make It In America follows Matt, an Aussie actor who arrives in America full of ambition, only for his dreams to be abruptly destabilised by the attacks on the World Trade Centre. Both a coming-of-age comedy and a moving evocation of extraordinary time, Steel’s play examines how unexpected events can radically realign our priorities.
Produced by Adelaide-based company Theatre Republic, directed by Corey McMahon, and performed by Jono Darby, taking on 28 different characters, the play premiered to acclaim in 2021 – The List labelled it a “beautifully told, deeply resonant piece” in a five-star review – and now arrives at Summerhall for the whole Fringe. You can get tickets via the button below.
This moving multi-disciplinary two-hander explores a remarkable, real relationship: that between Kayah Guenther, who has Down syndrome, and his older sister Maitreyah Guenther.
Using a combination of storytelling, projection, movement and more, the show jumps backwards and forwards in time to examine the evolution of Kayah and Maitreyah’s extraordinary bond, from their innocent childhood to their twin careers as dance-theatre artists, embracing their siblinghood in all its funny, frustrating and joyful complexity, examining how society has shaped it, and provoking profound questions about how we deal with difference. A Brisbane blogger labelled it “hands down the best piece of storytelling I’ve seen this year.”
Performed by Kayah and Maitreyah, produced by Gold Coast company The Farm, and directed by Kate Harman and Gavin Webber, Glass Child – the title refers to the syndrome in which the sibling of someone with special needs is overlooked – toured Australia last year, and now runs at Summerhall throughout the first half of the festival. You can get tickets via the button below.
Thanks to all 5177 subscribers, to all 150+ paid supporters, and particularly to The Crush Bar’s champion supporters, whose contributions make all this possible.
The Royal Court Theatre, Francesca Moody Productions, Raw Material Arts, Jermyn Street Theatre; Hampstead Theatre; Storytelling PR; Premier Scotland; Ellie Keel Productions; The Women’s Prize For Playwriting
Your organisation can become a champion supporter of The Crush Bar, join that list, and help keep its independent coverage of theatre going via the button below.
That is it for this week. If you want to get in touch about anything raised in this issue - or anything at all - just reply to this newsletter.
Fergus
No posts
Comments
Nothing yet. Say the first thing.
Sign in to join the conversation.