Ten Ways to Die Happy, Underbelly, Bristo Square ★★★★A live gameshow about life and death? Yes indeed, and host Perla Ambrosini proves the ideal guide, leading a panel of audience members through forks in their lives’ paths, throwing obstacles in their ways, and even offering unexpected rewards and punishments for altruism, selfishness or many other decisions and swerves in direction.Ten Ways to Die Happy is a neat concept, first explored by the Fondazione Teatri di Reggio Emilia and dramatists Emanuele Aldrovandi and Jacopo Giacomoni, and getting its first international outing at the Fringe Read more ...

When Dolly Parton was nominated for induction into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame, she requested that her name be withdrawn.She was "flattered and grateful" for the honour but "I don't feel I have earned that right," she wrote. "It kind of would be like putting AC/DC in the Country Music Hall of Fame. That just felt a little out of place for me.” Officials responded, saying they respected the star's "thoughtful note” and saying that "in addition to her incredible talent as an artist, her humility is another reason Dolly is a beloved icon by millions of fans around the world." A few weeks Read more ...

Theatrical trickster extraordinaire, purveyor of bewilderingly lavish stage illusions to unsuspecting and often jaw-dropped spectators, New York-based magician and theatre maker Geoff Sobelle jumped ship from the Fringe to the International Festival several years back, and his ambitions have grown ever since. Clown Show, however, must be one of his biggest, boldest and most opulent (and also most barbed) creations – it’s not often, for a start, that a show’s stage design (courtesy of Maruti Evans) gets its own astonished applause when the curtain goes up, as it did on opening night.And Read more ...

As the title of her fourth album suggests, South Carolina blues-rocker Hannah Wicklund is not happy. There’s a tangled yarn behind these songs, a tale of love, deception, and career-undermining shenanigans, followed by resentment, anger and reinvention. She inhabits a musical world that’s pure CLASSIC ROCK, but the voice, the tunes and the emotional vehemence often carry it with a convincing degree of panache.As far as I can deduce (some of the facts are murky), Wicklund had a relationship with Sam Kiszka of successful, sibling-led US rockers Greta Van Fleet. He produced her 2024 album The Read more ...

Where the US President chose to mark the 250th anniversary of the founding of his country with a cage fight, the BBC stuck to music in this Prom of 20th century Americana. Featuring Marin Alsop and the Philharmonia, it ticked lots of boxes – but slightly fell over itself in the process.The box-ticking included the programming of a woman – Joan Tower – but only for a three-minute piece, her first Fanfare for the Uncommon Woman. Its title is striking, but only draws attention to the fact the music is no more than a pale shadow of the Copland original, albeit with the Philharmonia brass and Read more ...

QFWFQ, Summerhall ★★★★At first glance, an iconic post-modern novel (or, perhaps more accurately, "novel") by Italo Calvino might not seem like the most obvious starting point for a searing condemnation of Zionism and Israeli atrocities in Gaza. But Los Angeles-based performance artist and writer Gregory Nussen finds a convincing if perhaps unlikely path between the two in the slippery, witty solo show QFWFQ (named after the protagonist in another of Calvino’s works, The Cosmicomics).And if you don’t know Calvino’s 1979 If on a Winter’s Night a Traveller, then it probably suffices to say that Read more ...

Mastodon, to those who are unaware of these US rock behemoths, fill a similar musical space to Iron Maiden or perhaps Rush, if they had louder guitars. Their music is wholly escapist, tending towards the bombastic with a widescreen prog metal sound. Moving from monumental riffing to quiet, more orchestrated ambiances and back again, their lyrics tell dramatic stories but don’t especially engage with modern life and its trials and tribulations. They may be able to turn up the volume but Ministry, with Raging Uncle Al Jourgensen’s continued hectoring of Amerikkka or Slipknot and their dark Read more ...

The gag – and it’s about as pitch-black a gag as you could imagine – is there in the title. Three African American guys hang out, shoot the breeze, chew the fat, discussing everything from pretty girls to who the best blues musician is. They bicker, disagree, pass on nuggets of wisdom and even sing an out-of-tune song or two, seemingly just to pass the time. But constantly interrupting their impromptu discussions are tortured, awkward movements, as the three lynched bodies hang together by their necks in deathly silence.Writer and director Zora Howard’s brief but potent show comes to Read more ...

Anyone who’s ever been to a movie set can’t help but struggle to reconcile the utter dismembered chaos of these workplaces with the smooth joined-up pseudo reality of the finished screen product. This jaunty, knowing third feature from Jane Schoenbrun – in which the teen slasher genre more or less eats itself – half-wants us to believe that the tortured film production process flows backwards. That is, the movie comes first. Then it sets out to assemble itself in the real world, torturing everyone all the more.It tells of a 29-year-old cultish filmmaker called Kris (Hannah Einbinder) with a Read more ...

It’s been 35 years since Tony Kushner’s two-play, multi-hour epic gay soap opera-cum-spiritual meditation was first unleashed on the world in Los Angeles and San Francisco. And it’s been 18 years since director Ivo van Hove unveiled his own raw, stripped-back production with what was then Toneelgroep Amsterdam, now Internationaal Theater Amsterdam. It’s tempting, therefore, to see the Edinburgh International Festival’s revival of van Hove’s production as a classic traversal of a classic text, with all the nicely safe distancing and detached appraisal that that double status might invite.That’ Read more ...

You’re not going to catch Alan Ritchson playing King Lear at Stratford or doing Noël Coward at Chichester, but as an implacable warrior for truth, justice and the American way – or what was once supposed to be the American way – he’ll be a hard act to follow. Built like the Incredible Hulk’s smarter brother, and equipped with an extraordinary capacity for busting out of apparently terminal predicaments, Ritchson is in the midst of turning himself into the embodiment of Lee Child’s wrong-righting hero, Jack Reacher. Tom Cruise had a go at the character in the movies Jack Reacher and Never Go Read more ...

This is a barrel of fun, an adrenalised, old-school monster movie made with ferocious commitment by It Follows’ David Robert Mitchell. Setting dinosaurs loose in Eighties suburbia stress-tests the marriage of Denise and Greg Platt (Anne Hathaway and Ewan McGregor), and proves prehistoric predators can still scare deliciously.We open in a platonic American suburban ideal, filmed with home movie dreaminess. It’s a deliberately Spielbergian scene, reinforced by Michael Giacchino’s sweeping pastiche John Williams/Jerry Goldsmith score; the director and his dark side Stephen King’s fondly recalled Read more ...