At the Fringe

I start this on the eight-hour flight from Amsterdam to Detroit. Think about that for a moment. Why was I in Amsterdam? Isn’t that in the wrong direction when traveling from the UK to the US? And then why am I flying over the east coast, halfway into the country, only to turn around and head to New York after a six (that’s six, s-i-x) hour layover in Detroit? (Detroit? Please! The airline gods do have an exquisite sense of pain).

But I am not complaining. Not a whit; for I am sitting in the front of the plane (Business Class on Delta). It was remarkable: I approached the end of what looked to be a 30-45 minute queue at the gate when, just as I took my place, an agent came up to me and said “don’t wait in that,” glancing at the line and at my gimpy leg and my cane, “follow me.” She took me to the front of the queue and then checked me in, bumping me up to Business. May all the flying gods be praised!

I am especially appreciative because I am flying on exactly no sleep. Tuesday was an action-packed, walking-heavy day in Edinburgh. I saw four (!) shows at the Fringe, took the 23:30 train back to Glasgow and was on the 03:40 bus to the airport. Between midnight thirty and two thirty I packed, Skyped Ransom, dealt with email and had a 30-minute lie-down, but no sleep.

In case you don’t know, the Edinburgh International Festival is an over-fifty-year-old arts festival that includes theatre, dance, music, lectures, tours and all kinds of varied programming. It was under the EIF’s auspices that I attended the two performances I talked about on Sunday.

The Edinburgh Fringe Festival runs concurrently and includes thousands of events: searching their website for everything returned 2,851 events! -- usually smaller, often weirder, sometimes really out there. Yesterday I saw four:

Godspell, in a 95-minute interval-free production by a very young and very talented troupe on a bare-bones set, sang to (I think) recorded backup. Somehow I had managed to never see Godspell (my friend, and best man, Sally’s favorite show), so this was the perfect opportunity, at £8.

Assassins: the Sondheim musical about people who have tried to kill POTUS, the President of the United States. This too I had never seen though I own the OCR and liked it well enough the two times I listened to it. Well, I LOVED this production by an enormously talented Princeton University drama group. Again, bare bones; this time, bare back-up: electric piano on stage; but terrifically sung and acted. I will be moving Assassins into my iTunes library when I get home.

Mr. Braithwaite Has a New Boy is a slight but very funny hour-long comedy about a retired Aussie who hires a rent boy, hires him again, and again, and then decides to adopt him. There are some wonderfully funny one-liners and ample amounts of one of my favorite off-Broadway experiences: full male nudity.

Monstrous Acts is a harrowing 70 minutes spent in the company of two inmates in a French prison in the fifteenth century. We learn early on from Sebastian why he’s locked up, but only in the last few minutes do we grasp the enormity of Gilles’s crime. Based on the story of the real-life Gilles de Laval, he is in jail for debauching, sometimes dismembering, and eventually killing over two hundred children, mostly boys. As I said, harrowing. And beautifully acted on the tiniest set I have ever seen in the hottest theatre in which I have ever sat. I said to a staff member on the way out: “excellent drama, and a free sauna to boot.” We were dripping. Literally.

I also spent time walking up and down Edinburgh’s Royal Mile, which I found dotted with lots of curiosities and interesting sites but absolutely overwhelmed by shops and, of course, tourists. I had a lovely chat with a lovely Scottish traffic control cop and we laughed together at the behavior of these tourists. By 18:00 they are queuing up in the hundreds behind police barriers to get in to the Royal Edinburgh Military Tattoo -- which at that time is three hours away and for which they have a reserved seat! WTF? The LSTCC says he tells people to show up at twenty minutes to nine and take their seat, but nobody listens.

Finally, I ticked one last thing off my To Do list: I spent some time between shows in a music venue – a hollowed-out old church as a matter of fact (see pictures) – and heard three guys playing some wicked acoustic guitar (loudly amplified) and trumpet. They did a version of Louis Armstrong’s St. Louis Blues that blew the place apart.

I took the 09:15 train to Edinburgh and, as I said, got back to Glasgow after midnight. A long, exhausting, but wonderfully rewarding day. I really hope that some August there's a week in Edinburgh in my future.