With over 3,000 confirmed shows – that magical time of the year is back. Returning with another year of Scottish, UK, and World premieres, the Edinburgh Festival Fringe continues to be at the forefront of the world’s home of art and culture. Here we take a look at some of the theatrical highlights of this August’s season. Featuring big budgets and familiar names, debut writing pieces, and a few curveballs which might just push past the bluster and over-priced baked tatties and make a stamp on the festival.
With a song in our heart, the team has been hard at work figuring out which of the year’s many (many) showtunes, powerballads, and productions with song make the cut for Top Musical Picks.
From now until August, we’ll be releasing our recommendations of the top theatre, comedy, spoken word, film, music, childrens, dance, and visual arts available to audiences across all the city’s festivals. However, this time, rather than focusing solely on genre or performance method, we’ll be examining some of the emerging topics, including The Manosphere, Women Writers, Comedy Debuts, Queer Musicals, Climate Crisis, Sport, Food, and Contemporary Myths. Come along with us and Have a Gander.
If you have a show coming and would like to chat with us about a Q&A or a review, please do get in touch through the ‘contact’ page where one of the team will get back to you!
Endometriosis: The Musical arrives in Edinburgh with strong word-of-mouth already behind it, following a triple award win at the 2022 Minnesota Fringe. Created by Maria Bartholdi and Kristin Stowell, and directed by Nikki Mirza, the show follows an ambitious woman navigating chronic illness, medical indifference and the mounting cost of not being heard.
Framed as a musical comedy but grounded in a recognisable anger, it combines a sharp contemporary score with a pointed critique of the healthcare systems that fail women in pain. Its Fringe debut suggests a production with both a clear comic voice and real emotional weight – enough to stand out in any shortlist of musicals to catch this year.
Venue 24 – Doonstairs at Gilded Balloon Patter House
August 5th – 31st (16:00)
This new musical takes the Gunpowder Plot and gleefully blows it apart. Remember, Remember! reimagines a familiar chapter of British history as something far more chaotic, romantic and knowingly ridiculous. Built around deliberate inaccuracy and a sense of comic mischief, it promises a version of treason with considerably more camp than the textbooks allow.
Created by WIT? Theatre Company with Pleasance, the show comes from the team behind NewsRevue and arrives with early momentum after winning the Glitch Award at Lambeth Fringe 2025 and the Charlie Hartill Fund 2026. With songs, scandal and a cheerfully irreverent approach to the past, it looks like a musical more interested in having fun with history than preserving it.
Venue 23 – Queen Dome at Pleasance Dome
August 5th -30th (12:00)
Acid’s Reign begins with the rise of a drag collective formed in the urgency of the climate crisis, then returns to them years later as momentum fades and the compromises of survival begin to press in. As funding dries up and mainstream attention offers a different kind of visibility, the show sets up a conflict between political conviction and commercial appeal.
Presented by Relish Theatre, this new queer musical brings together live music, high-performance drag and a contemporary story about activism, identity and collective purpose. With Victoria Scone, Scarlett Harlett and Gigi Zahir among the featured performers, it promises a production driven as much by theatrical flair as by the tensions beneath its glittering surface.
Venue 33 – Forth at Pleasance Courtyard
August 5th – 31st (15:45)
In Penelope, the familiar mythology of The Odyssey is reframed through the woman left behind, giving its heroine the chance to reclaim a story that has rarely belonged to her. What follows appears to be a witty, contemporary retelling that finds fresh life in an ancient tale without losing its emotional pull.
Written and performed by Grace McLean, this chamber musical is built around a Richard Rodgers Award-winning folk-pop score and promises a more intimate scale than its epic source might suggest. Its appeal lies not only in the shift of perspective, but in the chance to hear a canonical story retold with humour, intelligence and a distinctly modern voice.
Venue 61 – Belly Button at Underbelly, Cowgate
August 5th – 30th (15:45)
Already generating buzz, Legendary draws on Chinese mythology to frame a personal exploration of identity, inheritance and belonging, using ancient stories to ask distinctly contemporary questions. Centred on the relationship between queer selfhood and cultural tradition, it appears to unfold less as a conventional book musical than as something more intimate, fluid and reflective.
Created by Cheeyang Ng with Everything is Maya, Communal Practice and Jennifer Leigh, this solo work combines myth, memory and live communal music-making in a form described as a ritual musical. The result sounds both expansive and personal: a show rooted in storytelling, but equally interested in creating a shared space for joy, connection and reinvention.
Venue 302 – Friesian at Underbelly, Bristo Square
August 5th – 31st (15:35)
Apparently Ugly: A Stepsister Story
Apparently Ugly shifts the fairy-tale spotlight onto Cinderella’s overlooked stepsisters, imagining what happens after the happy ending has gone to somebody else. Their misadventure sounds playful and unruly, using a familiar story to poke at beauty, self-worth and the rules that decide who gets cast as desirable – or disposable.
Written by Nicky Douglas and produced by ERA Theatrical Productions, the show promises original songs, heightened comic energy and a deliberately off-kilter visual world. Positioned as a family-friendly musical with a mischievous streak, it looks set to offer a knowingly twisted take on the fairy-tale formula.
Venue 302 – Ermintrude at Underbelly, Bristo Square
August 5th – 30th (11.40)
The Singer centres on a creative partnership between a deaf performer who experiences music through vibration and movement, and a struggling musician looking for a second chance. From that meeting, the show builds a story about collaboration, communication and the pressures that can test even the most promising artistic connection.
Presented by Dundee Rep Theatre, Solar Bear and Aberdeen Performing Arts, this new piece of gig-theatre features music and lyrics by KT Tunstall and is directed by Cora Bissett. Performed in spoken English and BSL, it suggests a production that is as interested in how music is felt and shared as in the story it tells.
Venue 15 – Traverse 1 at Traverse Theatre
August 4th – 30th (Various times)
Mothman takes wartime pulp absurdity and runs with it, imagining a military experiment thrown gloriously off course when its all-American super-soldier plan is interrupted by a far less heroic winged intruder. The result appears to be a knowingly ridiculous musical comedy with one eye on B-movie sci-fi and the other on full-throttle farce.
Presented by Finger Guns and Liebenspiel, the show is written and performed by Alex Franklin and Nikola McMurtrie, with Alex Prescot and Hudson Hughes. Framed as an unapologetically improbable romantic comedy musical, it looks set to lean into chaos, camp and creature-feature silliness in equal measure.
Venue 61 – Belly Button at Underbelly, Cowgate
August 5th – 30th (18:50)
FUCCBOIS: LIVE IN CONCERT takes the farewell tour of the world’s biggest fictional boyband and uses it as the launching point for a broad, knowingly ridiculous satire of modern masculinity and dating culture. Beneath the arena-pop gloss, it sounds like a show intent on sending up bad behaviour, fragile egos and the manufactured allure of the pop heart-throb.
Presented by House of Oz and Soft Tread Enterprises, and written by award-winning writer Bridie Connell, this musical comedy promises the scale and swagger of a stadium concert with the comic instincts of a sharply observed parody. The hook, by all accounts, is that for all its irreverence, it still aims to deliver the pleasures of the form: big pop energy, polished silliness and songs strong enough to carry the joke.
Venue 17 – Studio Two at Assembly George Square Studios
August 5th – 31st (17:05)
Heated Rivalry: The Musical Parody!
This full-throttle spoof takes the overheated world of hockey romance and turns it into unabashed musical farce, piling innuendo on top of melodrama with a clear affection for the genre it is parodying. Less interested in realism than in comic escalation, it promises a knowingly outrageous take on sporting desire, repression and the fantasy life built around both.
Presented by Quick and Funny Musicals / Rhymes with Purple, the show comes from a company known for translating pop-cultural fixations into high-energy comedy musicals. With a full score and a deliberately excessive sense of humour, it looks set to offer a late-night Fringe musical that wears its mischief – and its fan devotion – very openly.
Venue 24 – Other Yin at Gilded Balloon Patter House
August 5th – 30th (19:45)
The Shocking Truth About The Flat Earth
This musical comedy follows Sharon Hargreaves, a woman whose late-night internet certainty sends her all the way to a flat-Earth convention in Las Vegas, where events begin to unravel in increasingly chaotic fashion. What starts as a comic conspiracy quest appears to open into something more self-aware, with the promise of misadventure, mistaken turns and a few uncomfortable truths along the way.
Presented by Wolverhampton Grand Theatre, The Shocking Truth About The Flat Earth seems pitched between broad farce and affectionate character comedy, with its social-media satire softened by a more generous interest in the people caught up in it. With big musical energy and an unapologetically eccentric central premise, it looks like a production aiming for both silliness and surprising warmth.
Venue 23 – Queen Dome at Pleasance Dome
August 5th – 30th (14:05)
Hole! takes an apocalyptic premise of spectacular absurdity and runs with it, imagining a post-rapture world in which an eccentric Midwestern sect may have understood divine judgment rather better than anyone expected. Out of that chaos, the show appears to build an unlikely love story, leaning fully into the collision between outrageous comedy, end-times mythology and gleeful bad taste.
Presented by American Sing-Song, this sounds like a musical determined to test the limits of fringe provocation while keeping one foot planted in parody. The setup is unapologetically extreme, but the framing suggests a production less interested in shock for its own sake than in the comic possibilities of total commitment to an utterly deranged premise.
Venue 302 – Cowbarn at Underbelly, Bristo Square
August 5th – 30th (21:30)
This musical parody sends a famously dysfunctional family into fresh small-town chaos, this time with a bicentennial parade and a Grand Marshal contest providing the perfect excuse for rivalries, vanity and escalating disaster. Framed as an original episode rather than a simple retread, it looks set to trade on the characters’ familiar comic rhythms while pushing them into even broader farce.
Presented by Sacred Heart University Repertory Theatre Company, the production promises original songs, heightened camp and an unabashedly affectionate approach to its source material. Its sold-out return suggests a show that knows exactly how to turn fan recognition into a lively, crowd-pleasing musical spoof.
Venue 24 – Other Yin at Gilded Balloon Patter House
August 5th – 30th (21:15)
Interested in being featured? With many previews and Q&As lined up, we’re always happy to chat about including your show in future articles. Please do get in touch through the contact page to feature in an upcoming ‘Have A Gander’