The Fringe is two days old, officially. Unofficially it's been rumbling since the previews started midweek, and already the patterns are forming. You can tell a lot from an opening weekend. Which queues snake round the courtyard. Which titles you hear twice in one bar. Which shows people are booking on a stranger's say-so before a single proper review has landed. I've been listening. Here are the five making the most noise.
Tom Read Wilson: The A-Z of Me
Gilded Balloon at the Museum, 7.30pm, until 16 August
The nation's favourite logophile has finally brought a full show to Edinburgh, and the timing is canny. This is the try-out for his first ever UK tour, which kicks off in September, so Fringe audiences are getting the thing while it's still warm from the oven. The format suits him perfectly: an alphabet revue, working from A to Z through songs, sonnets, stories and what the blurb cheerfully calls smut, each letter peeling back another layer of the man behind that extraordinary voice. Anyone who knows him only as the impossibly courteous receptionist from Celebs Go Dating is in for a recalibration. He trained in musical theatre, and word from the early performances is that the singing is the revelation. A short run, note, just twelve dates, which is doing the ticket sales no harm at all.
Swamplesque
Assembly, until 31 August
At what point does a cult hit stop being a cult hit? Swamplesque sold out its 2024 run, did it again in 2025, came back for Christmas, and returns this year with the swagger of a show that knows exactly what it is. If you've somehow missed the premise: it's a burlesque and drag parody of a certain beloved ogre film, built by a riotously talented Australian company, and it is considerably filthier and considerably better made than it has any obligation to be. The pull this year is partly the ticking clock. The company have been saying the swamp can't stay open forever, and their Perth dates are being billed as a farewell season, so the smart money says this is your last August to see it in Edinburgh. The opening weekend crowds suggest the smart money is already queuing.
Bliss
Pleasance Courtyard (The Grand), 1pm, until 31 August
Every Fringe needs its big commercial gamble, and this year it's Bliss, arriving with the sort of firepower that makes the rest of the musical theatre programme quietly nervous. Seventeen West End performers, which makes it the biggest new musical on the Fringe by some distance, produced by the Olivier-winning teams behind Cabaret at the Kit Kat Club and Benjamin Button, directed by Tony nominee Sheryl Kaller. The story turns the princess mythology inside out: four sisters escape their tower and collide with a world of fairy godfathers and happy endings that come at a price, all delivered with a pop-rock score and, in Tom Bennett's Glimmermore, what early word says is the campest turn of the festival. The lunchtime slot is the tell. This is a show hunting the Six trajectory, Fringe first, franchise later, and the room it needs to fill is enormous. So far, it's filling it.
Elf Lyons Is the Woman on the Edge
Pleasance Courtyard (Beyond), 9.30pm, until 31 August
Elf Lyons arrives this year with a mantelpiece problem. Sky Arts Award for comedy last year, Chortle's Comedian's Comedian this year, and a New York transfer for this very show already signed and announced before the Fringe even opened, which rather takes the suspense out of asking whether it's any good. The show itself sounds like peak Lyons: a stand-up hour about love, inspired by the collapse of her own engagement, which fell apart while she was touring Australia. The conceit is that Elf herself cannot face performing it, so one of her characters does it for her, with Vertigo, Apollo 13 and Pagliacci all swirling in the mix. On paper that's chaos. In her hands, on past form, it will be chaos with the precision of ballet. The late slot is perfect for her, and the buzz around the courtyard on Saturday night was the loudest I heard all weekend.
Bigfoot Ripped My Dog in Half I Saw It
Summerhall (Main Hall), 9.10pm, until 30 August
The title of the festival, obviously. But the reason this one's moving tickets is the names above it. Xhloe and Natasha won a Fringe First with every single show they've brought here, three in a row, a streak nobody saw coming from two self-produced New York clowns, and this is their first new work in two years, now with Soho Theatre muscle behind it and the Main Hall to fill. The premise is delicious: a flood-ravaged Appalachian town in the nineties, two teenagers faking Bigfoot sightings for a laugh, and then a neighbour's dog turns up in pieces and the joke curdles into full-blown conspiracy panic. There's a nine-foot Bigfoot puppet, built and operated by the pair themselves. Anyone who saw their Lyndon B Johnson show knows what these two can conjure from a bare stage and a single prop; the prospect of them with an actual budget is frankly a little frightening. The world premiere expectations could crush a lesser company. I don't expect them to be crushed.
That's the opening-weekend picture, anyway. Three weeks is a long time at this festival, and the joy of August is that some show nobody has mentioned yet, in a room above a pub, is currently about to ruin all our predictions. Good. That's what we're here for.
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