The Edinburgh fringe is mostly where new work is forged but that’s not the full picture. Amid all the hot-off-the-press shows are a number of familiar titles that have been around for years yet are only making their professional UK debut now. That’s the case with two fairytale musical productions hoping for a longer life whose festival run is a chance to engineer that happily ever after.
Bliss, co-created by Tyler Beattie and Emma Lively, won a new play award in the US in 2019 and had its world premiere in Seattle the year after. A handful of its songs were released in 2022. Now developed into what is billed as “the biggest new musical of the Edinburgh fringe”, it has a cast of 17 which exceeds regular fringe proportions – as does the running time (80 minutes rather than the standard hour).
When I arrive fairly early at the Pleasance’s 750-capacity Grand theatre, it is already packed out. The first thing to report is that many of Bliss’s powerpop songs are copper-bottomed. Inside These Castle Walls swiftly sets the scene with four princess sisters locked away in a castle by an over-protective single father. Break Through the Dark is their galvanising anthem of escape and the ballad Save a Dance captures how one loses her sense of self along the way.
The sisters are strongly delineated – Faye (Miriam Nyarko) seeks action, Carmella (Alexandra Emmerson-Kirby) seeks fame; Holly (Matilda Shapland) loves animals, Piper (Akshara Gunda) loves science. House of the Dragon’s Tom Bennett makes a summertime panto from the role of a grizzled, 500-year-old fairy godfather. “Do I look like Tinkerbell?” he scowls. His name is Glimmermore which reflects how he lures Piper into dipping in a pink lagoon that will rid her of “imperfections”. The parallels with online beauty filters and other scourges of modern teenage life are clear. She emerges devoid of individuality, her scientific ambitions evaporated, and marries a flashy, raver prince (Jordan Calloway) who has a holstered mic rather than a sword. There’s a great morning-after scene where he sulks that his ball is over and bounces like a manchild on his trampoline.
Co-produced by West End hit factory ATG, Bliss could easily be scaled up with set pieces, especially for the royal ball, and spend more time developing the sisters’ reactions to Piper’s transformation. It has a minimal set to suit fringe logistics but the lagoon, the sisters’ castle in Minisculia and a dragon befriended by the sisters would all lend themselves to eye-catching designs in a new venue. It would probably attract a similar audience to Six and has almost as many earworms.
Bliss pokes fun at fairytale cliches and empowers the princesses to find themselves rather than a prince. That’s roughly what goes on in Disenchanted! which received its first workshop in New York in 2009 and ran off-Broadway more than 10 years ago. It had its professional UK theatre debut in Warwickshire last year and that Lichfield Garrick production is now presented at the fringe by The Production Garden with an eye to future touring.
If Bliss come across as a musical ready to burst out of its fringe iteration, Disenchanted! seems shrunken in this form. Dialogue connecting some scenes has been trimmed from the show, created by Dennis T Giacino and Fiely Matias, which is styled here as an 80-minute revue for famous princesses. They each have a number to rail against their fate and the way they’ve been depicted. And they’re in a rush because the clock will strike at, um, 8.20pm as explained by our hosts Cinderella (Rosie Napper), Sleeping Beauty (Roshaan Saulnier) and Snow White (Lois Glenister).
Aimed at an audience of over-14s, it has some mildly spicy lines. “Do I look like I need to wait for my prince,” begins the rockabilly styled Snow White, before waiting a beat to mischievously add “to come?” When Sleeping Beauty mistakes a prodding broom handle for Pinocchio, there’s a whiff of adult panto. It’s probably all better suited to a wilder staging in a circus tent than the atmosphere-free Edinburgh International Conference Centre.
The show repeatedly takes the mickey out of Disney: “We used to like Anaheim [home to Disneyland] but that was once upon a time.” However, the studio was in on the joke itself within a few years of Disenchanted’s arrival (see the dressing room scene in Ralph Breaks the Internet). Disney, which went on to introduce Moana and Raya, has far to go in terms of more positive princess movies but there’s a sense that the satire here could seem dated just like its principal targets. The additional references to more recent live-action remakes, dismissed as “apology movies”, don’t add much.
The cast are always spirited though. Eliza Bowden’s drunken Little Mermaid with “two legs too many” is backed by clam puppets and looks set to devour Flounder. Ashley New’s Hua Mulan challenges offensive “beautiful and dutiful” stereotypes and her Pocahontas asks “why wasn’t my story told honestly?”. Jewelle Hutchinson as The Princess (Who Kissed a Frog) finds her authentic voice over the course of a song. That’s a case, as with Sleeping Beauty’s solo, when you gain a sense of who the character actually is rather than a run-through of what they are not.
The backstory to the revue is hazier than the contest in Six: The Musical – an Edinburgh fringe hit that went stratospheric – and like those songs, some of these wouldn’t do that well at the Bechdel test. But there are plenty of in-jokes for fairytale fans and a cheeky vibrato homage to Wicked, broomstick in hand, for the ending.
• Bliss is at Pleasance Courtyard, Edinburgh, until 31 August. Disenchanted! The Hit Musical is at Pleasance at EICC, Edinburgh, until 30 August.
