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    At Edinburgh Fringe, Small Shows With Big Ambitions

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    This year, the stronger productions in the open-to-all event were on a par with many in the more prestigious, curated Edinburgh International Festival.Shortly after I arrived in Edinburgh for this year’s festival, I had lunch with a Scottish friend and her young son. The boy was enthralled by the colorful posters plastered all over the city advertising upcoming shows in the Fringe, the scrappy sidebar to the highbrow Edinburgh International Festival. This year, the Fringe — which runs through Aug. 28 — comprises over 3,000 shows, and many posters featured eye-catchingly silly titles. My friend’s son was particularly amused by “Sex Job,” “My Sleepybum” and “A Shark Ate My Penis.” His delighted guffaws were a fitting prelude to my stint in Edinburgh.There was plenty of laughter at “Hello Kitty Must Die,” a musical inspired by Angela Choi’s cult novel of the same title. In this zippy farce, Sami Ma plays Fiona Yu, a Chinese American lawyer fed up with being fetishized by white people and shouldering the unrealistic expectations of her out-of-touch parents. She reconnects with a mercurial childhood friend, Sean (Lennox T. Duong), and they embark on a ludicrous killing spree reminiscent of the movie “Heathers,” with musical numbers including a hymn to a silicone dildo.The all-female cast is hugely talented, and their portrayals of obnoxious men were particularly striking for their impressively rendered physicality, whether the swaggering gait of a self-styled Lothario, the slumped posture of a feckless gamer, or the pompously militaristic bearing of the protagonist’s father.“Hello Kitty Must Die,” is another adaptation of a novel, with musical numbers and a standout all-female cast.Justine BarbinElsewhere, two dance productions explored somber subject matter with impressive subtlety. “Woodhill,” by the activist theater company LUNG, examines the failings of a real British prison where a conspicuously high number of inmates have died by suicide. The story is told in a series of fragmentary voice-overs — interviews with lawyers, prison staff and bereaved relatives — while performers act out the relatives’ grief through dance, set to thumping electronic beats and strobe lighting. It’s a powerful spectacle, and the message — that Britain’s prisons need urgent reform — hits home.“Party Scene,” by the Dublin troupe, THISISPOPBABY, has a similar aesthetic. It depicts four gay Irishmen who are active in the “chemsex” scene, in which people hook up for sex under the influence of methamphetamines. The men’s choreographed dancing is pointedly joyless in its zombified roboticism; for all their synchronicity, they seem lonely and abstracted. The show evokes the existential bleakness of a comedown, of morning-after remorse and shame. And yet it doesn’t lapse into preachiness: The nightclub atmospherics are sufficiently appealing, in themselves, to suggest good times. (On the way out I overheard a theatregoer say to his friend: “I felt like it made me want to do chemsex …”)From left: Liam Bixby, Anderson de Souza, Carl Harrison and Matthew Morris in “Party Scene.”Olga KuzmenkoFor budgetary and logistical reasons, many Fringe shows are relatively small productions, and there are always many for solo performers. One of these is “The Insider,” by the Danish company Teater Katapult, in which Christoffer Hvidberg Ronje plays a lawyer implicated in a huge tax fraud. We find him in a transparent interrogation cell, weighing up whether to spill the beans in return for a reduced sentence. He does lots of sweating, writhing and shaking while oscillating between hubris and remorse. The protagonist’s back story provides some intriguing psychodrama — an obsession with transcending his modest provincial origins led him to embrace a ruthless social Darwinism — his uncomplicated moral abjectness makes for a one-dimensional portrait. It’s an open-and-shut case, in every sense.In another one-man-show, “The Ballad of Truman Capote,” Patrick Moys plays the renowned American author as he prepares to host a masked ball in 1966. Written by the Scottish novelist Andrew O’Hagan, the play is a maudlin monologue in which Capote muses gnomically on his childhood and career. (“Being published is not like being loved”; “My creative life is an unmade bed.”) The problem is not the lack of action per se, but the monotonous timbre of the reminiscences: Capote’s elliptical inwardness makes for dull company.Holding the audience’s attention is a perennial challenge with a single actor onstage. In a smart revival of Cyriel Buysse’s Flemish classic, “The Van Paemel Family” by the Antwerp troupe SKaGeN, the actor Valentijn Dhaenens sidesteps this difficulty by playing all the play’s roles. He takes three of the 13 characters in the flesh, and the rest appear in the form of prerecorded scenes digitally projected onto a screen.The story revolves around a farmer who falls out with his two sons after they side with striking farmworkers during a period of social unrest. Mr. van Paemel is slavishly loyal to the landowner for whom they all work, and believes organized labor is a scourge. Even when he and his family are driven off their farm by rent hikes, and his daughter is cruelly taken advantage of by the landowner’s son, he prefers to maintain his beef with his sons, rather than focus on those responsible for his plight.There was something uncanny about seeing the real-life Dhaenens interact with his vaguely spectral digitized selves. This eerie visual texture, neatly complemented by the doleful tones of an accordion, made for a memorably unique aesthetic. The play dates from 1903, but the story’s central character is a timeless archetype: The embattled patriarch who clings stubbornly to every reactionary shibboleth even as he gets shafted from all directions.The standout Fringe show was Lara Foot’s stylish adaptation of “The Life and Times of Michael K.,” J.M. Coetzee’s Booker Prize-winning 1983 novel about the struggles of a poor man during a fictional civil war in South Africa. The play is a collaboration with Handspring Puppet Company, best known for its work on “War Horse”, and Michael K. and his elderly mother are represented by puppets that are manipulated and voiced by onstage performers.The interplay between puppets and actors made “J.M. Coetzee’s The Life and Times of Michael K.” a Fringe standout.Fiona MacPhersonMichael K. is a borderline simpleton, kindhearted and determined, but naïve; something about the puppet’s plaintive expression and scrawny frame evokes a pathos that fits the story perfectly. Yet this somewhat desolate tale is mitigated by moments of humor, such as when the famished Michael comes unstuck trying to eat a sandwich. Being a puppet, he can’t actually do it, so the three men controlling him hungrily take a bite each, on his behalf.People think of the Fringe, which is open to anyone who can pay the accreditation fee, as defined more by quantity than quality. Yet the stronger Fringe shows were pretty much on a par — in intelligence, aesthetic ambition and technical execution — with several of the productions I saw at the more prestigious, curated International Festival. The difference was mainly a question of scale.For all its bustling, chaotic energy and anything-goes philosophy, the Fringe’s organization was impressively slick, although there was, inevitably, the occasional blip. My heart went out to the cast of “Exile for Two Violins,” whose performance at the French Institute was marred by noise pollution from a street party next to the venue, complete with a P.A. system blasting pop music. This delicate meditation on the life and work of the Hungarian composer Bela Bartok could probably have done without the accompaniment of loud rhythmic clapping, periodic cheers and whistles, and the booming strains of the White Stripes’ garage rock anthem, “Seven Nation Army.” The performers plowed on — heroes, one and all.Edinburgh Festival FringeThrough Aug. 28 at various venues in Edinburgh; edfringe.com. More

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      Edinburgh Festival Review: ‘Food’ Is an Acquired Taste

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      At the Edinburgh Festival, Geoff Sobelle presents a dinner party as a theatrical spectacle, in which silliness is the end in itself.In an auditorium in Scotland, the American theater artist Geoff Sobelle is hosting a dinner party. The stage is taken up by an enormous square table, laid out with plates and cutlery. Around three of its sides sit twenty-four audience members. At the center of the fourth is the waistcoated figure of Sobelle, who brings wine, hands out menus and takes orders. When one lady requests a baked potato, he produces a bucket full of earth and empties it out onto the table; he plants a seed in the mound, waters it and waits a while before reaching in to pull out a large spud.After several skits in this vein, Sobelle withdraws into himself and proceeds to binge silently: He eats one apple, then another, and then another and another, followed by a bowl of cherry tomatoes, a few radishes and carrots, a concerning quantity of ranch, a number of raw eggs, an entire onion and some bank notes.Sobelle’s one-man show “Food,” which runs at The Studio through Aug. 27 as part of the Edinburgh International Festival, is billed as “a meditation on how and why we eat.” But, aside from a short preamble about the primordial nature of our relationship with grub, there is little attempt to intellectualize. Audiences primed to look for meaning will find none here: Silliness is the end in itself; the enjoyment is in the buildup of nervous energy in the room as Sobelle carries out his buffoonery with the focused determination of a doctor performing lifesaving surgery.Sobelle trained as a magician, and then as a clown, before turning his hand to absurdist theater. In an artistic mission statement on his website, he declares that he sees his body of work as “a colossal practical joke.” This checks out.Midway through the show, Sobelle carefully gathers up the guests’ wine glasses, then returns to his seat and violently pulls away the tablecloth, amid much clattering of plates. Underneath, it turns out, is not a table, but a field of dirt: The set is transformed into one big muddy landscape. A remote control tractor trundles across this terrain, and sheafs of wheat sprout upward in its wake. The trappings of modern civilization materialize; toy trucks are handed to the diners and passed around the perimeter of the dining table-turned-landscape. Sobelle clambers onto the scenery, sticks his hand in it and strikes oil; tall buildings start popping up here and there. We begin to suspect there may be someone underneath the table.The audience was bewildered, but charmed, and for 90 minutes reduced to a state of childlike wonder, reveling in the frisson of anticipation, awkwardness and unease. The immersive setup produced some amusing unscripted moments, like when a theatergoer’s cellphone got swept away as Sobelle removed the tablecloth; his demeanor as he handed it back was a picture of dumb officiousness, both apologetic and vaguely affronted.Sobelle’s comedy of affable idiocy may be witless, but it is also timeless — every bit as primal, one suspects, as our love of eating. (There’s a reason “Mr. Bean” is still so popular around the world.) In drawing much of its mirth from sheer ridiculousness or grotesquerie, “Food” channels a comic sensibility from less exalted sectors of the entertainment world — think provincial circus troupes, or competitive eating championships.In the comparatively rarefied environs of the Edinburgh International Festival, the show’s sensibility feels like an ironic curio. I was reminded of Freddie Mercury’s line about wanting to bring opera to the masses: Sobelle, it seems, is doing the inverse, bringing low culture to the cosmopolitan elite. A perverse kind of altruism, perhaps.FoodThrough Aug. 27 at The Studio, in Edinburgh; eif.co.uk. More

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      At the Edinburgh Festival, Wrestling With Identity

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      In plays from Scotland, Korea and Switzerland, theater companies explored questions of belonging, with varying degrees of success.Questions of nationhood, identity and belonging loom large in three politically themed productions at this year’s Edinburgh International Festival. The tagline for this year’s edition is “community over chaos,” and there was plenty of both in “Thrown,” a National Theater of Scotland production running at the Traverse Theater through Aug. 27.Written by Nat McCleary and directed by Johnny McKnight, it’s a sentimental comedy about five women from Glasgow who travel to the Scottish countryside to compete in a backhold wrestling tournament. In this folk sport, indigenous to Scotland, competitors are initially locked into a clamp-like hug, before trying to wrestle each other to the ground. It dates back more than a thousand years, and the escapade is a kind of pilgrimage for the characters as they seek to connect with their national heritage. Along the way they playfully dissect what it means to be Scottish, reeling off some serviceable — if not terribly original — gags about haggis, kilts and “Braveheart.”Personality clashes emerge. Jo (Adiza Shardow), who is mixed race, and Chantelle (Chloe-Ann Taylor), who is white, are both working class and have been best pals since their school days, whereas Imogen (Efé Agwele), who is Black, was expensively educated and is new on the scene. When Imogen encourages Jo to take a greater interest in racial politics, this puts a strain on Jo and Chantelle’s friendship. Chantelle resents Imogen for boiling everything down to race and vents her frustration at being seen as privileged, simply because she is white. Imogen, in turn, points out that her affluent upbringing has not protected her from racism. They are both right, of course, and their circular squabbling brings home the absurdity of pitting different types of oppression against each other.Lesley Hart is boisterously engaging as the group’s intense coach, Pam, but the star of the show is Maureen Carr, who plays Helen, the most unlikely of the five wrestlers. Diminutive in stature and older than the rest of the gang, she is a fish out of water who Carr plays with winning geniality. Helen provides moral support to Pam when she reveals her struggles with her gender identity and delivers the play’s defining monologue: a positive message of unity through celebrating difference.Pam explains that the play’s title denotes the feeling helplessness in the split second when you realize you’re about to lose a wrestling match. The sport is a metaphor for personal struggle, and the team, of course, is a metaphor for the Scottish nation. It’s heartwarming stuff, but heavy-handedly allegorical.Maureen Carter, right, who plays Helen, is the standout actor of the show. She delivers the play’s defining monologue: a positive message of unity through celebrating difference.Julie Howden“Dusk,” a show that the Brazilian theater maker Christiane Jatahy developed with the Swiss company Comédie de Genève, is more intellectually ambitious, but similarly flawed. Its protagonist, a young undocumented migrant called Graça (Julia Bernat), takes a job with a French-speaking theater troupe that is working on a stage adaptation of the Lars Von Trier movie “Dogville.”Graça claims to have fled Brazil as a political refugee, and the troupe’s members believe they are doing a good turn by hiring her, but relations sour when troubling stories emerge about her history. The women in the group become nasty as they suspect Graça has designs on their partners, and one male colleague, a naturalized citizen, takes against her because she reminds him of his own past experience as a hated outsider. The dynamic tips into exploitation and abuse, both psychological and sexual.Jatahy is known for work that blends the conventions of theater and cinema. Here, the onstage action is recorded by a camcorder synced up to a large screen displaying close-up footage in real time. This is occasionally interspersed with prerecorded footage that differs jarringly from what’s happening on the stage. The intention is to discombobulate the audience, and it does. The trouble, however, is that the big screen ultimately overshadows the actors’ in-the-flesh presence, as the eye is continually drawn upward. One might as well be at the movies.In “Dusk,” directed by Christiane Jatahy, close-up footage of the actors is displayed in real time on a screen at the back of the stage.Magali DougadosRunning at the Royal Lyceum Theater through Aug. 27, “Dusk” is a provocative and pointedly bleak allegory of liberal hypocrisy. The central concept is strong, but the play is let down by overkill, especially in not one, but two, graphic depictions of sexual violence. When, after the second, the fictional troupe’s director (played by Matthieu Sampeur) earnestly agonizes over the ethics of storytelling, we detect a none-too-subtle attempt to pre-empt criticisms that “Dusk” trades too heavily on shock value. (Reader, it does.)The final 30 minutes of this 90-minute production are spent laboring the message of the first hour, culminating in a catastrophically unnecessary audience-facing lecture from Graça on xenophobia, gendered violence and the rise of the far right. The applause at the end of the show was damningly restrained.A refreshing antidote to that production’s audiovisual clutter came in an exquisite production of Euripides’ “Trojan Women,” by the National Changgeuk Company of Korea. (The final performance of its three-show run is Aug. 11.) Set in the immediate aftermath of the decade-long Trojan War, it portrays the women of Troy as they await their imminent subjugation by the Greeks, who, having killed the Trojan menfolk, intend to take the women as wives or slaves.The National Changgeuk Company of Korea production of “Trojan Women” directed by Ong Keng Sen.Jess ShurteThe director, Ong King Sen, and the playwright Bae Sam-sik, have done a fine job of reimagining this tale, which is mostly told through the medium of Pansori, a Korean genre of musical storytelling in which singing is accompanied by drumming. The propulsive pounding of the drum lends the songs a certain martial quality, which combines with the mournful tones of a zither and the singers’ plaintive laments to produce a powerful blend of sorrow and defiance. Kim Kum-mi delivers a vocal performance of remarkable intensity as the Trojan queen Hecuba, and Yi So-yeon is arresting as the fey clairvoyant Cassandra.The splendid set, by Cho Myung-hee is all the more imposing for its elegant simplicity. The Trojan women emerge, clad in white, from a strange, otherworldly tunnel flanked by two golden staircases; at various points, the structure is brought to life with elaborate lighting effects to evoke fire and sea.Euripides’s play dates from 415 B.C., but its enduring resonance is all too obvious as we look around the world today and reflect, for example, on the anniversary of the genocide by ISIS of the Yazidi people of Syria and Iraq — and the subsequent sexual enslavement of hundreds of Yazidi women — which began nine years ago this month; or the mounting evidence of sexual violence by Russian soldiers in Ukraine.Hecuba’s howl of anguish — “Destiny is drunk, the gods are blind!” — is a lament for the ages, a visceral and succinct protest against the abject cruelty of war.Edinburgh International FestivalThrough Aug. 28 at various venues in Edinburgh; eif.co.uk. More

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      Nicola Benedetti Prepares Her Next Star Turn: Festival Leader

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      EDINBURGH — Not long into an interview with the violinist Nicola Benedetti, there was a knock at the door.“Ohhh, chips!” she whispered excitedly as a takeaway carton of haggis and fries entered the room. “I’ve been in meetings since 8 o’clock this morning. Do you mind?” A pattern quickly emerged: a question, a tidal wave of thoughts on the profundity of art, a pause for breath and then, eventually, a chip.“I think I’m in a good position to be saying, ‘Here’s why chips taste fantastic’ to somebody who hasn’t tasted them,” said Benedetti, who, in addition to her work as an acclaimed instrumentalist and educator, recently began her tenure as the director of the Edinburgh International Festival. She was describing her approach to the age-old question of attracting new audiences.That process “involves the disarming of prejudice,” she said, “but doing so in a way that still absolutely has integrity, that maintains and preserves the integrity of the art forms that we have presented and the tradition we’ve upheld for 75 years, and by not apologizing for what we do, not trying to change what we do.”Benedetti, 35, is the first Scot and the first woman to lead the festival since it began in 1947. For many, the appointment came as a surprise. “I always thought that she was keen to expand in that direction,” said Richard Morrison, the chief culture writer for The Times of London, adding, “that did rather shock me, that she’d be prepared to devote quite so much of her time and energy to that huge project.”Although Benedetti has had to be more selective in her future repertoire, and is more interested in consolidating existing musical partnerships than she is in finding new ones, she has been reluctant to press pause on her performing altogether. “Taking on this role meant I really had to double down on my commitment to continually improving as a musician,” she said.She premiered James MacMillan’s Violin Concerto No. 2 last fall, and is touring Szymanowski’s second concerto with orchestras in Berlin, Manchester and Boston this month. She has even restarted sporadic lessons, with the violinist Andrea Gajic, to help regain confidence after a wrist injury that forced her to pull out of a residency last summer at the Aldeburgh Festival in England.Benedetti premiered James MacMillan’s Violin Concerto No. 2 last fall with the Scottish Chamber Orchestra.Light Press Media and Design Her brain, she admitted, goes “in 20 different directions at once.” But her aim for the Edinburgh festival is focused: “to provide the deepest possible experience for people. We’re unapologetic and uncompromising on the weight, depth and profundity of the art that the festival presents, to the maximum number of people and the broadest possible audience.”Morrison said that her vision is not elitist, but that it also does not sacrifice excellence, “which, in a way, is slightly contrary to what the politicians and the bureaucrats are pushing towards in both England and Scotland.”Benedetti’s goal of bringing in broader audiences is one that was shared by her predecessor, Fergus Linehan, who incorporated pop music into the festival for the first time, in 2015. Though her background suggests she’ll lean more toward the fine arts, Benedetti confirmed that pop will still be programmed.“The diversity of music that we hear is going to remain,” she said. She wouldn’t be drawn on specifics of programming, but expect a bigger emphasis on Scottish voices and, because of sustainability targets, “deep dives” into a more select group of international orchestras. “When you’re flying 90 people from anywhere in the world to Edinburgh, I would like audiences to really understand why we chose them,” she said. “What’s special about their sound, their identity?”There will even be an attempt to break down traditional genre boundaries, and “recategorize through intensity of experience, and type of experience,” Benedetti said. How does she plan on selling the festival’s more traditional audience on all of that? “I have a lot of trust in people,” she said. “And I expect a lot from them.”Benedetti enters this role at a time when British arts organizations are struggling. Last fall, the Edinburgh Film Festival went into administration, which is similar to bankruptcy in the United States. In November, Arts Council England announced upheaval-inducing funding reallocations. That was followed in December by reductions in the Scottish government’s own budget for 2023-24, including a £7 million ($8.46 million) cut to Creative Scotland, the country’s national arts organization.The Edinburgh International Festival’s core funding is expected to remain at the same level for 2023-24, but, with rising costs and inflation, a standstill budget amounts to a cut. Will putting an international Scottish soloist with a national voice in this leadership position help attract private donors? “The great unknown is how much, in a really tricky climate, the Benedetti factor will end up benefiting the festival,” said Brian Ferguson, an arts correspondent for The Scotsman.Benedetti said that she doesn’t expect resistance from Edinburgh International Festival regulars: “I have a lot of trust in people. And I expect a lot from them.”Robert Ormerod for The New York TimesWhat happened to the Edinburgh Film Festival, Benedetti said, “heightens the acuteness of everybody’s vulnerability, and the need even more to be bold, clear and ambitious.“And not just get a marketing company to write statements about why you’re relatable to people,” she added. “The uncomfortable but necessary position of the festival is one where natural tensions lie.”IF BENEDETTI IS AMBITIOUS, that stems from her father, Gio. An Italian émigré who left school in Scotland at age 15, he would later embark on a series of financially successful, idiosyncratic business ventures in dry cleaning, cling-film dispensers and first-aid kits.“He had a real spirit for change, for making stuff happen, and was very, very ambitious about owning something, and about making money,” Benedetti said, adding, “he’d be the first one to say that, he’s not bashful at all about that.”She’s inherited her father’s uninhibitedness. When asked what kind of house she grew up in, she replied, “a big one.” After first picking up the violin at 4, Benedetti swapped the picturesque Ayrshire village of West Kilbride in Scotland for the “extreme environment” of the Yehudi Menuhin music school in Surrey, England, five years later.“If your priority in life is not to play your instrument to the highest possible level, I would not encourage people to go into that environment,” Benedetti said, but then defended the school’s specific commitment to excellence. “What do we want from the world? Do we all really have to be the same? Does everything have to follow one exact format?”After winning the BBC Young Musician of the Year competition in 2004, her public profile raced ahead of the security she felt in her own playing. “I didn’t win the Tchaikovsky Violin Competition, I didn’t win the Joachim Competition — that’s not what I won,” she said. “So in terms of my violinistic chops, I had a long way to go, in full view of the public.”To make matters worse, she added, “I was sometimes in a total fight-or-flight mode on‌stage, and I wasn’t playing at all how I could play.” Today, it’s a different story. She delivered an assured performance of the Szymanowski concerto with the conductor Karina Canellakis in Berlin, finding a meaty yet tender sustained sound.But for Benedetti, the more significant change has been psychological: feeling grounded enough in her technique to free up and really explore, even in the fastest, most intricately patterned corners of her repertoire, like Wynton Marsalis’s Violin Concerto, written for her in 2015 and reprised by Benedetti on many occasions. “I feel like I’ve become a lot more confident over time as a violinist,” she said.Teddy Jamieson, senior features writer for The Herald in Scotland, said of Benedetti, “She’s always been very serious about what she does, and really interested in the place music has in society — its role, its worth.” That, coupled with her undimmed energy as a self-starter, resulted in the Benedetti Foundation, a music education project she started in 2019, which provides large-group opportunities for string players of all abilities.“Too many times in my life I’ve seen, ‘Let’s have the whole nation playing the violin in two years,’ and people saying, ‘Our world will be fixed if that happens,’” Benedetti said of the organization’s constructive role within the wider education ecosystem. Within minutes, she flipped from arch idealist to blunt realist: “I’m in a position which is constantly doing this,” she said, putting her index fingers together, and wiggling them like a seismometer needle.Benedetti quickly shuts down questions about her personal life, and about the large ring on her finger. Otherwise, there’s a friendly gregariousness to her that belies her solitary violin work. “There’s a lonely quality to the soloist world, and especially because I didn’t go to college,” she said. “I left school at 15 and between the ages of 15 to 23, where you form some of those really strong bonds, I was basically on my own out there. That made an already quite lonely profession a bit more lonely.”A summer day in Berlin last year offered an alternative to that; Benedetti found herself shielding from “too much community,” focusing on her concert there rather than on a city full of friends. And the best friend she’s made around the world? “This person,” she said, pointing to the ring.“And family,” she quickly added. Benedetti used to live in London but is now based in Surrey, which she said has strengthened her support system: “I get excited about going home, and I can’t say that I ever really felt that when I lived in London.”The move places her close to relatives for the first time since she was a child; she’s a 15-minute drive from her sister (and fellow violinist) Stephanie Benedetti, along with her 1-year-old nephew Nico and 3-year-old niece Sienna, who received her first miniature violin for Christmas.There is a sense that personal connections come first for Nicola Benedetti. “I’ve refound in the last six or seven years,” she said, “such a community developed through the teaching and educating world, different parts of the industry that you wouldn’t necessarily access through being a touring concert soloist.” More

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      Alan Cumming Uses Dance to Get at the Truth of Robert Burns

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      GLASGOW — Rain pours down, thunder growls, lightning flickers. Fragments of melancholy melody emerge from the tumult, and a lone, silhouetted figure appears onstage, moving his upper body in sinuous circles, entwining his arms and gesturing with slow deliberation. Then he walks forward, opens his arms and smiles impishly. “Here am I,” he announces.Here he is: The Scottish poet Robert Burns, embodied by the Scottish actor Alan Cumming in the one-man dance-theater show “Burn,” coming to the Joyce Theater on Sept. 20.Conceived by Cumming and the choreographer Steven Hoggett, “Burn,” which had its premiere at the Edinburgh International Festival in August, is an unlikely hybrid: A movement-focused show performed by a famous actor with no dance training, about a man whose medium was words.Why dance? Why Burns?Cumming answered those questions at some length a few days after that Glasgow performance, in a video interview from Aberdeen, where — between performances of “Burn” — he was filming the second season of a Scottish travel series with the actress Miriam Margolyes. To boil it down: He loves a challenge, he loves dance even more, and he had been thinking about taking on another physically demanding role since reprising the role of the M.C. in “Cabaret” eight years ago. (He won a Tony Award for the performance in 1998.)Vicki Manderson, left, did the choreography with Hoggett (back to camera). Here, they are rehearsing with Cumming iin Glasgow.Tommy Ga-Ken Wan“When that ended in 2015, I was 50,” he said. “I felt sad to think I’m never going to be as fit as this again, this is it. Then I slowly began to think, No, I have one more thing left in me.” He added, “I put it into the universe.”The universe responded. In 2018, he went backstage at the Joyce Theater after watching “The Tenant,” choreographed by Arthur Pita, the partner of his old friend and flatmate Matthew Bourne. While chatting with Pita, Cumming was introduced to Linda Shelton, the executive director of the Joyce. “She asked me if I had any dancey ideas,” Cumming said. “I do!,” he answered.He had been thinking about Burns at that time, he said, prompted in part by writing an autobiography and revealing dark aspects of his own past. “It made me think how we don’t have a holistic picture of our icons,” he said. “Burns is everywhere in Scotland — on statues, milk bottles, chocolate boxes — he is a sort of Scottish DNA wallpaper. But we don’t really know who he is. Somehow, at that moment, the two things, Burns and dance, merged in my mind.”He told the Joyce team that he wanted to do a dance-theater piece about the poet with the choreographer Steven Hoggett. But he neglected to mention he hadn’t yet asked Hoggett.“It’s true,” Hoggett said in a video interview from New York, where he is working on a coming production of “Sweeney Todd.” The two men — friends since 2007, when they collaborated on the National Theater of Scotland’s “The Bacchae” — were having dinner one night when Cumming asked him what he thought about the idea. “I said it sounded fantastic and he should do it,” Hoggett recounted. “He said, ‘Good, because you are doing it, too.’”Cumming wanted to work with Hoggett, he said, because the choreographer comes from an experimental background (he founded the physical theater group Frantic Assembly) and has extensive experience working with actors. “He brings that energy and aesthetic to the more commercial work,” Cumming said, “a more narrative-led, Pina Bausch-y way of letting bodies tell a story.”Cumming, right, said that Hoggett, left, brings “a more narrative-led, Pina Bausch-y way of letting bodies tell a story.”Tommy Ga-Ken WanCumming and Hoggett began a residency at the National Theater of Scotland, which produced the show with the Edinburgh International Festival and the Joyce. Although their first idea, Hoggett said, was to look at Scottish male identity, they changed focus entirely after Kirsteen McCue, a professor of Scottish literature and a director of the Center for Robert Burns Studies at the University of Glasgow, talked to them about the poet. McCue suggested they read his letters and the research of her colleague, Moira Hansen, who posits that Burns might have suffered from bipolar disorder.“They guided us to his mental health, to his relationship with his patron Frances Dunlop, to things that aren’t so sexy, but fascinating,” Cumming said. “When you read the letters — and there are two thick volumes — you realize he is much more fragile, more florid, sometimes obsequious to rich people, a bit stalker-y to women, often depressed.”The men began to work on movement that could evoke Burns’s states of mind, and in the process started to “find out what Alan’s body did and didn’t do,” Hoggett said. “He wasn’t going to learn a rond de jambe,” he added, referring to a step in the basic ballet vocabulary.Instead they did exercises around some of the content of the letters: farming, writing, joy, love, lust, depression. “What happens to the body when you’re using farming implements? What does his joy feel like, where does it spring from?” Hoggett said. “What does it feel like, in the body, to be inspired?”Every day, they would do an hourlong warm-up, then try out various exercises. Together with Vicki Manderson, who choreographed the piece with Hoggett, they would create material and construct movement phrases.“He would try anything,” Hoggett said of Cumming. “I encouraged him to really feel whether something felt right and fit on his body.”Hoggett said of Cumming: “He would try anything.”Tommy Ga-Ken WanIt was hard both physically and mentally. “The sheer pain of it,” Cumming said, grimacing. “It was intense.” It was also scary, he added, to go into rehearsal and not have a structure. “Steven is used to just making things up in the room,” he said. “But actors like to have a script!”Asked whether it had been difficult to memorize movement sequences, and eventually an hour of choreography, Cumming clutched his head in his hands. “I kept thinking, I memorized the whole of ‘Macbeth,’ I can do this!” he said. “But of course, getting the muscle memory of movement into your body is entirely different.”He learned that to tell a story with your body, “you have to think in a different way, let the story touch you in a more nonlinear, visceral way,” he said. “It was an incredibly emotional thing to do. I felt very vulnerable, which is what I want to be.”And, gradually, he became more sure of himself. “The exercises, zoning into the themes we were focusing on in the show,” he said, “gave me more confidence about my body and storytelling. It was a shock to me that some of the movement started coming from me.”He also realized, he said, that he was playing both Burns and the Alan Cumming that people know. “I am asking people to look at me in a different way, and also to look at the character I play in a different way,” he said. “The form really helped tell the story.”Cumming and Hoggett knew early on, Cumming said, that they wanted to use the genre-defying music of the Scottish composer Anna Meredith, whom they both admired. “We press-ganged her a bit,” Hoggett said. “Then she came to a few workshops, saw how forensic we were being with her music, and sent us a lot of stuff that hadn’t been released before.”Meredith, whose memory of those workshops involves “mainly doing a lot of Scottish country dancing with an expert who had come to work with the men,” said that she “loved the ambition of the show,” and the way it revealed unusual aspects of Burns. The score, she said, is made up of both existing tracks and older, sometimes experimental, work that “I hadn’t found a home for.”Cumming working with Manderson.Tommy Ga-Ken Wan“It’s a mix of acoustic and electronic,” she said, “some tracks untouched, others needed edits or extensions to fit the exact length of Alan’s words and rhythms.”Working with Meredith to shape the score also helped in creating a structure for the show, when the men reconvened at Cumming’s home in Scotland last summer. “By then, we had pared down the topics we felt were important to telling the story of who Burns was,” Cumming said. He ticked off key points: Burns’s upbringing on a farm; starting to write; his relationship with Jean Armour (who would be the mother of nine of his 12 children); his affairs with Mary Campbell and others; his poverty, depression, and his love for Scotland and its stories and themes.“To label ‘Burn’ as dance might be stretching a point,” Mark Fisher wrote in The Guardian, adding that Cumming has nonetheless “dared to put himself in an unfamiliar place.”As several reviewers pointed out, there is not a great deal of Burns’s famous poetry in the show. Instead Cumming and Hoggett focus on the autobiographical content of Burns’s letters, evoking the highs and lows of his emotional life through their words, digital projections (Andrzej Goulding), dramatic lighting (Tim Lutkin) and occasional stage magic, as quills scroll independently across a manuscript and a dress rises from the floor to incarnate a character.“When Alan is 90 years old, he can recite Burns poetry in a rocking chair, under a spotlight,” Hoggett said. “And he can do that beautifully. But we wanted to go further and do a show about the man and the way movement can reveal a reality that words often hide.” More

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      At Edinburgh’s Festivals, Big Names and Live Issues

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      While marquee productions have featured star turns from Ian McKellen and Alan Cumming, smaller shows deal with contemporary life.EDINBURGH — Some big names have been leaving their mark this month in Edinburgh, where both the International Festival and the bustling theatrical grab bag that is the Fringe are in full swing after a slimmed-down pandemic lineup last year. Ian McKellen and Alan Cumming have proved box-office catnip, both of them in dance-intensive enterprises that take already long-established careers in new directions.There is excellence, of course, among the less well-known talent here, too. But there’s no denying the marquee appeal of McKellen, now 83 and pretty much alone among his generation of British actors in still being onstage. (Too many of his onetime colleagues have either retired or died.) Last year, he gave us a limber, age-defiant Hamlet, for an extended run. And this month, he is revisiting that hallowed text, in a 65-minute fusion of dance and theater that is unremarkable but easy on the eye.The performance, devised by McKellen and the Danish choreographer Peter Schaufuss, finds the veteran Shakespearean delivering excerpts from the text in his familiar, deep-voiced rumble; all the other performers are dancers, many from the company of the Edinburgh Festival Ballet, which Schaufuss runs. The approach includes Ophelia (an expressive Katie Rose) swooping to the stage floor in grief, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern hopping briefly into view and the charismatic dancer Johan Christensen whirling in torment as the young Hamlet: He and McKellen offer dual aspects of a split psyche. Luke Schaufuss, the choreographer’s son, completes a central triangle of sorts as a model-handsome Horatio in a decorative outing that is watchable, to be sure, but doesn’t run very deep.Alan Cumming performing an extract from the poetry of Robert Burns in “Burn,” created by Cumming and Steven Hoggett. Jeff J Mitchell/Getty ImagesAlan Cumming, the Tony-winning Scottish actor, gets the stage all to himself in “Burn,” an official Festival entry in conjunction with the National Theater of Scotland that will travel next month to the Joyce Theater in New York. It’s a portrait in words and movement of the 18th-century poet Robert Burns, Scotland’s national bard, whom Cumming and his co-creator, Steven Hoggett, have conceived as a lank-haired, black-clad goth. (The show finished Aug. 10 in Edinburgh and will tour Scotland before its New York run.)And what if Burns was 37 when he died — 20 years younger than Cumming is now? The protean actor brings to this assignment a lithe, sinuous physicality that belies his years, while a digital clock counts down the passage of time in Burns’s too-brief life. The show couples enticing visuals (Tim Lutkin’s lighting is suitably stormy) with a canter through Burns’s verse. We’re left at the end with a sweet recitation from in front of the stage curtain of “Auld Lang Syne,” the traditional New Year’s Eve melody, for which this Scotsman wrote the words.Contemporary themes are being dealt with in Edinburgh, too, even as this year’s celebrity names chose to look toward the past. “Silkworm,” at the Assembly Roxy, tells of a lesbian couple from Nigeria who arrive in Glasgow seeking permanent asylum in Britain. Ewa Dina, left, and Antonia Layiwola in Vlad Butucea’s “Silkworm.” Tommy Ga-Ken WanWritten by Vlad Butucea, a Romanian-born, Glasgow-based dramatist, the play is set 17 floors up in a low-income housing project where, we are told, “You can hear the wallpaper peeling.”Abidemi (a radiant Ewa Dina) is the more expansive of the pair; her partner, Omolade (the intense Antonia Layiwola) is fearful that the authorities won’t recognize the gravity of the women’s plight. That the previous occupants of this same apartment leaped to their deaths amplifies the air of unease: Once their fates are decided, the lovers’ bond gets tested in a slow-burning drama that could be teased out further for greater impact.Calvin (the live-wire Michael Dylan), the gay man at the endearingly manic center of James Ley’s “Wilf,” is in the process of ending a relationship when we first encounter him center stage, chattering away and wearing a Celine Dion T-shirt. His story, he tells us at the start, involves love, loss and the comfort he takes in the car of the title, a used Volkswagen Polo that he has come to cherish as if it were a person. The play is at the Traverse Theater — always a reliable Fringe destination — and directed by Gareth Nicholls, the house’s artistic director.Irene Allan and Michael Dylan in James Ley’s “Wilf,” directed by Gareth Nicholls.Mihaela BodlovicIts good nature proves entirely infectious as Calvin learns to motor his way, literally and metaphorically, through the pain of separation, en route to a possible new start with any of the various men he encounters along the way. Neil John Gibson gives vivid life to a broad array of romantic prospects, and a third performer, Irene Allan, is a hoot as a polyamorous onetime therapist. The play’s sexual candor was something of a surprise at 11 a.m. — performance times vary throughout the run — but “Wilf” is highly engaging whatever the time of day, and very touching, too.The sexual peccadilloes in “Boris the Third,” at the Pleasance Courtyard, belong to Britain’s prime minister. The writer-director Adam Meggido’s overextended comedy puts center stage a teenage Boris Johnson in a production of “Richard III” at Eton, one of Britain’s most elite boarding schools. The troubled show took place — or maybe not, given that Johnson’s father remembers that the actual Shakespeare play was “Richard II” — with a leading man who, in this account anyway, was more intent on bedding two sisters at once than on learning his lines.Meggido’s play tries to connect the conniving if doomed charmer Johnson may once have acted onstage to the modern-day leader who has been repeatedly called out for deceit. While it is worth seeing principally for Harry Kershaw’s pitch-perfect performance in the title role, it still feels like a shaky first draft.From left, Naima Swaleh, Fionn Ó Loingsigh, Anna Healy and Fiona Bell in Sonya Kelly’s “The Last Return,” directed by Sara Joyce.Ste Murray I had a much better time at Sonya Kelly’s wonderful “The Last Return,” the best of the seven shows I attended last weekend. Also at the Traverse, this production by the Druid Theater of Galway, directed by Sara Joyce, gathers a disparate array of characters, all clamoring for entry at any price to the sold-out final performance of a fictitious play.The ebb and flow of the queue is of scant interest to the ticket seller (Anna Healy), who repeats ‌as if ‌by rote that there are no seats left, and the prospective playgoers become increasingly fractious. A disaffected 60-something academic (Bosco Hogan) has tried 36 times to make it through the show but hasn’t managed, because he is incontinent; this performance is his last chance. Among those also jockeying for admission are a battle-scarred American soldier (Fionn Ó Loingsigh) who just wants to rest his feet after the trauma of war and, most memorably, a querulous Scotswoman (Fiona Bell) who offers homemade snacks to the other characters as she angles for a spot at the front.The lineup of hopefuls also includes a mostly silent Somali woman (Naima Swaleh) who has crossed continents, we discover, to get to the theater and whose final gesture ends the play on an unexpectedly touching note. Chaos, “The Last Return” suggests, lies in wait everywhere, but so, too, do humanity and compassion, if we are lucky enough to experience them — and this play.Edinburgh International FestivalThrough Aug. 29 at various venues in Edinburgh; eif.co.uk.Edinburgh Festival FringeThrough Aug. 29 at various venues in Edinburgh; edfringe.com. More

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      A Quiet Summer at Edinburgh’s Festivals

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      There are fewer shows and smaller audiences than usual at the International Festival and the Fringe this year.EDINBURGH — Quiet isn’t a word usually associated with August in Edinburgh, where the International Festival and the bigger, more ragtag Fringe usually promise a cultural hurly-burly. But the pandemic here, as elsewhere, has readjusted realities, as was evident from the moment I arrived last week, primed for a whirlwind weekend of playgoing.Gone were the theatrical hopefuls eagerly buttonholing visitors, and, with them, the barrage of fliers that can quickly weigh down a knapsack. This year, there are hundreds of shows, as opposed to thousands, and many of them are online. It was as if the Scottish capital were taking its cue from the title of a show I saw here: “Still.”That play, by Frances Poet, running at the Traverse Theater as part of the Fringe, is an intriguing study of five people whose lives are threaded together by desperation, among whom Mercy Ojelade stands out as an expectant mother confronting unbearable grief. Directed by Gareth Nicholls, who runs the Traverse, it offers up a fractured landscape of Edinburgh residents bound together by pain, even as the mood around town was one of readjusting to life after lockdown: The majority of coronavirus restrictions were lifted in Scotland on Aug. 9, three weeks later than in England.This means that restaurants and bars were open at capacity, while theaters are still adhering to the social distancing protocols that were in place when shows were planned and tickets sold. More than once, I found myself surrounded by rows of empty seats: “Still,” for instance, can play to 67 people per performance in the Traverse Theater’s largest auditorium, which usually holds more than 200.A mind in free-fall is also the fearsome topic for a high-profile Festival entry at the Traverse, “Medicine,” which was originally scheduled in last year’s canceled lineup. The production will travel to Galway, Ireland, and then to St. Ann’s Warehouse in Brooklyn in the fall.Aoife Duffin, left, and Domhnall Gleeson in Enda Walsh’s “Medicine” at the world premiere at Traverse Theater this month.Jessica ShurteA collaboration between Ireland’s Landmark Productions and the Galway International Festival, “Medicine” springs from the adventurous, absurdist mind of Enda Walsh, the Dublin writer whose breakthrough play “Disco Pigs” exploded on to the Edinburgh Fringe in 1997: Walsh later wrote such musicals as the David Bowie-scored “Lazarus” and “Once,” winning a Tony Award in 2012 for the latter.The appearance early in “Medicine” of a woman dressed as a lobster (don’t ask) tips the show toward an anything-goes therapy session that unfolds in an unnamed psychiatric facility.The lead character is the pajama-wearing John (Domhnall Gleeson, the “Star Wars” and “Harry Potter” alumnus in splendid form), who is made to relive past traumas as part of a dubious psychological reckoning that leaves this beleaguered figure looking even more anxious. Any healing, you feel, hasn’t quite gone to plan, and you begin to think his therapists, both named Mary, might just as well be there to torture him. Walsh doubles as his own director, balancing the play’s anarchic energy with its prevailing sadness.This year, those wary of plays indoors can take comfort in any number of outdoor shows — a brave proposition in a city known for its unpredictable weather. (I experienced mostly clear skies, which is by no means the Edinburgh norm.)At “Aye, Elvis,” Morna Young’s sweetly sentimental play about a female Elvis impersonator (a game Joyce Falconer) who wants to take her tribute act all the way to Graceland, spectators sit in self-contained pods in a parking lot behind the Traverse, with Edinburgh Castle looming high above. But our attention was justly riveted on Falconer’s obsessive Scotswoman, Joan, and her scold of a mum (Carol Ann Crawford, whose every expletive is brilliantly timed).Keith Fleming in Ben Harrison’s “Doppler” in Musselburgh, Scotland.Duncan McGlynnThe following afternoon, I sat on a cushioned tree stump in a woodland as one of 35 spectators for the Grid Iron theater company’s hugely enjoyable “Doppler.” Directed and adapted by Ben Harrison, from a novel by the Norwegian writer Erlend Loe, the play tells of an unrepentant misanthrope (an impassioned Keith Fleming) who forsakes his family to live in a tent, surviving on elk meat and soaking in his own bile.Yet isolation turns out to be elusive, as the play’s title character is visited by a stream of family members. His irascibility is leavened by deadpan humor (“Man cannot live by elk alone”) that varies the tone, even as the lush setting exerts an allure of its own.Back in town, and indoors, a Methodist church is the unexpected venue for an eco-friendly half-hour musical, “WeCameToDance,” a brainchild of the Food Tank initiative in Baltimore that is billed as an “interactive, interplanetary musical adventure.”What does that mean, you might well ask? Think of it as a dance class led by six kindly, athletic women who argue for a better, more environmentally aware planet, all the while leading an intensive aerobics workout. Deliberately difficult to classify, the show, co-directed and choreographed by Ashley Jack, offers a family-friendly mixture of consciousness-raising and fitness training, imparting an urgent political message while working the pulse.The cast of “WeCameToDance” from the Food Tank initiative.Douglas RobertsonPerformed three times daily to carefully distanced audiences of 50, whose members remain on their feet throughout, the show feels like a blueprint for something more ambitious to come and has been invited to participate in the United Nations Climate Change Conference in neighboring Glasgow in November.Not much was charitably intended over at “Dead Funny,” the raucous solo performance from the drag artist Myra DuBois that I saw in Edinburgh as part of a British tour that will include a stand at London’s Garrick Theatre on Sept. 6. Staged in a tent, the hourlong show places Myra firmly in the take-no-prisoners tradition of Barry Humphries’s formidable alter ego, Dame Edna Everage: Latecomers are lampooned and Myra saves what praise she has for herself — “My pronouns,” she says exultantly, “are me, me, me.”Watching this last in a sequence of shows that made a virtue of distance, I had to feel for those ensnared by Myra’s predatory eye, as she scanned the audience for prey. But even she found room for a closing thank-you to her public for embracing her act in these uncertain times. Myra’s strangulated cackle gave way to expressions of generosity (“be kind,” she unexpectedly urged those same playgoers whom she had been so quick to chide), alongside an acknowledgment of the strength in numbers — however depleted — without which live performance cannot survive. More

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      Edinburgh Fringe Is Back. Is a Smaller Festival Better?

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      Locals long complained that the event had gotten too big. This year, because of the pandemic, their wish for a reduced Fringe has been granted.EDINBURGH — The drone of bagpipes drifted down the Royal Mile last Saturday, as members of a student theater troupe walked the cobblestones trying to drum up interest in their show.In a normal year at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe, this central artery of the city’s Old Town district would have been packed tight with young performers and street acts, all competing loudly for the attention of passers-by. But late Saturday morning, there was only one group around.“We were the only ones here yesterday, too,” said Serena Birch, 22, a member of the Aireborne Theater Company, from the University of Leeds. “Usually, it’s like a fight.”Before the pandemic, the Edinburgh Fringe, which opened last Friday and runs through Aug. 30, was surpassed only by the Olympics and the soccer World Cup in terms of audience size. In 2019, the Fringe sold more than three million tickets for 3,841 shows at 323 venues — an increase of 31 percent in five years. Independent researchers estimated that the event generated around $1.4 billion for Scotland’s economy.During the Fringe, the Royal Mile, a central Edinburgh artery, is usually full of performers and street acts jostling for the attention of possible audience members.Iain Masterton/AlamyBut after the 2020 event was canceled, the Fringe was plunged into financial peril. A tentative comeback this year, buoyed by a $1.4 million government bailout, will see fewer than 850 shows presented — a third of them online. Uncertainty around the easing of coronavirus restrictions in Scotland, where limits on audience sizes were in place until Monday, seems to have kept performers and spectators away.This year’s slim, yet typically weird and wonderful, program features stand-up comics, like Daniel Sloss and Jason Byrne; a choral drama about migration staged on an out-of-town beach; and an educational walking tour, led by pelvic physiotherapist, titled, “Viva Your Vulva.”Established in 1947 as a free-spirited alternative to the highbrow Edinburgh International Festival, the Fringe is built on the principle of open access for performers, meaning any acts that pay a registration fee can present a show. It is one of several major festivals that take place in Edinburgh in August, but it is by far the largest.For some in a city with a population of only around 500,000, a break from the Fringe last year, followed by a much smaller festival this year — one that doesn’t clog up roads and sidewalks, or cause short-term rents to skyrocket — has been welcomed.Shulah Stewart, 35, a home care manager, said last year’s cancellation gave locals “an opportunity to just enjoy the city in summer, in a way that they can’t ordinarily.”And even the Fringe’s organizers say the event had become too big.In an interview, Shona McCarthy, the chief executive of the Fringe’s coordinating body, said it was time for a “serious conversation” in the coming months about how to build back in a smaller and more sustainable way. She said that “some kind of regulation” of the Fringe’s open-access policy could be considered for future editions.“Some kind of regulation” of the Fringe’s open-access policy could be considered for future editions, said Shona McCarthy, the chief executive of its coordinating body.Jane BarlowWhile theater and comedy make up most of its program, the Fringe has expanded over the years to embrace a broad range of acts. McCarthy said that some items on the schedule — like open-top bus tours and wine tastings — stretched the definition of performing arts. The Fringe needs to “be brave” and question why events like those have become such a huge part of the festival, she said.Yet the owners of Underbelly, an events producer that runs some of the Fringe’s busiest venues, said in a joint interview that a move away from the open-access policy would hamper the event’s fragile recovery. “As soon as the Fringe became closed access, then a new fringe would just start up alongside it,” said Charlie Wood, an Underbelly director.“No one can control the festival,” he said. “It’s organic.”Ed Bartlam, Wood’s business partner, said many locals’ criticism of the Fringe’s size was based on an “urban myth” that the event was primarily for people from outside Edinburgh and Scotland.According to a Fringe spokeswoman, people from Scotland made up more than half of the audience members at the 2019 event, and Edinburgh residents around 35 percent. About 7 percent came from outside Britain, she added.McCarthy said the digital hybrid model for this year’s festival, with a mix of online and in-person events, would remain for future editions so that audiences and performers could take part in the Fringe “without necessarily having to travel here.”Underbelly’s owners said they would not be presenting any online events in this year’s program. They “can sometimes work,” Wood said, “but you have to spend a lot of money on it, and therefore it doesn’t work for this festival.”Nerea Bello, left, Julia Taudevin and and Mairi Morrison. They are performing in “Move,” a choral drama about migration.Jeff J Mitchell/Getty ImagesOut and about in Edinburgh, the question of whether a bigger Fringe was better drew a range of responses.Claire Mackie, 41, an animator, said the event’s usual “noise and chaos” never used to bother her, even when she lived close to the Royal Mile. “I liked the buzz,” she said, adding that this year’s Fringe seemed “subdued.”Jackie Honisz, 70, a retiree, sitting in her garden beside the Pleasance Courtyard venue complex, said she didn’t miss the Fringe last year, and didn’t want it to return to its previous scale: “Because of Covid,” she said, and because festivalgoers would regularly leave trash in the streets around her home.The comedian Josie Long, 39, made her Fringe debut at 17 and has returned as a performer for 16 of the past 22 years, including this year with a work-in-progress show for limited, socially distanced audiences at the 100-capacity Monkey Barrel Comedy. In a phone interview, she said she felt like this year’s festival was “just about enough Fringe that people can handle psychologically.”But Long added that she hoped the festival would one day return to its sprawling prepandemic proportions. “Making fewer opportunities doesn’t tend to stop the arts being the preserve of privileged people,” she said.“I can’t wait until it’s in a position where I can say it’s annoying again,” she added. More

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      Everything Was Canceled in 2020. What About 2021?

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      From the French Open and the Tokyo Olympics to New York Pride, a look at which global events are canceled, postponed or moving ahead (with altered plans) in 2021.Early last year, as international lockdowns upended daily life, they took with them, one by one, many of the major cultural and sporting events that dot the calendar each year. The N.B.A. suspended its season, the French Open was postponed for several months and the Tokyo Olympics were delayed a year. The future of the Glastonbury Festival and the Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival were in doubt. It was a bleak time.Recently, as conditions in many places around the world have slowly begun to improve, and as countries have begun mass vaccination campaigns, some events and cultural staples have made plans to return, albeit with modifications. While few events, if any, have plans to go ahead free of restrictions this year, some are taking a hybrid approach. Others remain postponed or canceled.Here’s the status of some of the major events around the world.The Tokyo Olympics are set to start on July 23.Shuji Kajiyama/Associated PressSports: The Olympics are full steam ahead.The Tokyo Olympics, which were delayed for a year because of the coronavirus pandemic, are scheduled to begin on July 23 with an opening ceremony. The bulk of the athletic events will begin the next day. The first round of Wimbledon begins on June 28 and will run through mid-July. Officials said they were working toward a spectator capacity of at least 25 percent.The 125th Boston Marathon, which is usually held in May, is now scheduled for Oct. 11, and the 50th New York City Marathon is set for Nov. 7.The 105th Indianapolis 500 will go on as planned on May 30. Officials will allow about 135,000 spectators in — 40 percent of the venue’s capacity. The event was organized with state and local health officials and was approved by the Marion County Public Health Department, race officials said.The French Open, one of the premier tennis competitions, has been postponed one week to a new start date of May 24. The decision was made in agreement with the authorities in France and the governing bodies of international tennis, said officials, who want the tournament played in front of the largest possible number of fans.Coachella was canceled in 2020, and again in 2021.Amy Harris/Invision, via Associated PressMusic: Coachella and Glastonbury are holding off.The Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival, which typically draws big headliners like Beyoncé and is an annual pilgrimage for the more than 100,000 fans who trek to Southern California, is canceled again this year.In January, organizers for the Glastonbury Festival said it would not take place this summer.The Essence Festival of Culture, which usually draws more than a half million people to New Orleans over the Fourth of July weekend every year, will host a hybrid experience this year over two weekends: June 25-27 and July 2-4.Headliners like Billie Eilish, Post Malone and ASAP Rocky will take the stage at the Governors Ball Music Festival, which is scheduled for Sept. 24-26 at Citi Field in Queens. Organizers say the event will return to its typical June dates in 2022.Burning Man, the annual countercultural arts event that typically draws tens of thousands of people to Black Rock Desert in Nevada, has been canceled again this year because of the pandemic. It will return in 2022, organizers said.After being canceled last year, the Austin City Limits Music Festival, the event in the capital of Texas, is scheduled to return to Zilker Park on Oct. 1-3 and Oct. 8-10.Lady Gaga at the Met Gala in 2019. The event this year is scheduled for September.Karsten Moran for The New York TimesCultural events: Broadway is coming back.A delayed 2021 Met Gala, the annual benefit at the Metropolitan Museum that draws scores of celebrities and fashion-industry elites, will happen on Sept. 13. A second event is scheduled for May 2022.NYC Pride 2021 will move forward in June with virtual and in-person events. The Pride March, which was canceled last year, will be virtual this time. (San Francisco Pride, also in June, is planning similar adjustments, while Atlanta Pride is planning to hold an in-person event in October.)The Lucerne Festival, which offers a range of events featuring classical orchestras, ensembles and more in Switzerland, will run from Aug. 10. In order to keep concertgoers safe, organizers said events will not have intermissions and its venue will have a limited number of available seats. Similarly, the Salzburg Festival in Austria kicks off in mid-July with modifications.The Edinburgh International Festival, a showcase for world theater, dance and music in the Scottish city since 1947, will run Aug. 7-29. Performances will take place in temporary outdoor pavilions with covered stages and socially distanced seating.E3, one of the video game industry’s most popular conventions where developers showcase the latest news and games, will be virtual this year from June 12-15.The New York International Auto Show, which showcases the newest and latest automobiles from dozens of brands, will run Aug. 20-29. The event last year was postponed and eventually canceled because of the pandemic.The Cannes Film Festival in the South of France, one of the movie industry’s most revered and celebrated events, has been postponed to July 6-17 from mid-May. The 2021 edition of the event, which was canceled last year, is currently scheduled to be in person.After more than a year of no theater performances, Broadway shows will start selling tickets for full-capacity shows with some performances starting on Sept. 14. (Some West End shows will resume as early as May 17.)After being virtual last year, New York Comic-Con will return with a physical event Oct. 7-10 at the Jacob K. Javits Convention Center in Manhattan. The convention will run at reduced capacity to ensure social distancing, organizers said. This year’s Comic-Con International event, which is normally held in July in San Diego, has been postponed until summer 2022. There are plans for a smaller event called Comic-Con Special Edition however, that will be held in person in November. More