Edinburgh Fringe: Looking for the next big thing after Six success

A number of hit shows and comedians started out performing to tiny audiences at the Edinburgh Fringe. Could the next big thing be appearing in a dingy venue right now?

In 2017, a group of students put on a musical imagining Henry VIII's wives as a 21st Century girl group in a hotel conference room at the Edinburgh Fringe.

"It had 80 or 100 seats or something in it. Very low ceilings, I remember that," recalls theatre producer Andy Barnes.

"I was in after the first song. I came out straight afterwards and made a beeline for Toby [Marlow], the co-writer, and said, 'I want to firmly put our hat in the ring to get involved'."

Five years later, Six: The Musical has been a hit in the West End and beyond, and Marlow and co-writer Lucy Moss won Broadway's prestigious Tony Award for best original score in June.

Breakout hits on such a scale may be rare, but over the years Edinburgh has given a number of shows a successful life beyond the Fringe.

Fleabag started as Phoebe Waller-Bridge's one-woman stage show in 2013. In 2019, The Shark Is Broken - based on the making of Jaws - launched in the Scottish capital before transferring to the West End and being nominated for the Olivier Award for best entertainment or comedy play.

Meanwhile, comedians from Rowan Atkinson and Steve Coogan to Miranda Hart and Rose Matafeo got major career boosts at the Edinburgh Fringe.

Six was first staged by Cambridge University students. "Cambridge University Musical Theatre Society couldn't afford to pay royalties on doing, you know, Sister Act or Hairspray or something to bring it to the festival," according to co-producer Kenny Wax.

"They wanted to bring a show to the festival, so they did a royalty-free production, which they wrote themselves in about two weeks. The best and most lucrative two weeks of their lives."

After Andy Barnes and his wife and producing partner Wendy spotted the show during its first Edinburgh run, Mr Wax came on board and they took it back to the larger Underbelly venue the following year to see whether it would have legs.

Mr Barnes says the Fringe runs were "essential" to the show's development.

He says: "I knew it was going to take off about halfway through Edinburgh the second year, when I got a video of the entire Underbelly staff singing one of the songs at a party, which made me go, wow, that's clearly resonated with that group of young people. They were jumping up and down and singing 'We're Six'."

After no proper Fringe for two years because of Covid, this year's festival has almost 3,500 shows on offer - including some influenced by Six.

Another set of students, from Durham, have brought The Single Lady, a "new pop/R&B musical" about Elizabeth I. Dots and Dashes, meanwhile, follows the format of six women lining up on stage - this time codebreakers at Bletchley Park during World War Two.

In Fantastically Great Women Who Changed the World - also part of Mr Wax's stable - an array of historical figures, like Emmeline Pankhurst, Jane Austen, Rosa Parks and Anne Frank, come to life in another energetic and empowering pop musical.

Its creative team, including Girls Aloud hitmaker Miranda Cooper, already have established careers, it has a relatively big budget, and has already been on tour - and is a banker to end up in the West End.

"One of the reasons for bringing Fantastically Great Women here was because I really felt that the Fringe was a brilliant platform for Six when we took it into the [Underbelly] Purple Cow," Mr Wax says.

On a smaller scale but a similar theme, Kickass Divas brings Boudicca, Florence Nightingale, Cleopatra and more out of the museum vaults and onto the stage.

Meanwhile, the Cambridge University Musical Theatre Society is back with two shows. Sleepover is a "coming of age comedy musical about self-discovery (and self-pleasure)", while Living With Sin is a musical "seducing us all to try a little sin".

Beyond the shows riding on Six's coattails, there's a musical about the victims of serial killer Charles Manson set to the sounds of Fleetwood Mac; another about another Bletchley Park hero, Alan Turing; and even, somewhat dubiously, one about Shannon Matthews, the teenager at the centre of a kidnap hoax in 2008.

Making A Murderer: The Musical, written by one of the creators of TV sitcom Early Doors, has not been endorsed by Netflix.

And Kate Butch, a Kate Bush tribute drag act, is making the most of the singer's recent revival with an entertaining parody about her attempts to take a fictional jukebox musical called Bush! to Broadway.

So how can you spot the next breakout hit? Mr Barnes, who develops and stages new shows with his wife under the banners of Global Musicals and Perfect Pitch, says he would scour the Fringe brochure and look up anything that might be up his street.

"The key thing is the brochure and sitting in the beer gardens and eavesdropping," he says. "I've sat in many a beer garden in Edinburgh listening to other people's conversations or watching them look at and talk about flyers, and just picking up on things."

Stand-up comedy still takes up the most space in the brochure, and Janette Linden is among the agents decamping to Edinburgh in search of comedy and performing talent.

"I've got two assistants, and I'm going to be up for three weeks. I will probably, if I can bear it without having a breakdown, do about five shows a day," she says.

Linden works for PBJ Management, which represents acts like Eddie Izzard, James Acaster, Noel Fielding and Nish Kumar.

"I've got 10 million Edinburgh WhatsApp groups going at the moment with all sorts of people who are also suggesting shows to go and see," she adds. The company also has a list of acts who have written to them directly, and they pick up tips from social media, reviews, award nominations and word of mouth.

"We'll split out what we can between us, and if somebody goes to see something and they really loved it, then they'll report back to the rest of the team and then somebody else will hopefully go and see it as well. None of us have a huge amount of space for new acts, but we're always looking. You have to be scouting at all times."

The Edinburgh Fringe runs until 29 August.