I'm at the Fringe festival as I write this post on the morning that it's going out to readers. It's my final day, and as soon as I hit publish, I'll be walking over to see Mario The Maker's show at 11:00 (he was brilliant at Blackpool this year), and then it's off to the airport to head off.
The Edinburgh Fringe Festival is an annual month-long festival packed with comedy, circus, theatre, music and too much magic. Every pub, classroom, office and gym across the city transforms into a makeshift venue for thousands of shows and hundreds of thousands of eager audiences. 856,541 tickets were sold at the festival in 2019.
Funnily enough, Fringe magicians don't see much value in getting written about by a publication for magicians. I offered a few of them the option to write about their show in One Ahead during the run-up to the festival. All of them declined because, as it turns out, magicians are not their target audience.
I caught a bunch of shows and sadly missed a bunch I didn't have time to see. Notably, Dom Chambers and Charlie Caper have received rave reviews, and I would have loved to catch their shows. But what were some of the shows I saw, and what can magicians learn from what worked and what didn't work so well?
