3 Reviews for the 2026 Edinburgh Fringe (In order from most enjoyable to least)

First, I have an extra pair of tickets for each of the shows on 12 August, except “A FACE”, “That’s Why Mums Go to Switzerland”, and “A Letter to My Parents”. You can see my schedule at 2026 Schedule.htm to learn of those five shows. If you would like their tickets for free, please email me and we will meet at each venues.

Welcome to the 2026 version of my Fringe reviews. I am a 73-year-old retired Computer Science lecturer from the University of California in Davis who thinks even a bad play is better than no play at all. This year my wife, Debbie, is here. Unlike me, she has an excellent memory, and has acted and directed. While my ratings of enjoyment will not be affected by her, my reasoning may be. You can see my schedule at 2026 Schedule.htm. To learn more about scheduling regime, you can go to my Scheduling section after the reviews on this page. This year I have created a separate page that has my thoughts on reviewing as well as access to all of my reviews from the past, Reviewing and Archives.htm

You can change the sorting column of the table below by first clicking anywhere in its header. Each succeeding click in the header sorts the table by the column clicked. Succeeding clicks of a column will reverse the previous sort order. Sorting by the Date column on the right allows returning viewers to see my most recent reviews.

Fringe Festival Reviews

Rank	Review	Venue	Begins	Ends	Date
1.	The Singer (*****) A singer/songwriter with one hit who has writer’s block meets a deaf man who has a journal full of songs but who cannot break into the music business of the hearing world. The show utilizes speech, British Sign Language (BSL), music, and supertitles with the cast of four to draw us into the world of the deaf with both its challenges and the wonderful expressiveness of BSL. The catchy music and touching unusual lyrics of his songs provide a perfect soundtrack for this tale of prejudice and personal growth.	Traverse 1 at Traverse Theatre	19:00	20:20	4
2.	Glenn Moore: Work in Progress (****) The established comedian uses his I-pad to prompt him as he tests out a wide variety of jokes that usually are quite humorous. Beside the amusing content, I enjoyed seeing the beginning of the process of creating a routine from a mix of thematic jokes with standalone one-liners. Because I have neighbor back in the USA who is from Croydon, I laughed the most at Moore’s allusion to that city’s dark reputation by saying that he was on a first name bases with the crime photographer.	Monkey Barrel 1 at Monkey Barrel Comedy	11:05	12:05	4
3.	Fun-Size Wine Tasting (***) A wine dealer offered us four wines from Italy, South Africa, and Romania and gave us short descriptions of their origins and tasting notes. The wines tasted good and were surprisingly inexpensive, but there was too much chatting and not enough teaching for me. I was surprised to learn that Prosecco is neither a style of wine nor a variety of grape but must be made from at least 85% Glera grapes.	Boardroom at Vegan Tipples	16:00	17:00	4

Scheduling

I expect to see between 150 and 190 shows this year. Because the Fringe website no longer allows search results to be downloaded as csv files, I wrote a C++ program, main.cpp that parses the html files results from the saved files produced from searches on edfringe.com, and stores the information in a .csv (comma separated file), named AllShows2026.csv. I also converted AllShows2026.csv to an Excel file, AllShows.xls. Each includes information about 3690 shows available on 5 June. The coding for the availability of each show for each day is: 0=No show, 1= Sold out/cancelled, 2= Available, 3= 2-for-1, 4= Preview, 5= Free Fringe. Since the information is from 5 June, it doesn’t include information about the 300 shows added after that. I have also not updated their cancellations and sold out days.

To save time during the Fringe, this year I wrote a C++ program that schedules our shows based on our ratings from their descriptions in the Fringe program, number of performances, and travel time between venues. It has plotted a schedule of 192 shows but we have only bought tickets to the 130 shows to which we gave 4 or 5 stars. That leaves room to replace some scheduled shows with those recommended by other Fringe goers. As usual, the biggest problem is that comedy dominates the Fringe evening programming, and I prefer theatre. If you are curious about the full 192 schedule it is here, ourSchedule.txt. The dates in the file are not in ascending order to guarantee that the 30^th and 31^st are filled and the 18th, 20^th, 25^th, and 27^th are more available for recommend shows.