Back from Edinburgh!

I'm back from the Edinburgh Festival where I spent the past 10 days working on The Wooster Group's La Didone and still amazed at the scope of the festival--hundreds, no, thousands of events every day. The city is more or less occupied by an invasion of artists.

I had a wonderful time despite being too busy with our show to take much in except a hard-edged Poppea from the Vienna Schauspielhaus and Matt Schickele's engaging pub show. He's a wonderful songwriter and I look forward to hearing more of him in New York!

I was also pleased to see that La Didone was pretty well received by the local press. Here are a few links to reviews, which also include some of the more up-to-date photos.

The Guardian
The Evening News
The Scotsman

And here are a couple of my photos of the work in progress. The Theater, the Royal Lyceum on Grindlay Street, was amazing, with a beautiful interior and a raked stage that made everything look good. First, the balconies:


Outside the theater:


Our crew and their crew hard at work building the grid during load in:


And a shot of our publicity, which shocked each of us as we found it wandering the streets from the theater to the closest coffee places.


One of the revelations for me on this trip was how good the coffee was! I love tea, and I expected more of it, but instead I found a thriving coffee culture that rivaled the Bay Area, with little Italian expresso places sprouting up everywhere and freshly brewed coffee to take away at all the pubs. And the best tea-or-coffee accompaniment I've tried in a long time, caramel shortbread (otherwise known as millionaire's shortbread). Thanks to Kamala for alerting me that it needed to be on my Edinburgh food list!