The Edinburgh Festival Fringe is the biggest arts festival in the world, with nearly 3,500 shows. This year, Playbill is in Edinburgh for the entire month in August for the festival and we’re taking you with us. Follow along as we cover every single aspect of the Fringe, aka our real-life Brigadoon!

As part of our Edinburgh Fringe coverage, Playbill is seeing a whole lotta shows—and we're sharing which ones you absolutely must see if you're only at the Fringe for a short amount of time. Consider these Playbill Picks a friendly, opinionated guide as you try to choose a show at the festival.

I've seen a lot of cirque shows and I can definitively say: Sophie's Surprise 29th at this year's Edinburgh Festival Fringe is something special. It follows the basic circus/burlesque cabaret structure, but the makers of this show have created a little storyline and given each performer a distinct character to layer on top of their circus skills. The result is a super fun party (with all the kids you didn't really talk to in high school...)!

The show's loose concept is that we are gathered at this spiegeltent for Sophie's surprise birthday party. As the audience is filing in, an unwitting Sophie is chosen and whisked away backstage so that we can ready for the surprise. The performers wander about chatting with the audience until showtime. We meet the nerd, the goth, the chavs (which is a new word I learned in the U.K.), the party girl, and the ne'er-do-well (who might be dealing drugs...or biscuits...it's unclear).

The small cast of six are all gifted circus performers in the own right, but having them play characters spikes the humor a bit. Instead of a rope aerial number, we get the nerdy girl (Katharine Arnold) in her baggy clothes and big glasses clumsily twirling above, making each drop seem a little more anxious. The goth boy (Cornelius Atkinson) reads a little Twilight fanfic before his trapeze number, his moodiness and black poet shirt imbuing his flight with drama. The party girl (Nella Niva) adds high-energy silliness to her yoga ball acrobatics. 

But with all the high-flying spectacular, the show's real highlights came rolling in on wheels. A pair of working-class chavs (Nathan Price and Isis Clegg-Vinell) had the audience on the edge of their seats with some death-defying spins on roller skates. The two stole the show with this number and yes, there is also a smart joke about our socio-economic assumptions. 

Wheeler Dealer (Sam Goodburn) had the audience at alert during his number too...but for different reasons. After he loses his clothes during a backstage tryst, he appears on stage on a unicycle with only his hat held to cover his...ahem. The audience finds and tosses him his clothes and he manages to completely re-dress while riding the unicycle and never once exposing himself. It was a riot. 

Sophie's Surprise 29th was great fun and I could totally see it being a destination show for birthday and bachelorette parties if it goes beyond Fringe. 

The show runs until August 26 at Underbelly’s Circus Hub on the Meadows. Check out photos in the gallery below and find out more about the show here.

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Photos: Go Inside Sophie's Surprise 29th at Edinburgh Festival Fringe

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