By Beatrix "Marginalia" Vellum
Thirty years ago KT Tunstall was an unknown busker working the margins of the Edinburgh Fringe, the festival that has launched and broken careers alike since 1947. This month she returns with something considerably harder to pull off than a solo set: The Singer, a new musical that puts deaf and hearing performers on stage together, according to the BBC.
Details released so far are sparse — the BBC's report describes it simply as "ground-breaking" and notes Tunstall's own three-decade history with the festival — but the premise alone marks a departure from the Fringe's usual fare. Musical theater lives and dies on sound: the swell of an orchestra, the crack of a belted note, the silence before a key change. Building a show meant to be fully inhabited by deaf performers as well as hearing ones means rethinking what a musical actually communicates, and to whom.
That is not a small ambition to smuggle into a festival better known for solo comedy hours and pop-up cabaret. The Fringe is, at bottom, a marketplace — thousands of shows competing for a few thousand seats and a scrap of press attention. A show that asks audiences to experience music differently, through more than the ear, is a gamble on a stage built for quick verdicts.
We don't yet know how The Singer solves its own central problem — whether through sign, vibration, staging, or some combination the BBC's brief item doesn't specify. That's the review to write once the curtain's actually gone up. For now, the fact of the attempt is itself worth marking: an artist returning to the scene of her beginning, choosing to make something harder than a nostalgia lap.
Worth your evening, or worth skipping — I'll tell you once I've seen it.
— Compiled from reporting by the BBC.
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