Playbill Pick Review: The Weird Sisters at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe

Playbill Pick Review: The Weird Sisters at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe

This punchy power-pop infused new musical is destined to be a family friendly favorite.

The Edinburgh Festival Fringe is the biggest arts festival in the world, with over 3,700 shows. This year, Playbill is in town 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 letting you know what we think of them. Consider these reviews a friendly, opinionated guide as you try to choose a show at the festival.

New musicals are hard. New musicals are especially hard on the Fringe, where tight turnaround times, low budgets, and an overwhelming stew of publicity make word-of-mouth singlehandedly the most important determining factor of a production’s success. While most new commercial musicals can spend years building word-of-mouth behind the scenes while in development, new Fringe musicals are shot out of a cannon, with just one month to establish themselves if they aren’t starring known celebrities from the jump.

While many fail to stick the landing, every so often, the impossible happens. Such a wonder is currently happening deep in the Cowgate catacombs at the new family friendly musical The Weird Sisters.

Embracing grief and girlhood through some surprisingly catchy tunes by the cleverly talented Eliza Waters, The Weird Sisters is destined to become a cult classic three-hander in community and repertory companies across both sides of the pond. Gen Z may have latched onto “Dead Mom” from Beetlejuice the Musical, but if Waters plays her cards right, Gen Alpha may be belting out “In the Inbetween” with equal abandon in a few years. 

The premise of the new musical is simple; three sisters, Amaranth (the perfectionist, a potions master), Scarlett (the snarky one, a necromancer), and Blush (the WitchTok one, a crystal expert) have invited you to join their coven, once the most powerful in all of Cordova. With the memory of their recently deceased mother and coven leader looming (played quite humorously by a framed photo of Meryl Streep as Miranda Priestly in The Devil Wears Prada), the group initiation spell goes awry, transporting everyone within the theatre space to Edinburgh, where the sisters powers slowly wane until they rediscover the healing power of sisterhood and sharing their burdens.

Look, the show isn’t going to win a Pulitzer. The musical could do with some tightening, Amaranth’s solo song needs a fresher lyric, and the Myrtle side plot can be excised entirely. But that isn’t the point. Regardless of the tweaks any early-life musical inevitably needs, The Weird Sisters is just plain fun. With an audience ranging from about the ages of 7 to 70, it was a straight hour of smiles, laughs, and yes, even a few tears.

When Blush grapples with how her people-pleasing tendencies are been taken advantage of in her song “Powerless,” a young teen in the audience could be seen gripping their mother’s hand so tightly that her knuckles turned white. As Amaranth, the eldest, struggles to set aside her own pain to become the family leader in the wake of their mothers passing, sniffles could be heard throughout the room. And when Scarlett (played by the luminously talented Lowri Jayne Rees) lets go of her snarky attitude to reveal the wayward power of her grief, I felt the same audience shift that I felt at one of Beetlejuice‘s first public presentations. 

Being a teenage girl is hard. Being a traumatized teenage girl is even harder. Teen girls are often scrambling for something, anything that makes them feel seen and heard, accepting the hurricane of emotions inside them instead of pressuring them to “grow up and put on a brave face.” In a world that often simplifies the concept of teenage girlhood to crushes, bullies, and physical changes, The Weird Sisters is a shining new addition to the growing canon of musicals that give voice to the teens who are sick and tired to being told what they need, but who can’t quite figure out what they want. 

It’s messy, emotional, and oh-so-satisfying. I almost look forward to the hundreds of “In the Inbetween” audition cuts.

Weird Sisters runs at Just The Tonic at The Caves through August 25. Click here for tickets.