Latest news with #FrancescaMoody
Scotsman
01-08-2025
- Entertainment
- Scotsman
How to build a shed in 12 days, from College of Art to Fringe venue
This video More videos Shedinburgh has transformed the Wee Red Bar and outdoor courtyard into an Edinburgh Festival Fringe venue in less than two weeks. Keep up with the latest new videos with the Shots! Newsletter. Sign up Thank you for signing up! Did you know with a Digital Subscription to The Scotsman, you can get unlimited access to the website including our premium content, as well as benefiting from fewer ads, loyalty rewards and much more. Learn More Sorry, there seem to be some issues. Please try again later. Submitting... It started out as a remote venue created during the Covid pandemic to bring Edinburgh Festival Fringe artists together. Now, Shedinburgh, a new venue created by Baby Reindeer and Fleabag producer Francesca Moody, has launched for this year's Fringe at the Edinburgh College of Art's Wee Red Bar. Advertisement Hide Ad Advertisement Hide Ad The Scotsman has filmed a time-lapse video of the build of the venue over a 12-day period. Watch here to see how a Fringe venue is created, while we also speak to Shedinburgh producer Darcy Dobson about creating a venue in less than two weeks. Arts and culture correspondent Jane Bradley interviews producer Francesca Moody at the launch of her new Shedinburgh venue. | Scotsman 'The secret to building a Fringe venue in two weeks is don't build it in two weeks,' Ms Dobson said. 'The venue was conceived in the pandemic five years ago and the idea behind it was to let storytelling shine and when we came to build this venue, that was really our North Star for all of this, about supporting artists and letting storytelling sing.'
Scotsman
01-08-2025
- Entertainment
- Scotsman
Watch: The Scotsman at the Edinburgh Festivals episode one - Baby Reindeer, Shedinburgh and the Tattoo
The Scotsman at the Edinburgh festivals will run regularly throughout August. Sign up to our Arts and Culture newsletter, get the latest news and reviews from our specialist arts writers Sign up Thank you for signing up! Did you know with a Digital Subscription to The Scotsman, you can get unlimited access to the website including our premium content, as well as benefiting from fewer ads, loyalty rewards and much more. Learn More Sorry, there seem to be some issues. Please try again later. Submitting... Welcome to our first edition of The Scotsman at the Edinburgh festivals. We have a jam-packed first video show for you, speaking to performers and producers as the first week of the Edinburgh Festival Fringe kicks off. Advertisement Hide Ad Advertisement Hide Ad Arts and culture correspondent Jane Bradley is speaking to Fleabag and Baby Reindeer producer Francesca Moody, at the launch of her new venue, Shedinburgh, at the Edinburgh College of Art, as well as comedian Dion Owen, who has brought his free bike loan scheme for performers to Edinburgh for the third year. Meanwhile, reporter Rachel Fergusson has been at the launch of this year's Royal Edinburgh Military Tattoo. The launch of new Fringe venue Shedinburgh on Friday morning. | Scotsman We also bring you interviews with comedians, including Melania Trump impersonator Laura Benanti, from outside the US Consulate in Edinburgh.
The Guardian
25-07-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
Fleabag and Baby Reindeer superproducer Francesca Moody: ‘The next best play can come from anywhere'
Francesca Moody's name is a sign to pay attention. The Olivier-winning producer discovered the plays that led to two of the most successful TV shows in recent memory: Fleabag and Baby Reindeer. If a show has Moody's backing, it has a higher-than-average chance of soaring to success. But as Moody's recognition has grown, so has the pressure to create a hit. 'That is exciting,' she cautions as we slip into a small glass-walled room in her office off London's Leicester Square. She looks surprisingly calm given the restaurants' worth of plates she's spinning. 'But it's also terrifying. The stakes are higher than they used to be.' She's busy unleashing a new set of shows across the US and UK – including an entire miniature festival at the Edinburgh fringe – and has another Netflix show in development. Risk is part of the producing game, and Moody's threshold is high. She hadn't raised the money for Richard Gadd's Baby Reindeer until the week it was due to go on at the Edinburgh fringe in 2019. At that point, she didn't have much of a buffer for the money not coming through. 'I don't know what I would have done,' she concedes. These days, she has greater financial stability. But there's also more hanging in the balance. 'It's our company's money,' she says, 'our investors' money, and ultimately my name.' Moody now runs her own production company, Francesca Moody Productions, which has a knack, as she puts it, for 'finding unusual, kooky, sometimes auteur-led work that doesn't always immediately feel commercial'. It currently has nearly a dozen scripts at various stages of development, plus a film in the works and a first-look deal with Phoebe Waller-Bridge's production company. 'There are a few ideas on our plate now that we're just itching to get in the room,' Moody says. The list sounds exhausting, but she seems energised. Failures do happen. 'Things go wrong every day,' she says, 'on the good stuff, too.' But some mishaps are more marked than others. 'We had a musical called Berlusconi,' a cautionary tale about the former Italian PM, 'which was universally panned by critics.' She says it casually; this job demands rolling with the punches. 'I stand by the boldness of the idea, and it was such a collegiate group of creatives, it was almost comical that it didn't hit in the way we were expecting it to.' Good or bad, the role is all-consuming. Moody admits to an 'almost unhealthy relationship' with her work. 'It's so much more than a job,' she explains, searching for the right description for what fuels her. ''Vocation' sounds horribly wanky, but it's so all-defining. It would be really hard for me to unpick who I am without this.' And how does she spot a hit? She talks about intuition. 'I always think Fleabag is a great example of trusting your gut.' She first met Waller-Bridge and Fleabag's director Vicky Jones in Soho Joe, a now-defunct pizza place next to London's Soho theatre, to discuss producing a play they had commissioned. 'I remember it as a whirlwind of ideas,' says Moody. She was nervous and Waller-Bridge made her laugh. When she later heard about a short piece Waller-Bridge had written, which eventually became Fleabag, she leapt at the chance to work with her. 'I knew that Phoebe was an incredible actor who could spin comedy and tragedy on a dime,' she says. She locked Waller-Bridge in a room until she finished Fleabag. Her nose has continued to serve her well. She first read the script for Baby Reindeer on a train and didn't get off until she'd reached the last page. And it only took one song for her to fall in love with Jon Brittain and Matthew Floyd Jones's comedy musical Kathy and Stella Solve a Murder!, which leapt from the fringe to the West End. 'You have to start with: Do I love this show? Is it like anything else I've ever seen before? You have to be 100% all in.' As with most of her hits, the Edinburgh fringe was the birthplace for Weather Girl, Brian Watkins' unsettling climate-comedy, which sees a weather reporter smiling her way through the apocalypse. This prophetic eco-monologue played in Edinburgh in 2024, sold out at Soho theatre earlier this year, and is soon transferring to St Ann's Warehouse in New York. On first reading, Moody says, 'it hooked me'. But she knew it needed work. Her team helped to guide it into what it is now: an absurd comedy that quickly tumbles into giddy climate disaster. 'I always try to think about the audience and whether they will connect with a character, so my notes on Weather Girl were largely bound up in that – but it was all there at the beginning,' she says. The show is currently in development with Netflix – and may well be another next big thing. On the other side of the world at the Edinburgh fringe, Moody is ushering in a new roster of shows. 'Edinburgh's not a place to be making money,' Moody says. 'It's a place to be investing.' This year, her investments include three shows and an entire month-long festival-within-the-festival. The first show is Ohio, an autobiographical folk drama by married couple and award-winning musicians the Bengsons, which gathered a keen following in the US and already has a transfer to south London's Young Vic planned. She's also bringing Seiriol Davies' camp historical musical How to Win Against History back to the fringe. (It started there nearly a decade ago.) Her third show is Garry Starr: Classic Penguins. 'It's the best version of clowning I've seen,' Moody says, 'and the most beautiful holding of an audience through quite exposing audience interaction.' She compares it to Julia Masli's cult hit, ha ha ha ha ha ha ha. In recent years, Moody's name has become synonymous with success at the festival. 'We understand the conditions you need to facilitate a sense of something being exciting,' Moody asserts. 'That's 25% of the way there, in terms of building a bit of a hit.' A producer has to create more demand than a show can satisfy, she says. That means choosing a small enough venue that you can sell a show out and create a buzz. Sign up to Inside Saturday The only way to get a look behind the scenes of the Saturday magazine. Sign up to get the inside story from our top writers as well as all the must-read articles and columns, delivered to your inbox every weekend. after newsletter promotion Next comes the image: 'In a world that seems to be increasingly obsessed by star-led revivals or existing bits of adapted IP, you have to make a show feel like its own bit of original IP.' She points to Weather Girl. The eye-catching marketing image, of the lead actor's grinning face drowning in a pool of bright red, did a lot of work to make the new show recognisable. Perhaps most exciting is Moody's upcoming collective endeavour. As her company grows, she worries about 'not being in the weeds in the same way I used to be, creatively'. To rectify this, she wants to get back to her roots in fringe theatre and support artists in this prohibitively expensive climate. 'I came up through the fringe at a time just before it started to get really difficult to make work there,' she says. 'You couldn't make a show any more in the way we made Fleabag in 2013. Our two-bed flat was like £2,000 for the month. You'd be hard pressed to find that for less than six or seven grand now.' After many conversations about the difficulties of producing work, Moody decided to 'put our money where our mouth is'. The result is Shedinburgh. Originally conceived with writer and performer Gary McNair and producer Harriet Bolwell during the pandemic, it started as a digital festival where shows were livestreamed from two small sheds in London and Edinburgh. This year, they're turning the idea into an intimate, 100-seat live venue for the duration of the fringe. 'It was too good an idea to let go of,' she says. The programme is eclectic, with the 'shed-ule' consisting of one-off performances of old and new work from the likes of Sophie Duker, Maimuna Memon and Christopher Brett Bailey. Paying artists' travel, accommodation, plus a fee or a box office split, whichever is higher – an inversion of the typical method at the fringe – the project is made possible by investors who believe in its ethos. 'We wanted to imagine a bit of a utopia,' Moody reasons. 'It's a love letter to the fringe.' The fringe used to feel like a level playing field. 'Once you're there, the literary manager at the National Theatre can see your show. The theatre critic at the Guardian can see it. I can see it. Now, it's so much harder to just get there.' She places these struggles against wider concerns about the 'death of fringe theatre' – particularly with the recent cancellation of London's Vault festival – where so much emerging work begins. Shedinburgh is determinedly creating opportunities in spite of these difficulties. 'Theatre is my first love,' Moody says. 'We want to reinvigorate that sense that the next best play can come from anywhere, and inspire others to do the same.' Shedinburgh runs 1 to 24 August; Ohio is at Assembly Roxy, Upstairs, 30 July to 24 August; How to Win Against History is at Underbelly, George Square, 30 July to 24 August.
Time Out
07-07-2025
- Entertainment
- Time Out
Ohio
A cult hit in the US, this autobiographical musical two-hander is based around the real lives of married indie folk duo The Bengsons, specifically Shaun's rejection of his religious faith and embrace of his hearing loss. It's produced by Francesca Moody – unerring queen of the most zeitgeisty recent Fringe hits, including Fleabag and Baby Reindeer – and has a transfer to the Young Vic already pencilled in, so expect big things.
The Guardian
10-06-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
‘Stupider than everyone else': one comic's semi-naked bid to perform dozens of Penguin novels
Comedy smash-hits come in all shapes and sizes. You've got your standup, your sketch – and then there are those shows in which semi-naked Australians impersonate penguins to dramatise the western literary canon. Such is Garry Starr: Classic Penguins by 43-year-old goofball Damien Warren-Smith, which delighted Edinburgh last summer, then hoovered up awards on the Australian festival circuit. After winning the prestigious Best Show gong at Melbourne's Comedy festival ('for me that's a Commonwealth gold,' says Warren-Smith, 'and Edinburgh's the Olympics'), this unlike-anything-else comedy set is now returning to the UK, picked up by fringe super-producer Francesca (Fleabag) Moody and expanded for bigger audiences. The show, which animates a bookshelf full of Penguin classics in 60 minutes, is not a complete departure for its host. Yet another graduate of celebrated French clown school Ecole Philippe Gaulier, Warren-Smith's first stunt was to showcase every theatre style in under an hour (Garry Starr Performs Everything, 2018), and his second was to bring all of Greek mythology to life in the same timeframe. It's a simple formula, as he admits: 'Choose a highbrow topic that most people know quite a lot about, then just get it wrong – which makes me stupider than everybody else.' Garry, according to his creator, isn't a character, he's just 'the most enthusiastic but slightly less intelligent version of myself. He's like me if I had no inhibitions.' In Classic Penguins, that 'eternal optimist and over-reacher' turns his attention towards great books. Clad in tailcoat, flippers and alarmingly little else, our lanky host performs one inexplicable stunt onstage after another – then explains them by revealing the title of the next book off his paperback pile. 'I was in a Perth bookshop two years ago,' he says, 'and happened to notice those beautiful, aesthetically appealing orange and cream spines on the shelf, and the penny dropped. I was like, 'Oh my God, it's got to be [my next show].' I called my producer straight away. I then put together a list of over 100 books, and went through it giving them the Garry treatment. What is the one thing I know about this book already? Frankenstein builds a monster, say. And what could Garry get wrong about it?' Watching the show, the pleasure is intense as you puzzle out Garry's doofus misinterpretation, what bizarre visual gag or literary pun is now unfolding in front of you. But what flips the show from bookish brain-tease into raise-the-roof party-comedy is the involvement of its audience. 'I never made a conscious decision to push things as far as I could [with audience participation],' says Warren-Smith, on Zoom from Oz. 'But being on my own, I wanted to play with people.' Being on his own wasn't always the plan: Warren-Smith has variously worked as an actor, and as part of the clown troupe A Plague of Idiots. His solo career began, reluctantly, when they disbanded. 'So now, if I had an idea for a scene that needed two people – well, I couldn't pay someone to be a plant. So I'd just ask audience members to help.' In Classic Penguins, spectators are duly invited to be shot, tied to the floor, to manhandle our naked host, and join him in bringing Rudyard Kipling's Jungle Book to very improbable life. That latter scene is one of Warren-Smith's favourites, for reasons I can't reveal without spoilers. Another is his Wind in the Willows skit, the 'puerile' (his word) content of which you can probably guess. 'There's about 30% of the audience who just can't control themselves after that.' What concerns its creator, now the show (and his career) is scaling up, is whether he can keep his percentages that high. 'When I saw Ricky Gervais in a stadium, it was completely un-thrilling. If the only way to make money is live, and you have to get bigger to do it – or stay smaller and charge more – that doesn't interest me. I'd rather continue to make work my way and not be famous or wealthy.' I suspect there might be a middle way, for an act – and a show – whose potency certainly won't be limited to small rooms. That would be good news for Warren-Smith, because 'for 45 minutes after every show as Garry, I am just buzzing. Every single show, I have to pinch myself, because when I was an actor I never found that kind of freedom and pleasure.' But if all else fails, Classic Penguins may have opened up other professional avenues. 'On the last night in Edinburgh, this woman came up to me and said, 'Have you read all these books? Do you read a lot? Would you be interested in being a judge for the Booker prize?' I was like, 'Aah, yeah, sure. Drop me an email!' Thinking this was maybe a crazy person.' He's since been told it was legit. 'And had I not dismissed it quite so much,' he says, just a little wistfully, 'maybe I could be a Booker judge by now …' Classic Penguins is at Soho theatre, London, from 14-26 July, then at Underbelly George Square, Edinburgh, from 30 July to 24 August
