5 days ago
- Entertainment
- Edinburgh Reporter
Fringe 2025 – Del Valle – A True Tale of Sex, Drugs, Rock and Roll…and Redemption ⭐⭐⭐⭐
A journey of acting and addiction from Texas to Hollywood, to the Chelsea Hotel and back to a Texas prison cell
This show is written and performed by Ned Van Zandt. It is a darkly comic memoir that charts Van Zandt's extraordinary life from teenage acting star to the drug-fuelled chaos of 1970s New York, and eventually the harsh realities of incarceration. This isn't typical Fringe fare – it's a masterpiece that pulls no punches and could be expected to be performed at the International Festival.
Van Zandt has worked with Jane Fonda in Coming Home as 'a soldier boy'. He nearly became Luke Skywalker – 'but didn't'. Van Zandt name drops his way through his career, and tells us how he arrived in New York to escape from the West Coast. He was in The Marvellous Mrs Maisel..
Once in the Big Apple he lived on the ninth floor of the Chelsea Hotel. There he became friends and a supplier of drugs to Sid Vicious and Nancy Spungen. He visited them on the fateful night that Nancy was stabbed to death. Did Sid kill her? You will find out that Van Zandt knows more.
The performance follows Van Zandt's descent through Hollywood addiction to his unlikely imprisonment in Del Valle, a Texas state prison, where he finds himself giving acting lessons (and sexual favours) to the Junior Grand Dragon of the Texas Aryan Brotherhood in exchange for protection.
Ned Van Zandt has mastered the delivery of a solo performance, and this show will take your through all the emotions – it's entertaining, it's funny, its sad, its frightening – but most of all it is great entertainment.
Venue: 302
Dairy Room at Underbelly, Bristo Square
Time: 14.55
Tickets here
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