Commissioned by the New York Philharmonic and premiered in 2018, Julia Wolfe’s Fire in my mouth is a multi-sensory oratorio written to commemorate the 146 workers who perished in a factory fire in what was the deadliest industrial disaster in New York’s history. Scored for orchestra and female chorus, each voice part represents an individual worker who died, most of them Jewish or Italian immigrants.

Amy Gledhill won the Don and Eleanor Taffner Best Comedy Show, the main award at the 2024 Edinburgh Comedy Awards for Make Me Look Fit on the Poster. The show has variously been described as “bawdy comedy delivered with a blush”, “a funny woman rightly confident of her comedy talents” and “a brilliant physical comedian”.

Accepting her award, Gledhill said: “This is insane. I saw the other people on this list and I thought, 'I don't have to write a script!'”

L’Addition, Summerhall ★★★★ 

Pete Waterman, responsible (some might prefer the word guilty) for more than 100 Top 40 hits, said that a pop song is the hardest thing to write. Boy meets girl; boy loses girl; boy gets girl back – all wrapped up in three minutes. Benedict Lombe’s Shifters takes longer – 33 Kylies longer – but it pulls off the same devilishly difficult trick and, as with the best earworms of the 1980s, it’s likely to stay in your head for years.  

The book by Tilar Mazzeo on which Thomas Napper's film is based is subtitled “The Story of a Champagne Empire and the Woman Who Ruled it”, though one suspects that the life of Barbe-Nicole Ponsardin was a little less Mills & Boon-ish than the version seen here.

I had been softened up for the Medicine Festival by a recent visit to the global music extravaganza WOMAD – a trio of us met a guy called Paul aka SpriITman – an ex-IT expert who after a health crisis realised he was a healer. Bear with me on this.

Hugh Masekela used to give advice for concerts like this one: “If you haven’t got tickets, turn yourself into a cockroach.” Every seat for Aurora Orchestra’s Beethoven’s Ninth by Heart Prom had already sold out on the first morning when season booking opened back in May, and the queue for returns at the Royal Albert Hall last night must have had well over a hundred people in it.

Before the Plays That Went Wrong and the multi-role six-hander Operation Mincemeat, there was Patrick Barlow’s adaptation of The 39 Steps: four actors on a collision course with feasibility.

Strange noises fill the crisp nighttime air in a small Alpine village: Avian shrieks and some wild beast a-rustling in the hedgerows – or are those the screams of a desperate woman?

Into the strange, scary, funny world of Cuckoo comes a British-American family that has upped sticks and packed the entire household – dad, stepmom, and little daughter – to rural Bavaria, where the father will be renovating the local spa-resort.

REVENGE: After the Levoyah, Summerhall ★★★★★