Category: 5. Entertainment

It’s beyond a joke for pun-lovers. The traditional list of the funniest gags at the Edinburgh fringe, presented by the TV channel U&Dave, has been scrapped for 2025.

A statement from UKTV, which owns the channel formerly known as Dave, said: “U&Dave’s Joke of the Fringe was originally created to celebrate and spotlight grassroots comedy talent. As our commissioning focus evolves, we’re taking the opportunity to reflect on how we continue to support comedy in the best way possible.”

The award was launched in 2008 and has been held every year since apart from during the Covid-19 pandemic. Last year, Mark Simmons won for his nautical one-liner “I was going to sail around the globe in the world’s smallest ship but I bottled it”. The shortlist of jokes was chosen by a panel of UK comedy critics and comedians, then submitted anonymously to 2,000 members of the public who were asked to pick their favourites. Upon winning last year’s prize, Simmons said: “I needed some good news as I was just fired from my job marking exam papers, can’t understand it, I always gave 110%.”

Previous victors include Masai Graham (three times), Tim Vine (twice) and Olaf Falafel (a regular on the shortlist). Lorna Rose Treen, the second woman to win the award, triumphed in 2023 for the joke “I started dating a zookeeper, but it turned out he was a cheetah.” Treen later said that when she later performed the joke in her show, an audience member “shouted along … It was like I was a band!”

The annual pun-heavy list of jokes brings gripes as well as groans, for not capturing the full spectrum of comedy on offer at the Edinburgh fringe. “It’s a welcome addition to the fun of the festival,” wrote the Guardian’s comedy critic Brian Logan in 2012. “But by suggesting that the immeasurable range of Edinburgh comedy can be captured by these few words on a printed page, it sells the wild world of comedy short.” The festival’s most prestigious prize is the Edinburgh comedy award (formerly known as the Perrier), now in its 43rd year. Last summer it was won by Amy Gledhill.

UKTV’s statement on the cancellation of the joke of the fringe continued: “While we’re resting the award this year, we remain committed to championing great comedy across U&Dave and beyond, and we’ll always look for ways to bring laughter to audiences in exciting ways.”

Within hours of the announcement, the production company Need to Know Comedy announced that it was reviving its (Some Guy Called) Dave award, previously held during the pandemic. It called for fringe acts to email five one-liners from their show, with the winner receiving £250. The Edinburgh fringe officially begins on 1 August, with some comedians starting previews later this month.

Mark Horowitz had done his homework before Stephen Sondheim came to visit. He filled the room with scores by Bartók, Brahms, Copland and Rachmaninoff; manuscripts in the hand of Bernstein and Rodgers and Hammerstein. “The last thing I brought him out was the manuscript for Gershwin’s Porgy and Bess,” Horowitz recalls. “That’s when he started to cry.”

The “show and tell” of Sondheim’s favourite composers, mentors and collaborators at the Library of Congress in Washington DC in 1993 planted a seed. It convinced him, Horowitz believes, that his papers would be in good company at the world’s biggest library. “Shortly after that he said he was going to be changing his will and he in fact did. He sent me a printout of the paragraph in his will that left his manuscripts and things to the library.”

Sondheim died in 2021 at the age of 91 and his bequest is now fulfilled. The library has acquired about 5,000 items including manuscripts, music and lyric drafts, recordings, notebooks, and scrapbooks that provide an unrivalled window to the mind of the man some called the Shakespeare of musical theatre.

Among them are hundreds of music and lyric sketches of Sondheim’s well-known works as well as drafts of songs that were cut from shows or never made it to a production’s first rehearsal. Dozens of scrapbooks hold theatre programmes, clippings and opening night telegrams.

On a Tuesday afternoon, the Guardian is ushered into the library’s inner sanctum for another Horowitz “show and tell”. The senior music specialist has laid several cardboard boxes on a table, opening them to reveal sheet music and other papers graced by Sondheim’s pencil.

“I love his hand, which I think is just gorgeous,” observes Horowitz, a longtime admirer and acquaintance of the winner of eight Tony awards, including a special Tony for lifetime achievement. “This intimacy with the process is a privilege and a great pleasure.”

Sitting prominently are weathered spiral notebooks documenting some of Sondheim’s musical efforts while a student at Williams College in Williamstown, Massachusetts. There are music exercises, tunes and early compositions like the sheet music from his college musical, Phinney’s Rainbow, along with a programme from his high school musical, By George, written when he was 15.

The crown jewels are manuscripts for some of Sondheim’s most celebrated shows including Company, Follies, Sweeney Todd and Into the Woods, as well as lesser-known works such as his plays and screenplays.

Horowitz flicks through a thick folder containing 40 pages of lyric sketches for A Little Priest, a duet where Sweeney, the demon barber of Fleet Street, and Mrs Lovett gleefully plan to dispose of his murder victims by baking their flesh into pies to sell at Mrs Lovett’s failing pie shop. It uses clever wordplay and puns about professions and social classes, imagining how 31 different flavours would suit various pies.

Here is a master wordsmith at work. “One of the things he writes in the margins is lists of people who might be baked into the pies: cook, butler, page, sailor, tailor, actor, barber, driver, crier, gigolo. I went through the pages and counted them and I came up with 158 different professions that he considered as types of people.”

Horowitz points to an abandoned idea: “Somewhere on this page is rabbi and the thing I get a kick out of is that then, a few pages later, he actually turns it into a couplet: ‘Everybody shaves except rabbis and riff-raff’.”

Horowitz reaches into a box and produces lyric sketches for Send in the Clowns from A Little Night Music, along with a one-page inner monologue written as subtext for the character Desirée when she sings it. The most popular song that Sondheim ever wrote was also one of the quickest to turn around.

Horowitz explains: “Basically in 24 hours he wrote his hit song whereas for most of his songs it took about two weeks, certainly for the longer numbers. There are 40 pages of sketches for Priest; I think there are nine pages here for Send in the Clowns.

“One of the reasons was they’d already been in rehearsal so he knew almost everything about the show and particularly about Glynis Johns and her voice. He always described it as a light, silvery voice, which was very pleasant but she couldn’t sustain notes.

“He wrote it specifically for her voice. It’s very short phrases, which is why they’re questions. ‘Isn’t it rich? Are we a pair?’ They cut off quickly. It was written for this character, for this place in the show, for this actress, for this voice, and knowing all that made it much easier than it would be otherwise.”

The volume of work for each show seemed to increase, from three sheet music boxes for Company to nine for Sunday in the Park with George and 12 for Into the Woods. “I don’t know if it was because things got harder for him or he was more hard on himself,” Horowitz observes.

“There’s no question that he was literally a genius but seeing the vast amount of perspiration in addition to the inspiration – it’s one thing to be witty and clever but to see how much went into refining and making everything as perfect and specific as possible is sort of staggering.”

The collection also contains materials related to Sondheim’s plays and screenplays, such as draft scripts for The Last of Sheila, and a commercial he wrote for The Simpsons when he was a guest on the show. Three boxes of specialty songs include birthday songs he wrote for friends Leonard Bernstein, Hal Prince and others.

There are drafts of variations on the lyrics to I’m Still Here from Follies that Sondheim wrote for the singer and actor Barbra Streisand at her request. Horowitz rummages through a folder to find a 1993 fax from Streisand listing personal traits she wanted included such as “my name – shorten it”, “nails – too long”, “perfectionist”, “opinionated – big mouth”, “feminist”, “liberal”, “don’t want to perform live”. He comments: “She’s being fairly candid here about the things that people criticise her for and suggesting he include them in what he writes.”

Sondheim primarily worked with pencil and paper for his music and lyric writing, even though he was “very computer proficient” and at one point considered writing video games. He made his first donation to the library in 1995: a vast record collection of about 13,000 albums accompanied by a hand-typed card catalogue. He also sat for a series of interviews with Horowitz in 1997.

To Horowitz, who produced a 70th birthday celebration concert for Sondheim in 2000, he was the artist who made him believe that musical theatre was “something important and something worthy of a life’s study and a life’s pursuit”. He was always intimidated by Sondheim in person but found him to be unfailingly kind and generous.

He has fond memories of working on a production of Merrily We Roll Along at Arena Stage in Washington DC in 1990. Sondheim borrowed Horowitz’s rhyming dictionary as he was writing new lyrics for some of the songs. “When he handed it back to me, he said, ‘Just so you know, I put in some missing words,’ which he had in fact done.”

Recalling another incident from that production, he says: “They had just done a run through with the orchestra and he was talking in the house to the producer, who was a very intimidating fellow I did not particularly like, and one of the musicians came up and was standing by the side, waiting very patiently, but this producer whipped around and said: ‘Yes, what do you want?’

“The guy said: ‘I’m sorry, I was just wondering if there’s going to be another run through without the orchestra so I can sit and see the show?’ The producer was very dismissive and said: ‘I don’t know, we’ll see.’ Sondheim whipped around and said, ‘How dare you? Do you know how lucky you are that you have a musician who cares and wants to see the show?’ This guy withered a bit and it was very gratifying to me.”

Horowitz credits Sondheim with changing the perception of musical theatre in academia. Previously “looked down upon by music departments and theatre departments”, Sondheim’s work has led to “an explosion of scholarship in musical theatre” because it “is that important and that good and that serious”.

The Library of Congress aims to be a one-stop shop for researchers. The Sondheim collection joins existing archives of collaborators and mentors such as Leonard Bernstein, Oscar Hammerstein II and Richard Rodgers. Sondheim encouraged Hal Prince and Arthur Laurents to donate their collections to the library. The Jonathan Larson collection includes notes from Sondheim’s feedback.

Yet the precious Sondheim collection was nearly lost. In 1995, there was a fire in his home office at 246 East 49th Street in New York, where the manuscripts were kept in cardboard boxes on wooden shelves.

Horowitz recalls: “When I went back afterwards, if you lifted the manuscripts out of the boxes, there were singe marks outlining where the paper sat in the boxes. Even now, as we’re going through the collection, we’re finding smoke damage on the edges of manuscript. Why they didn’t go up in flames, I don’t know. It truly is the closest I’ve ever seen in my life to a miracle.”

A new photograph of Prince George has been issued by Kensington Palace to mark his 12th birthday.

The photo of the smiling prince was published on social media with a message from his parents, the Prince and Princess of Wales, which read “Happy 12th Birthday to Prince George!” alongside a birthday cake emoji.

The picture, with a rural setting, was taken in Norfolk earlier this year by photographer Josh Shinner.

George, the eldest son of Prince William and Catherine, is second in line to the throne.

There has been speculation over where George will go for secondary school next year and whether he will follow in his father’s footsteps and go to Eton College, a private school where entry usually begins at the age of 13.

Prince William and Catherine have made efforts to create as much of a normal family life as possible, in their home at Adelaide Cottage on the Windsor estate.

But his childhood has been within a family living in the public spotlight.

The young prince was seen with his parents at this year’s Wimbledon tennis championships and he was on the balcony at Buckingham Palace for the Trooping the Colour flypast.

During celebrations to mark the 80th anniversary of VE Day, Prince George met veterans at a tea party in Buckingham Palace, hearing their first-hand stories.

He has also been experiencing the highs and lows of being a football supporter, going to see Aston Villa with his father Prince William.

A spate of Macbeths will hit the Edinburgh festival this month, all of which bring a novel spin on Shakespeare’s Scottish play. There’s Macbeth: The Musical, accompanied by pop classics, and Macbeth for Bairns, a sensory children’s version with bubbles. But the most leftfield must be an award-winning show that has taken the Australian fringe circuit by storm.

As mashups go, Lady Macbeth Played Wing Defence is nothing if not high-wire. It’s a black comedy musical, which takes place on a netball court and features a seven-strong team of teen players, one of whom, Mac Beth, is a latter-day Lady M with vaulting ambitions of becoming Year 12 netball champion. The witches are a girl band called the Dagger Divas who goad her towards her goal, by any means necessary.

Created and performed by an all-female creative team, Crash Theatre Co’s production debuted at Perth fringe festival in 2024 and arrives in Scotland as part of the House of Oz season. It has been compared to both Six the Musical, which started out at the Edinburgh fringe, and the Australian musical Fangirls, which had its London premiere last year. Its writer, Courtney McManus, who is also co-lyricist and performs the role of the team’s coach, works as an English teacher at an Australian school. She had noticed a lack of interest in Shakespeare among students and set out to encourage teenagers to connect with the tragedy.

“In the English departments I’ve worked in, these texts are the ones on the shelves that have dust on them … If I said to my students ‘Who’s Shakespeare?’ they probably wouldn’t be able to tell you because it’s just not that relevant to them. That was key in my thinking: ‘how do I make Shakespeare accessible and relevant?’”

Macbeth has always been her favourite Shakespeare play but her family has more of a passion for sport. “So for me it was about ‘how can I get people invested in Shakespeare?’” As soon as she had the idea to set it in the world of netball, she knew it had to be a musical, with bass, synths and athleticism combined. Bec Price composed its electro-pop score and co-wrote the lyrics (she directs the show, too) with influences from Lady Gaga, Kylie Minogue and Charli xcx – but with added sporting elements. Price sampled the sound of netball trainers on a court for one of the show’s main songs, Pick Your Player.

“Synths are my favourite instruments in the whole world because they’re so layered,” says Price. “So when the girls came to me to write the music I thought ‘I’m going to make it a dance album’ and that’s exactly what they wanted … The vibe was that we wanted to make Shakespeare really cool and in the club … flashing lights and fast music with girls spinning around.”

The play’s themes transposed perfectly to the adrenaline-fuelled world of competitive netball, thinks McManus, and served as a way to explore young female ambition, rivalry and teamwork. “The way the characters have been written by me mirror my experiences with young people when they’re having their worst moments and when they’re having their best, too.” Importantly, Mac Beth is given a redemption arc, explains McManus: “Mac Beth still feels the guilt, she still suffers the consequences of her actions, but she has a road to redemption.”

The core message of the show revolves around the collective power of the team and the girls, rather than the individual power that Mac Beth craves. “We can take that message into the groups of women that surround us: we don’t need to be the biggest and the best. We just need to be supportive and supported.”

Price has worked as a youth mentor, running camps for young girls’ mental health. “I was really passionate about the word ‘bossy’ which is never used to describe a man. So what is being bossy? What is being ambitious? Let’s put it on a stage and have everything go wrong but still at the end this girl deserves love, and to be part of the team.”

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Peter Lobbenberg’s mother died in 1971, and made way for an extraordinary discovery of his family’s past.

Clearing out his mother’s desk, he found 22 letters of correspondence penned by his grandmother, Leonie ‘Lony’ Fraenkel. Lony was a German-Jewish exile who ran the Café de Paris in Amsterdam. Her letters illustrate the time of war and Nazi-occupation in Europe, with many of the letters addressed to Lobbenberg when he was a baby.

Years later, the letters form the text for a new work, Letters from Lony: a Holocaust Story, composed by Ronald Corps for mezzo-soprano, piano and string quartet.

‘My emotional connection came only much later, when I re-read them and realised Lony was pouring out her heart to me; of course, she was also keeping in touch with the family,’ said Lobbenberg.

Lony died in Auschwitz-Birkenau in October 1944. After finding the letters, Lobbenberg translated the text and asked Corps to set them to music, as a way to memorialise his grandmother he had never met, as well as the millions of others who shared her fate.

On writing the work, Corps said: ’I wanted the music to sound conversational but not too much like recitative. I felt the music had to have melody and I hope to have found a way of writing in an arioso style which brings Lony alive.

’I also had to be sensitive to the accompanying musical palette and to give the singer some respite during the cycle – hence the interludes, which also serve the purpose of helping the narrative to progress.

’The combination of string quartet and piano seemed to provide the fullest “orchestral” accompaniment without drowning the voice.’

The 70-minute work is divided into sections that represent different letters. Notably, one of the first numbers is a lullaby, which recurrs at the very end of the work, hummed by the singer as she walks offstage, to signify that Lony has perished in Auschwitz.

The work was first performed by the Chilingirian Quartet in 2017 at the Proms at St Jude’s. It will be performed at the 2025 Three Choirs Festival by Olivia Ray (mezzo-soprano), Sholto Kynoch (piano), Gildas Quartet on 1 August. The concert will be in memory of Corps, who died recently in May 2025.

The Three Choirs Festival runs from 26 July to 2 August 2025. Find out more here: https://3choirs.org/events/letters-from-lony-a-holocaust-story

In The Best of Technique you’ll discover the top playing tips of the world’s leading string players and teachers. It’s packed full of exercises for students, plus examples from the standard repertoire to show you how to integrate the technique into your playing.

In the second volume of The Strad’s Masterclass series, soloists including James Ehnes, Jennifer Koh, Philippe Graffin, Daniel Hope and Arabella Steinbacher give their thoughts on some of the greatest works in the string repertoire. Each has annotated the sheet music with their own bowings, fingerings and comments.

The Canada Council of the Arts’ Musical Instrument Bank is 40 years old in 2025. This year’s calendar celebrates some its treasures, including four instruments by Antonio Stradivari and priceless works by Montagnana, Gagliano, Pressenda and David Tecchler.

Billy Joel has opened up about his health, after cancelling his scheduled concerts mid-tour in May. At the time, the 76-year-old singer announced that he had been diagnosed with normal pressure hydrocephalus (NPH).

Speaking to Bill Maher on his Club Random podcast this week, Joel said he felt “good”.

“They keep referring to what I have as a brain disorder, so it sounds a lot worse than what I’m feeling,” he said. “I feel fine. My balance sucks. It’s like being on a boat.”

NPH is a condition in which excess cerebrospinal fluid accumulates in the brain’s ventricles, typically affecting balance and gait, cognitive function and bladder control. It primarily affects people over the age of 60, according to the Hydrocephalus Support Association.

In a statement on his Instagram account in May, Joel said his condition had been “exacerbated by recent concert performances, leading to problems with hearing, vision and balance”. He said he had cancelled the rest of his tour on medical advice, and was undergoing physical therapy.

Speaking to Maher, Joel said: “It’s not fixed. It’s still being worked on.”

Joel said he does not know what led to him developing NPH. “I thought it must be from drinking,” the Piano Man singer said, adding he doesn’t drink any more. “I used to – like a fish.”

Joel has not rescheduled his concert dates.

His interview with Maher focused on Billy Joel: And So It Goes, a two-part documentary premiering this week on HBO. Coming in at five hours, the documentary unpacks the Grammy award-winner’s extraordinary five-decade career and catalogue of music, which includes the hits Piano Man, Uptown Girl, We Didn’t Start the Fire and New York State of Mind. – Guardian

With festivals upon us and the tunes on high, memories will be made to music this summer. But what if that is a bad memory?

We would like to hear about the music that evokes a negative memory for you that you’d like to reclaim. What song do you prefer to avoid and why? Have you tried to associate it with better memories? And why does reclaiming that song matter to you?

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With his own particular kind of unhurried ceaselessness and murmuring calm, Korean auteur Hong Sang-soo has produced another of his elegant, discursive, low-key movies of the educated middle classes. These are movies so numerous and so obviously comparable to each other that they collectively constitute a kind of Balzacian Comédie Humaine, though on a more intimate scale. It will surprise none of Hong’s admirers to discover that this film once again shows us a series of conversations with familiar repertory players, informal one-on-one chats shot casually in available light, with people doing a vast amount of daytime drinking. Really, does any film-maker show characters getting quietly plastered as often and realistically as Hong?

It’s possible to feel simultaneously amused, bemused, intrigued and exasperated at Hong’s film-making, to wonder if the drinking and the consequent inevitable cathartic outburst are in fact cathartic or dramatically meaningful, to wonder what it is leading to. But arguably the enigma is the point. This movie lodged in my mind a little more than Hong’s earlier films, perhaps because it is less contrived and it features a genuinely funny and complex opening scene.

Donghwa (Ha Seong-guk) is an amiable but conceited man in his mid 30s who aspires to be a poet; it is quite clear that his wealthy lawyer father is bankrolling him, however much he claims to be independent. For three years, he has been dating Sunhee (Cho Yun-hee) though without ever meeting or apparently wanting to meet her parents. It is only when dropping her off at their house one day that he is prevailed upon to come in and meet them, while being astonished at how grand the house is (in the process revealing that he is more impressed by money than he would admit).

Sunhee’s father Oryeong (Hong regular Kwon Hae-hyo) is polite and blusteringly good humoured, though clearly nettled at Donghwa’s finally deigning to say hello. His complicated and contradictory emotions spill out in an amusingly pointless and embarrassing discussion of Donghwa’s secondhand car – which he impulsively asks to drive, just to see what it’s like, and to demonstrate his alpha-male mastery of the situation.

Many other embarrassingly uptight conversations between Sunhee’s dad and boyfriend ensue, fuelled by drink. Finally, there is a weirdly fractious scene at the dinner table, triggered by Sunhee’s sister and her scepticism of Donghwa. Yet the boozing seems to result in no hangover, real or metaphorical. Intriguing as ever.

Stevie Nicks and Lindsey Buckingham are sparking reunion buzz after a cryptic billboard appeared on Los Angeles’ Sunset Boulevard this week, seemingly teasing a long-awaited reissue of their 1973 album Buckingham Nicks.

The billboard was shared on , showing the album’s original cover art—featuring a topless Nicks and Buckingham—alongside their names and the date Sept. 19. The location, near Sound City Studios where the record was initially tracked, feels like a deliberate nod to the album’s origins.

The billboard, spotted near Los Angeles’ Sound City Studios where the album was originally recorded, features the iconic cover art of a topless Nicks and Buckingham alongside their names and the date Sept. 19 — a likely nod to the record’s roots.

Adding to the speculation, Nicks and Buckingham shared matching Instagram posts last week featuring lyrics from Buckingham Nicks cut “Frozen Love.” Nicks posted, “And if you go forward…” while Buckingham followed with, “I’ll meet you there,” completing a line from the song’s chorus.