Edinburgh Fringe 2024
Pleasance Dome
Playing August 9-11, 13-26
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Jukebox musicals are inescapable these days. From Tina Turner to Queen, plenty of musical icons have had their songs immortalised in a glitzy, big-budget West End extravaganza. But, according to RuPaul’s Drag Race UK Alum Kate Butch, there’s one artist who has been cruelly left out of the theatrical fun: Kate Bush.
In her 2024 Edinburgh Fringe show Wuthering Shites, Kate Butch aims to right this injustice by workshopping her new musical ‘BUSH!’, featuring all of the mysterious singer’s biggest hits. It’s a genius concept that allows the performer to lean into her brilliant talents for comedy and singing while offering constant entertainment for the audience.
Leading us through the story of young Kathy and her marriage to James (before he runs off with ‘Kashka from Baghdad’), Kate Butch gets the audience involved throughout to help bring the new musical to life.
Introducing us to the concept of ‘musical shoehorning’, the drag artist finds increasingly ridiculous ways to weave Kate Bush’s discography into the narrative, taking the character of Kathy on a wild journey that includes giving birth to a baby called ‘Wow’ and landing herself in a coma.
Kate Butch truly knows how to work a crowd, always on hand with a witty quip to roast audience members and make everyone feel like part of the fun. Even when some of the guest stars she welcomes onto the stage become a tad unruly, she handles them with ease and great humour.
What’s particularly impressive about Wuthering Shites is that Kate Butch sings all of the songs live, making us laugh through physical comedy and witty lyric changes while dazzling us with a spectacular voice. Her confident vocals shine especially in ‘This Woman’s Work’, and she even manages to hit the higher octave in the iconic ‘Wuthering Heights’ during the show’s climax.
If you’re not hugely familiar with Kate Bush’s back catalogue, you may not appreciate all of the references or the fact that the second half of ‘BUSH!’ features a lot of slower songs which don’t rely so heavily on comedy, but this never dampens the entertainment.
Celebrating Kate Bush while also poking fun at some of the enigma’s idiosyncrasies, Kate Butch’s Wuthering Shites is a clever, tight and entertaining hour that left me with a big smile on my face and is sure to delight Kate Bush loyalists and non-believers alike.
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