Edinburgh Festival Fringe: Sir Cameron Mackintosh says Fringe has become too big for Edinburgh

Sir Cameron Mackintosh said he believes the Edinburgh Festival Fringe has become too big for the Scottish capital – after revealing a nine-week run in the city of a musical sensation created by one of its most successful former performers.

The leading British theatre producer, who is bringing Lin-Manuel Miranda’s Hamilton to the Festival Theatre next year, has suggested there are “probably too many shows chasing an audience” in the city. He also said he was fully aware of concerns over the “huge" costs faced by Fringe performers and companies.

Sir Cameron said the entertainment industry was in a “different era” emerging from the pandemic after decades of growth since the 1980s – due to a decline in international travel and “the pressures on the planet”.

Miranda was a complete unknown when he appeared at the Fringe with his New York hip-hop improv comedy group Freestyle Love Supreme in 2005 – a decade before launching Hamilton.

Sir Cameron Mackintosh was in Edinburgh to announce the Scottish premiere of musical sensation Hamilton in 2024. Picture: Lisa Ferguson

Sir Cameron said appearing at the Fringe had played a crucial role in helping Miranda to “hone his art,” despite performing to “virtually no-one” at the festival.

Speaking after the Scottish Government had reversed a 10 per cent funding cut for its own arts agency, Sir Cameron called for greater investment in Scotland’s small-scale theatres. He also described the King’s in Edinburgh, which has had to postpone the start of a long-awaited revamp due to a £9 million funding shortfall, as “absolutely irreplaceable”.

Sir Cameron was visiting the city to promote the Scottish premiere of Hamilton at the Festival Theatre next year.

Recalling his first experience of seeing Hamilton, he said: “I was completely swept away. It was labelled the hip-hop musical and there's hip-hop in it, but I just felt it was a great musical.

Sir Cameron Mackintosh was in Edinburgh to announce the Scottish premiere of Hamilton at the Festival Theatre. Picture: Lisa Ferguson

“I didn’t feel that it was written in a particular genre. It had an absolutely brilliant use of rhythms to tell a very dense story – there’s a lot of politics, a lot of characters and a lot of battles going on. It is told in a very modern vernacular, which is why it has worked so effortlessly and grabbed an audience.

“The only musicals that seem to stand the test of time are the ones with great stories. It’s the same with opera. There’s always room for modern contemporary stories, but they don’t normally capture the popular imagination across the world.

“Hamilton, which is now eight years old, was the first great original musical which had come along for a decade or two. Most successful musicals are using existing material.”

Sir Cameron raised concerns about the impact Britain’s current film and television boom was having on the theatre industry.

The Festival Theatre in Edinburgh will be playing host to the hip hop musical Hamilton next year.

He said: “We don’t seem to have as many younger writers who are just passionate about writing for theatre as when I started. People now feel they need to be a success straight away. But it takes a long time to become a skillful writer.

"The number of big film companies who have come over here and built big studios have sucked out gigantic amounts of talent, both in terms of actors and off-stage. We’ve lost a huge amount of people.

“When Lin was here in Edinburgh doing his Fringe show, I know he couldn’t give away the tickets. He was playing to virtually no-one, they had to drag people off the streets, yet he persevered. You need to persevere. No-one owes us a living. There is no short cut to gaining experience.”

Eight of the biggest Fringe venues have warned the soaring cost of accommodation in the city in August is the “biggest risk” to the future of the event.

Hamilton producer Sir Cameron Mackintosh and Fiona Gibson, chief executive of Capital Theatres, which runs the Festival Theatre. Picture: Lisa Ferguson

Sir Cameron said: “The cost of staying in the city is huge now. There is a real juggle between Airbnb and everything like that, and having places where people can stay. The Fringe has become huge, it has become so big. Anything that becomes big ends up creating its own problems.

"I suspect there are probably too many Fringe shows chasing an audience that doesn’t grow exponentially. I’ve seen that myself in Australia, where I’ve got four or five shows either on or coming on, that market has shrunk.

“We’re in a different era now. None of us quite know what is going to happen. I don’t believe that all the pressures on the planet and the cost of fuel are going to go backwards. People have to look forward, but it is going to pinch. There's just not as many people travelling now.

"The 30 years until Covid was an extraordinary era of expansion where anyone could go anywhere and it was dirt cheap.”

Sir Cameron said the reinvention of Edinburgh’s Empire to become the Festival Theatre in the 1990s had ensured it could host productions on the scale of Hamilton.

Asked about ongoing efforts to save the King’s in Edinburgh, he said: “Having spent a large fortune on my own theatres in London I’m not surprised to hear that money is tight and more money needs to be found for the King's.

“When you own something old and beautiful, you’ve got to be prepared to put your own in your pocket because of the fabric of these buildings which are more than 100 years old. The King’s is absolutely irreplaceable. You could never build a theatre as beautiful as that again.

"It’s great that money was put into the Festival Theatre and it shows. It’s why it’s able to attract the top shows like Hamilton now. But there are lots of equally-important smaller theatres, where the talent grows.

“It’s great that Scotland has a roving national theatre, which I think is a great idea, so the money doesn’t get swallowed up unnecessarily in the running of a building.

“But it’s very important that all the places where people start and learn and make their craft are given enough money to allow them to experiment, so that whether they win or fail, they are learning.”