Edinburgh Fringe Festival will present two new woman-led comedy shows Sarah Hester Ross... is What? and Alexa, Play as part of the 2024 season.

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Sarah Hester Ross Is What?

Best known for her 3 million followers online and her uproarious Las Vegas Residency, Sarah Hester Ross brings Sarah Hester Ross Is What? to Edinburgh Fringe for her premier debut at the fest.

Following the release of her new comedy special on Apple TV and Amazon Prime Don’t Mess With A Redhead, the new 1-hour show Sarah Hester Ross Is What? is a hilarious musical experience that shows you a woman being TikTok famous, who doesn’t want babies and is the leader of the ‘Stop Giving Men Microphones’ movement.

Sarah invites you into the life of a TikTok-famous woman who doesn’t want babies and leads the “stop giving men microphones” movement. Sarah Hester Ross is What?, her hilarious debut Edinburgh Fringe show, serves as an introduction to a multi-talented comedian and musician best known for her 2.4 million social media followers and lovers of Florida Man Friday, who will be the first to tell you she aims to be the “next Bette Midler”. 

Hester Ross is aware that musical comedy is not everyone’s cup of tea, but she effectively utilizes music to help audiences to stomach some very serious topics. “A spoonful of music helps the discussion of women’s rights (or lack thereof) go down. The music is niche but the topics aren’t and I feel that’s what makes it special”, says Sarah.

Originally from Tampa, Florida but currently Las Vegas-based, Sarah has been performing professionally since age 11, when she got her start as a member of a show at Busch Gardens. Later, while performing at a piano bar in Orlando where people request top 40 songs and she would play them on the spot, a colleague told her “you’re funny, you should go learn the gig properly somewhere else, your talents won’t be used here”. So she did, packing her possessions into her car and moving to Vegas where she started working the piano bar circuit.

The pandemic forced Sarah offstage and online, where her musical comedy hit on a larger scale, quickly building a sizable online following. This led to a post-pandemic three-month Vegas residency where she developed the hour, which she honed further by taking it on the road. The result is Sarah Hester Ross Is What?. Sarah admits “...it blew my mind that people would buy tickets to see me. Just me. It changed my whole perspective of what I wanted to do with my career.” While her mind may have been blown by the well-deserved audience attention, we believe the Edinburgh Fringe audience minds will be similarly blown by Sarah Hester Ross is What? 

Ticket Link: https://tickets.edfringe.com/whats-on/sarah-hester-ross-is-what 

Venue: Just The Tonic - Nucleus - Atomic

Address: 140 Pleasance, Edinburgh EHB 9RR

Time: All shows at 2:30pm / 14:30

Show Dates: Aug 2-4, 7, 9-11, 14, 16-18 

Alexa, Play

This August, actor/writer Alexa Elmy’s one-woman comedy Alexa, Play is appearing at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival August 12-17 at Paradise in the Vault with a 14:55 daily showtime.

Alexa, Play is a high energy response to the global abuse of the name ‘Alexa’. Our real live human being Alexa is fed up with Amazon’s bastardization of her name. She creates a support group, “Alexa’s Anonymous”, to seek healing over the robot that has stolen their identity, and to ultimately take on yet another mega conglomerate hell-bent on turning women into objects. The show positions the audience as members of the group, fellow Alexas, there to work through the damage that’s been done. 

“The show was inspired by my own experiences of introducing myself to people and immediately having to suffer through an ‘Alexa joke.’ I often felt embarrassed in those moments, and I think the show was partially inspired by my desire to confront that,” says Alexa Elmy. “As a woman named Alexa, I have endured these jokes about the Amazon ‘Alexa’ since it came into the tech market.” 

Naming products after women is a common practice tied to the capitalist patriarchy with deeply negative social impacts; a glaring and less discussed form of objectification, changing the perception of literal objects as female. This play finds itself at the intersection of feminism, comedy, and pain. The character oscillates between sane and erratic as she tries to help others while seeking peace for herself. 

As stated by the director, Emma Shafer, in a w42ndst.nyc feature, “It’s about a strong, opinionated, messy, vulnerable woman trying to get what she wants and for me that just felt really empowering and exciting.” 

Playwright and performer Alexa Elmy is a NYC based Actor, VO Artist, Audiobook Narrator, and Writer. She debuted the show Off-Broadway in NYC at Theatre Row as part of the United Solo Festival. The script was a Semifinalist in Screencraft's 2023 Stage Play Competition, and had its first public reading at the Chain Theater in 2022. Bringing a sharply defined solo show with roots in feminist comedy to Edinburgh Fringe has been a longtime goal that she is thrilled to achieve this year. 

Venue: Paradise in The Vault - The Annexe (Venue 29) 

Tickets: £12.00 

Dates: 12-17 Aug 2024 

Time: 14:55 (65 min) 

Box Office: 0131 510 0022 

Website: https://tickets.edfringe.com/whats-on/alexa-play 

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