Charming! The Musical – Edinburgh Festival Fringe

Charming! The Musical continues at Just The Fancy Room at Just The Tonic at The Caves until 30 August 2026 (except 18).

Star Rating. two stars ★ ★ ✩ ✩ ✩

What a great concept. Prince Charming (author and director Thomas Rolph) has had enough. There have been too many pantos in which the heroine hogs the limelight. He has been treated as an “also-ran”. He thinks it’s time he had a panto centring on him. Self-aggrandising, utterly class conscious (the audience are labelled riffraff), he sets about realising his dream.

Trouble is he doesn’t know how to go about it. Enter the genie of the lamp who offers him three wishes. For much of the show, this is an actual static lamp which sits on the stage throughout, the genie (“Not genie! Genius!” he proclaims) an amplified voice coming from the other side of the stage. Trouble is, Charming’s not very good at wishing.

This is advertised as a Disney parody musical. The songs composed by Rolph, Michael Rincon, Adam Marké and Joe Sartin, are vibrant and capture the flavour of Disney.

For much of the time it’s a one-man show. Rolph is a wonderful singer, but curiously his arrogant Prince-ness doesn’t come over, due to a certain lack of ease about his performance and an inexplicable tendency to address the front two rows of the audience.

This is refreshingly dispelled by the brief appearance of not one, but three fairy tale princesses (a marvellously outgoing trio of Lizzy Monds, Naomi Park and Amy Smith) who hijack one song. When the genie of the lamp appears in person, he displays a similar lack of ease, with an annoying habit of brushing his hair from his face.

Admittedly, it’s a small venue with limited resources and it was early in the run, so perhaps it needs time to settle in. However, I think that writer, co-composer and director Rolph would have been well-served by bringing in an external director. It still has a wee way to go before I’d give it three stars, for the songs are good and he’s a good singer.

That said, the audience enjoyed it.

The company, Grownup Playhouse is currently running another four shows on at the Fringe, three of them at Just the Tonic.

James Bryce