World’s Greatest Lover: The New Musical – Edinburgh Festival Fringe

Picture: Danny Hidalgo

World’s Greatest Lover continues at Pleasance One at Pleasance Courtyard until 24 August 2025.

Star rating: five stars ★ ★ ★ ★ ★

With a stage populated by five very attractive men embodying the world’s greatest lovers, fabulous pop tunes, great singing, dancing and choreography with sound and lighting to match, what could possibly go wrong?

Nothing. It’s wonderful.

This is SIX for men. From the opening number to the last, the quality of music and performances doesn’t falter.

The world’s greatest lover has been summoned by text, to a meeting. Casanova, Romeo, the Marquis de Sade and Cyrano de Bergerac turn up and each thinks he’s the rightful one. Of course, these men are competitive and try to prove to the others that they alone deserve the title. The banter is effortlessly witty.

Then a mysterious character appears and challenges each of them to examine how they loved, and it turns out that they didn’t love in a pure way, but expected something in return. Suddenly we’re in the world of enlightenment. They rethink their pasts and strive to be better… because that’s what men do, right? Well in musical theatre they do.

But the plot, such as it is, is incidental. The performances are universally excellent.

This is boybands elevated with Broadway gloss.

The music, book and lyrics by multi-award-winners Julien Salvia and Ludovic-Alexandre Vidal are sharp and assured. With direction and choreography by Broadway’s Joshua Bergasse, we’re in the safest of hands and he makes sure it’s not all on one level.

Cyrano’s ballad about dreams, sung beautifully by Will Ingram, eases the pace. Sade, in the hands of Jordon Bolden, avoids cliché while advocating that the more love hurts, the better. Daniel DiPinto channels the suave sexiness of Antonio Banderas as Casanova and Sam Hyre’s Romeo attempts to outdo them all with his youthful exuberance.

The mystery character (no spoilers from me), elegantly played by Rickens Anantua, drives the others to see love as a philosophy and not just gratification.

With an excellent onstage band of three, song after song of the highest quality, performances beyond expectation, this has HIT written all over it.

We may not have found the world’s greatest lover, but we just might have found the Fringe’s greatest musical.

Steven Wren