Dear Michelle Kwan review – fire and ice in a whirlwind figure-skating comedy

Assembly @ St Andrew Square, Edinburgh A lusty adaptation by Avenue Q’s co-creator is performed with verve by Katie Holmes and Tom Cruise’s daughter and her fellow students Not every undergraduate Shakespeare show at the Edinburgh fringe makes headlines but this one brings stardust by association. Suri Noelle, the 20-year-old daughter of Tom Cruise and Katie Holmes, appears with her fellow drama students from Pittsburgh’s Carnegie Mellon University. However, it’s a bit of an event regardless – the UK premiere of a “modern translation” of A Midsummer Night’s Dream adapted by Jeff Whitty, a Tony award-winner for the riotous Avenue Q. That show, newly returned to the West End, is populated by some horny puppets and Whitty’s Dream is similarly frisky. Often more lustful than lovestruck, Noelle’s Helena prowls after Demetrius (Logan Yao) on all fours, Puck (Eli Strain) bares his nipples during the “up and down” speech and when Titania (Siahvash Marshall) instructs the fairies to show Bottom some courtesies, it fuels an orgy...

Pleasance Courtyard, Edinburgh This one-man comic play, told at breakneck speed and featuring West Side Story-like dance-numbers, is highly entertaining It’s as if Joseph Morpurgo had never been away. The Londoner made a splash on the fringe a decade ago with several high-concept comedy shows, of which thrift-shop source material and multimedia presentation were standout features. After a nine-year absence, the same is true of Highlander 70, a one-man comic play built exclusively around an American high-school yearbook salvaged from half a century ago. Drawing on that book’s text and (mainly) innocent black-and-white photographs of wholesome teens, Morpurgo cobbles together a breakneck tale of dorky David Moon’s last day of school. He must navigate assembly, the big game, graduation – and then he’s free. “What could possibly go wrong?” In Morpurgo’s telling, plenty, as our juvenile hero (face painted grey, the better to resemble his monochrome original) embarks on a quest to recover his missing diary, which contains mortifying evidence of a crush on schoolmate Beth. Standing in his way, the school’s martinet principal, its bully Roscoe Peltz and his crew of unconvincing tough guys, and a dance-hall full of dangerously intoxicated adolescents. At Pleasance Courtyard, Edinburgh, until 30 August All our Edinburgh festival reviews..

There has been a sharp increase in sales of Homer’s The Odyssey in the UK, with purchases up more than 1,400 percent in the first four weeks of July. Christopher Nolan’s adaptation of the epic may be behind the surge, as the film stormed the global box office, taking in 264 million dollars during its opening weekend. Miles Osgood, from Standford University, joins us for more details.