Underbelly, Bristo Square

This enjoyable if extremely lightweight musical is based around a substantially made-up version of the complicated relationship that existed between tech titans Steve Jobs and Bill Gates. Written by Jordan Allen-Dutton, Erik Weiner and Hal Goldberg – aka the US team behind previous Fringe favourite The Bomb-itty of Errors – the songs are for the most part melodious but flyaway baubles. But there’s no denying that silly as it all all, the whole thing comes together when our geek heroes break into rhyme: an obnoxious rap-rock number in which the newly hip Microsoft founder declares ‘I’m Bill Gates, bitch’ is unfortunately very funny, and the climactic rap battle between the two protagonists is basically worth the admission in and of itself. Kane Oliver Parry is very enjoyable as Jobs, here portrayed as a slick, self-absorbed hippie who shamelessly steals from and manipulates others to help him design products that people think are cool rather than ones they actually need. It’s to the credit of Parry that he emerges as the hero of the story without it ever descending into weird fawning – this Jobs is an incorrigible rogue rather than an out-and-out bastard, and his amorality credibly feels like an extension of his free-love philosophy. Dan Buckley’s Gates comes across less well, a bullied geek who is driven into the heights of megalomania by a cocktail of vast success an resentment that Jobs remains forever cooler than him.  Despite Gates’s more benign latterday image, the...

Louis Pearl’s bubblicious show is an Edinburgh mainstay that sells out every year for a reason. That reason being: he does cool stuff with bubbles! Big bubbles, little bubbles, artistic bubbles, bubbles demonstrating science, dumb bubbles, clever bubble – aaaaaaall the bubbles. It’s not even the only bubble-based Edinburgh Fringe kids’ show – we count three this year, you may want to take in several! – but it’s definitely ‘the big one’.