If you’re putting a show on at the Edinburgh Fringe, the thing everyone looks for is a good review. In the performing arts, the star system starts where the Michelin Guide runs out of steam. Three stars for a show is just run of the mill. Four stars means it’s a “must see”, while five stars indicates that you may need to kill to get tickets. Except it’s all got rather devalued.
Go back thirty years and there were two gold standards – the Scotsman and The Stage. Each had a team of professional reviewers who awarded stars in their daily reviews. A few other printed publications like The List joined in, but everything changed when Broadway Baby burst on the scene in 2004 with online reviews. The Scotsman was outraged and railed against non-professional reviewers, but an increasing number of online review sites appeared. Audiences were encouraged to comment on Twitter and post reviews on the Edfringe.com website.
The result was that it became a lot easier to get a four or five star review from somewhere – sometimes the Edfringe.com ones even appeared before the show opened. Productions now plaster their posters and flyers with the stars in large font and the source in diminishingly small font. What’s important seems to be how many sets of stars you have. That’s been going on for several years. What is ruffling feathers this year is the accusation that some reviews are being written by AI.