EDINBURGH — A Shrek burlesque parody. A one man show inspired by the 2002 Hilary Duff Disney Channel original movie Cadet Kelly. An improvised hour titled David Elms Describes a Room (despite the dry name, it's actually quite entertaining).
At the Edinburgh Fringe, which wrapped up its 79th edition late last month, almost anything can be a show. And almost any show can be an audition.
This year's festival featured more than 4,200 productions, an overwhelming marketplace of comedy, theater, cabaret — and plenty that resist easy categorization. It is also an important hunting ground for producers searching for the next unlikely thing that might travel beyond Edinburgh.
Few have a better track record for spotting it early than Francesca Moody.
The 38-year-old London producer helped bring both Fleabag and Baby Reindeer to the Fringe, years before either became a global television phenomenon.
Their success has given Moody a reputation for spotting hits early. But ask her how she decides what to produce, and she doesn't want to talk much about strategy or numbers.
"I think ultimately it's all about my personal taste, because I'm a producer who is really led by their gut," Moody told NPR on a recent afternoon from a makeshift office in Edinburgh, where the Fringe was in full swing.
Trying to reverse engineer a commercial success, she said, can ruin the exact thing she's looking for.
"As soon as I deviate from that and I pick something because I think it's going to be super commercial and go straight to the West End, or because it's going to be adapted into the next TV series, it just won't be as good."
That "fizzy feeling"
To understand what Moody means by "gut," it helps to go back to Fleabag – in the days before there was much of a Fleabag to speak of.
When Moody first got involved with the project in late 2012, the writer and actress Phoebe Waller-Bridge had written roughly a page.
"We really didn't know what it was yet at all," Moody said.
Waller-Bridge had been invited to put together a short monologue as part of a storytelling night at a London theater. At the time, Moody, who was already producing another play with Waller-Bridge, asked if she could read what she had written down. She immediately became hooked.
"You know when you get that fizzy feeling when you read something that you think is really exciting, and it doesn't really matter that it's not all there yet?"
That fizzy feeling was enough for Moody to secure a venue at the Fringe.
What followed was a dizzying, anxiety-soaked six-month period in which Moody, still only 26, learned two important lessons: First, trust is invaluable to the producer-artist relationship. And second, so is a hard deadline.
A week before rehearsals, Moody stopped by Waller-Bridge's house to see how she was getting on with the script. Save for a scatter of Post-It notes laid out across the floor, the play was still not written.
Moody, who by then had gained a reputation amongst colleagues for her keep-calm-and-carry-on demeanor, reassured Waller-Bridge, then locked her in a room and told her to keep writing.
A colleague later found Moody hyperventilating in a closet.
"I was wondering what would happen if this play didn't get made," she said.
It did, though the final ending — at one point there were at least three alternate conclusions — was written on the train up to the festival.
The show was still rough around the edges when it arrived in Edinburgh.
Reviews were mixed — "Waller-Bridge hasn't produced a flawless piece of writing," the critic Lyn Gardner wrote in The Guardian (though she did acknowledge for all its flaws, it was "hugely distinctive").
But Moody says that lack of polish was part of the point.
"The Fringe is this place for messy, complicated, unfinished, scrappy stuff because it's those bits that you'll find the magic in," Moody says.
A different kind of stage
Moody's own relationship with the Fringe started as a compromise.
After telling her parents she wanted to become an actor, they gently suggested she try an internship on the organizational side of things — a slightly less precarious path.
She landed an internship at the Fringe, handing out flyers and moving sets around. It was her first time away from home. She says she hasn't missed a year at the Fringe since.
Years later, just out of drama school, she bumped into a friend one day at the Fringe who said he was getting into producing, and asked if she wanted to help with a project. She accepted. While the project didn't materialize into a big break, something clicked.
"I suddenly realized everything that I loved about acting, producing was actually serving that in a better way," she said. "I felt like I had way more autonomy."
Producing still kept her at the center of the creative process, but gave her a say in what got made — and how.
At 23, she put on her first show at the Fringe, a play called The Ducks, written by playwright Michael McLean. The experience catapulted Moody into not just the Fringe, but the wider London theater ecosystem, eventually leading to her big break with Fleabag in 2013.
Five years later, she launched her own company, Francesca Moody Productions.
Around the same time, a couple of friends sent her a script for Baby Reindeer, a monologue written by the Scottish actor Richard Gadd. It was based on his real life experiences with a stalker.
Moody started reading the script on a train from Norwich to London and became so absorbed that, when the train reached the station, she stayed in her seat to finish the final pages.
She didn't know how she was going to produce it.
But, she thought, "By hook or by crook, I'm going to do it."
In 2019, Baby Reindeer premiered at the Fringe. Five years later, it became a Netflix series — and just like Fleabag, a global hit.
The success of both shows changed things for Moody, whose name has become a stamp of approval at the Fringe.
At this year's Fringe, Moody backed three very different shows: Crybabies: The Scaring, a horror sketch comedy; Roleplay, a one-woman drama about feminism, sex and the personas we build online; and Garry Starr: Classic Penguins, a raucous hour where a nearly naked Starr, reenacts a series of Penguin Classics — almost entirely naked.
For all their differences, Moody sees a common thread in the work she backs — comedy that doesn't take itself too seriously, even when the ideas underneath it do.
Roleplay, which perhaps generated the most buzz, sold out its full run before the festival had even kicked off. India Scarlet Kolb, a creative director from London, bought her tickets two-and-a-half months in advance. After the show, in the venue's courtyard, she said Moody's name was part of the appeal.
"I wanted to kind of see what the next hit of the Fringe would be," she said.
That reputation can be a gift to the artists Moody backs. It can also come with baggage, says Hannah Reilly, the star and writer of Roleplay.
"This work will never be viewed in a vacuum," Reilly said. "There can definitely be some people approaching the work with arms folded a little bit, saying 'this better be better than Fleabag and Baby Reindeer combined.'"
"Guys," she added. "This is my first solo show. Can we just take it for what it is?"
But Reilly also says Moody's role goes beyond simply scouting good work. During the development of Roleplay, Reilly says she encouraged her to lean further into the darker parts of the story and take risks.
"She really wants you to make the boldest version of what's in your head," Reilly said.
And despite the reputation, not every bet pays off for Moody.
In 2023, she produced Berlusconi: A New Musical, a satirical comedy about the former Italian Prime Minister that became a commercial and critical flop.
But that, Moody says, is part of the bargain.
"I try really, really hard not to think too much about what's coming down the line," she said.
Developing a show with a future television adaptation in mind "just isn't great for storytelling."
Take Garry Starr, one of Moody's other productions, which made its New York debut earlier this month.
The premise is hardly mainstream TV material: Garry Elizabeth Starr, the alter ego of Australian clown Damien Warren-Smith, realizes that books, just like penguins, are on the brink of extinction. Thus begins the inspiration for his journey to save penguins and literature at the same time, by acting the titles of a series of Penguin Classics books in front of a live audience.
On top of that, he's naked (save for a pair of penguin flippers, a tuxedo jacket and a black top hat). To pull it all off, Starr also needs plenty of help from the audience — and, perhaps most surprisingly — they are more than willing to play along.
Moody saw the production at the Fringe two years ago, and loved it enough to sign on as a producer.
"It's completely non-political," Warren-Smith said. "It's pure escapism."
And maybe that's what Moody is really betting on. Not the next Fleabag or Baby Reindeer.
Just something strange enough — and true enough — to be worth the risk.
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