Edinburgh Fringe 2026
Lizzy Sunshine
Liz Coin
Genre: character comedy, Comedy, Theatrical Clown
Venue: Gilded Balloon Patter House
Festival: Edinburgh Fringe
Low Down
When her partner doesn’t show, Lizzy Sunshine makes the audience her co-star. She promised a two-person show. She got… you. Following sold-out runs at Soho Playhouse and beyond, Liz Coin is BACK with this chaotic, feel-good spectacle! Expect a fast-paced hour packed with gags gone wrong, big characters and something real just beneath the surface.
Review
‘It’s gonna be perfect and we’re gonna live forever’. Lizzie Sunshine wears a lot of yellow. She loves musical theatre and would like to bond with us all about it. She thinks being happy is the best and has all the affirmations ready to go, one after the other, without stopping for breath. She just wants us to solve our problems together, we are a part of this. Her show partner Jamie Storm may be running late but there is no need to worry about that. Comedy, clowning, stand-up (she says she can’t really do impressions), crowd-work, use of multimedia presentations, and meta-drama make up this high-energy show about positivity when things don’t go to plan.
Go see writer and actor Liz Coin’s Lizzy Sunshine for its way with audience interaction. Between her reward of a lollipop for everyone who helps her and a finale where the room sings the show onwards, group-propelling an ending, something very special has happened. It is hard to explain. From buckets of charm and encouragement (everyone is ‘being positive and brave’), singing practice, and a very funny sequence improvising a scene with an audience member’s message thread she doesn’t just win you over, she really does make you a part of it. By the end of the hour, instructions to think of ‘a problem you have in your life right now’, determined attempts to bring happiness, and increasing glimpses of Lizzy backstage magic a reflectiveness and group empathy into being. Tomorrow from Annie nearly makes me cry and I’m not sure what has happened.
It’s a little bit of wizardry. A character that could have been unbearable has your heart within minutes. Of course this positivity has a shadow and Coin strikes a beautiful balance of vulnerability and showmanship, whilst maintaining a very high laugh-rate. It’s quite a feat to keep the energy up and keep your audience trusting you whilst letting the cracks appear. My show falls about at a remark from Lizzy that a musical theatre-nerd audience member looks like ‘a gay boy’s first kiss’ (she was entirely correct). We slowly attune to the post-its around her dressing room and the phone calls coming in. During a costume change we sing Don’t Stop Believing more or less left to our own devices and then switch to Love In A Hopeless Place on Lizzy’s instruction. We are a part of this- we’re won over and on her team pretty early.
Coin is unmiked and her sound design up high. On occasion I struggle to hear her and it feels like she shouts. This may be partly due to Coin being unwell for the performance I attend. However, the volume could be reduced slightly to save her voice without sacrificing the high energy. The frenetic quality necessary for a character embodying “live laugh love” also requires a very tight script to keep everyone’s focus and the performance at times becomes messy and uneven. There are too many loose parts, such as Lizzy and Jamie’s Greek orthodox church upbringing, that could be reworked to feel more in tune with the whole, and joins between sections or emotional shifts in tone could be smoother. The container of a meta-show must be rock solid to allow the rest to fall apart. Lizzy leaves the stage with the occasional multimedia inspirational videos which work very well as standalone jokes but messages sometimes pass by the screen too quickly.
In need of a little tightening up, this is a clever, unwieldy piece of comedic theatre that genuinely moves and surprises.
