Edinburgh Fringe 2026
Vasthy and Friends: Sing, Dance, Play!
Vasthy and friends
Genre: Children's Theatre
Venue: Online
Festival: Edinburgh Fringe
Low Down
Vasthy and her friends invite young children to sing, dance and play. Children engage over a number of songs as they dance, sing, and learn a little American Sign Language. Along with recognisable and original songs and video interactions they come onstage and help their adult helpers to engage with each creative request.
Review
This is an enjoyable, fun experience. Vasthy and Friends have a huge background in musical theatre – Broadway experience, no less – and Vasthy Mompoint and Leanna Gadow have created a fun experience which celebrates being a kid. It’s a warm welcoming place of participation with the lights up and the volume turned as high as tolerable.
The structure is simple, various songs are performed with simple repetitive movements, much as you would expect from the children’s entertainment of yore, but these are gently brought into a more modern context. The brightness of their approach is enjoyed vastly by the children in the audience.
It is directed with the children in mind. They are encouraged to come up onto the stage and wander about, along with their adults who are there to help them join in. Often though with this type of show, the enthusiasm of the adult will last the entirety of the song, their young charges have a smaller attention span so can drop in and out of focus.
It’s good to see how structurally unstructured it feels. Often preschool and early primary children allow their concentration to wander. As described in the Solihull Approach, the Dance of Reciprocity is one that adults don’t understand. A child at that age will give you attention for a short period of time but then will break that – not because they’re bored or they don’t like you, but it’s the way in which they manage their concentration. You then get parents – often the fathers – trying to repeat the same actions, hoping for a new reaction. Well known within child development circles, what is impressive here is that many of the children in the show sit watching for a decent period of time.
By removing seats within the Gilded Balloon Patter Hoose, and inviting the children to invade their stage, part of the joy is watching the adults who are with them attempting to behave you would expect within an adult performance. They are also trying to avoid dancing like an elephant putting out a fire.
It’s bright, it’s bubbly, it’s really fun. The children enjoy it and although I got to see this only on a video platform you can sense the enthusiasm that the children will walk away with after experiencing a decent show.
It has no pretensions to being anything other than it is and it worked well. I thoroughly enjoyed having the opportunity to catch up with this after The Fringe had finished. It is a really good piece of preschool entertainment which manages to keep children engaged but also recognizes that that engagement must not come at a price of compliance, but they should be encouraged to get up and break the fourth wall at every opportunity.
