A New York transformation for Edinburgh's Metamorphoses

The Blitz wartime version of Ovid’s Metamorphoses that David Nice was raving about is New York-bound now, after winning one of the Edinburgh Fringe Festival’s most generous awards, the Carol Tambor Best of Edinburgh Award. This, set up in 2004 in perpetuity, gives the winning production an all-expenses paid trip to New York’s Off-Off-Broadway to stage the show for a run of up to a month (and to keep the net box office receipts).

The run has the added bonus of being timed to coincide with New York’s  Association of Performing Arts Presenters convention, which brings some 4,000 international producers and presenters to New York.

Pants on Fire’s inspired production relocates the old epic stories of miraculous divine transformations to 1940s wartime Britain, with Theseus as a soldier, Narcissus a Hollywood film star, and the Chorus as Andrews-sisters harmonisers.

The Carol Tambor Award has previously given a New York showcase to Andrew Dawson’s extraordinary dance-theatre piece Absence and Presence (2005) and Elaine Murphy’s Little Gem (last year). Other winners are Russell Barr’s Sisters, Such Devoted Sisters, Mark Jenkins’ Rosebud, Michael Redhill’s Goodness, 1927’s Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea and Ella Hickson’s Eight.

• The final Edinburgh showing of Metamorphoses is today, the last day of the Fringe
• Pants on Fire website