Beyond The Fringe

Satirical revue, originally staged at the Edinburgh Festival in 1960 and a hit in London's West End in 1961 and on Broadway the following year. Pooling the talents of graduates from Oxford (Alan Bennett and Dudley Moore) and Cambridge (Peter Cook and Jonathan Miller), the show included skits on everything from organised religion, through capital punishment, the nuclear threat and the British class system, to Shakespeare, classical music and restaurant etiquette. An initial LP of highlights from the show was released in 1961, with a second LP, including remakes of some of the skits included on the first, being produced to tie in with the original cast's transfer to Broadway in 1962 (a replacement cast continued to perform in London, and yet another set of performers took the show on tour). A third LP of mostly new material appeared to co-incide with the show's "refresh" at the start of 1964, though without co-founder Miller, who left at the end of '63. The show ended in April 1964, but a reunion performance was staged later that year for the benefit of the BBC, and released on DVD in 2006.