This summer, bespoke theater travel organization Ghost Light Global will be taking a group of industry professionals to the Edinburgh Fringe Festival. The trip, which includes attendance to 3-5 performances each day plus networking events with festival creators and other industry professionals, will take place from Aug. 23-28.
Ghost Light Global co-founders Molly Morris and Chris Crouch had been attending the festival for over a decade themselves when they came upon the idea for Ghost Light Global. “People constantly came to us with the same sentiment,” Morris told Broadway News. “They wanted to attend the Edinburgh Fringe but they were too overwhelmed by the world’s largest arts festival to plan their own trips.”
Morris is a theater producer with Broadway credits including “Come From Away” and “Diana.” Crouch is a professional actor and restaurateur. The two also serve as members and sponsors of the National Alliance for Musical Theatre and sit on the U.S. board of the Edinburgh Fringe Festival Society through Ghost Light Global.
In 2019, the pair began curating full-itinerary trips for arts organizations like La Jolla Playhouse, Goodspeed Musicals and New York City Center and other groups headed to the Edinburgh Fringe. Their work soon expanded to include trips to Broadway, Paris and London’s West End.
This year marks the first trip for industry professionals Ghost Light Global has led to the festival. “We are so excited to plan our first-ever industry trip based on the folks who keep telling us they want to go to either discover the next ‘SIX’ or to produce their own work there as a development step,” Morris said. “We’ll focus on networking events, talks and collaborative sessions so that people can feel like the Edinburgh Fringe is demystified as a landscape to both experience and produce work.”
The Edinburgh Fringe Festival began in 1947 as a way of supporting and celebrating the cultural life of Europe after World War II. The 2025 festival featured nearly 3,900 shows, its second highest number ever, with performers coming from 63 different countries.
As Broadway News has reported, producers have begun looking more and more to the international scene and festivals for new work and new kinds of theatrical experiences. The Edinburgh Fringe has been a gateway to Broadway for decades. The full three-act version of Tom Stoppard’s “Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead” was performed for the first time at the festival in 1966, before becoming Stoppard’s Broadway playwriting debut in 1967.
Recent years have seen both “SIX” and the 2023 “Jaws” bio-play “The Shark Is Broken” come to Broadway after previously playing the festival.
