World premiere at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival - August 2025
Produced by Sing Out, Louise! Productions
Directed & choreographed by Paul McGill
Book by Rae Binstock
Music & lyrics by Brandon James Gwinn
Starring Al Cammish, Baylie Carson, Aaron Douglas, Gregory Haney, Andrew Horton, Al Knott, Becky Sanneh, and Jordan Walker
Associate direction by Lily Ockwell
Production & costume design by Max Allen and Elliott Adcock
Lighting design by Adam King
Sound design by David Beckham and Tony Gayle
Stage Manager: Bill Wilden
Crash head‑first into the wild world of The Cockettes—the original counterculture trailblazers—for a riotous night of radical joy and rhinestone‑encrusted rebellion.
A fever dream of gender-bending hippies, freaks and glitter-bearded drag queens, led by flowers-in-guns radical Hibiscus and legendary disco diva Sylvester, The Cockettes took 1960s San Francisco by storm. But when their acid-fuelled act hit New York, it all went spectacularly wrong.
Celebrate living life loudly and the queens who came before with this outrageous new musical exploding with in-your-face hilarity and on-your-feet original music.
Come for the glitter. Stay for the revolution.
⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐
(only 9 shows out of 3000+ received 5 stars)
”You might well have your jaw on the floor at the sheer energy blazing from the stage in writer Rae Binstock and composer Brandon James Gwinn’s dazzling musical. … A whole lot of taboo-breaking fun, but – like the Cockettes themselves – it also joyfully embodies all the values that it celebrates.”
- David Kettle, Suzanne O’Brien, and Ariane Branigan, The Scotsman
⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐
“Full of knock-out musical numbers, hilarious vignettes, and steeped in the politics of the era, this is an anarchic piece of theatre that stays true to the artists’ avant-garde, gender-bending and transgressive creativity.”
- Deborah Klayman, The Queer Review
⭐⭐⭐
“Captures the hedonistic, drug-fuelled craziness of the Cockettes. Brandon James Gwinn has written an evocative score, drawing on psychedelia, disco and show tunes, while Rae Binstock’s book allows the story to unfold almost as if it were one of their musicals. … Midnight at the Palace triumphs in finding an acceptable route into a difficult story.”
- Paul Vale, The Stage