Review: Dan Lees and Tom Curzon: The Sonic Joy Orchestra, Banshee’s Labyrinth
Edinburgh Fringe Festival 2026
Off the rails musical masterworkRating
Chaos. Chaos is almost the strongest element of this show, as Dan Lees and Tom Curzon set each scene for each section as easily and as certainly as they end up smashing it apart, with extravagant costume changes and bizarre prop reveals – whatever keeps the whole thing feeling like it’s gone off the rails even when they have the audience right in the palm of their hands, laughing the whole way through. Chaos is almost the strongest element of the show, but Joy wins out in the end.
To describe the ins and outs of the performance would be to do it a disservice, as it is both so dynamically crafted around the particular audience present and so wonderful to see in motion that words would fail where your eyes are much better suited. Suffice it to say that Lees and Curzon are master cultivators of a crowd’s energy and draw the best out of the room as they improvise lyrics, music and sketches on the fly.
Doing so much without strict planning can be a recipe for disaster in novice hands, but this is where Lee and Curzon prove themselves master clowns as well as musicians. The absurd and goofy laughs they inspire roll effortlessly from the most bizarre situations in a narrative that only really exists in their own heads, alongside interactions with the audience that make us all joyously complicit in this silliness; all this while, Lee expertly plays the guitar, and Curzon proves wonderfully adept with a cello and violin.
It’s a comedy masterwork that can impart a wonderfully good mood on even the sourest of attendees (who may or may not have been drowned in the biblical Edinburgh rains this week), and in doing so, the band live fully up to their name: The Sonic Joy Orchestra deliver just that, and you’d be a fool to miss them.
Performed by Dan Lees and Tom Curzon
Written by Jack Kenyon & Isabelle Dooley-Carmichael
Dan Lees and Tom Curzon: The Sonic Joy Orchestra plays at Banshee’s Labyrinth until Sunday 30 August as part of PBH’s Free Fringe, the Edinburgh Fringe Festival.
