2 plays about Gwyneth Paltrow's ski trial come to the Edinburgh Festival

Edinburgh, Scotland • Terry Sanderson, a retired optician, was unsuccessful when he sued actress and wellness entrepreneur Gwyneth Paltrow over a collision on a Utah ski slope. Although he claimed she collided with him, a jury ruled it was actually his fault. The live-streamed 2023 civil trial was an ugly but oddly fascinating spectacle, featuring two equally unlikable archetypes: the bullying plaintiff and the preening, unworldly socialite.

But in another sense, Sanderson has won: His name is now forever engraved in the folklore of pop culture, as not only two New stage productions about the ski attempt at this year’s Edinburgh Festival Fringe bear witness to this.

The rougher of the two, “Gwyneth Goes Skiing,” in the Pleasance Courtyard, is a camp burlesque in which both parties are mercilessly skewered. Linus Karp plays Paltrow in drag with the drawling malice of a pantomime witch. She is a spoiled girl boss whose altruistic airs conceal a sociopathic character, while Joseph Martin, as Sanderson, is blunt mediocrity personified. The characters' partners are played by plucky audience volunteers aided by a teleprompter, and Kristin VanOrman, Sanderson's lawyer, is portrayed as star-studded and hopelessly incompetent by a disheveled ventriloquist's dummy to which Martin lends his voice.

(Karp and Martin brought “Gwyneth Goes Skiing” to Park City for its US premiere in May at the Egyptian Theatre.)

In this narrative, Sanderson and his lawyer are driven less by greed than by a pathetic desire to connect with Paltrow. They are moths drawn to the glow of celebrity, and Sanderson's charisma is that of a spurned lover. There are snowball fights, some ski competitions, and snippets of music. When Paltrow utters the immortal line that spawned a thousand memes, “I lost half a day of skiing,” the stage lights turn a deep red to emphasize the gravity of her situation. At the end of the show, the audience becomes the jury, voting via QR code to decide who wins.

The humor is crude. Sanderson is a typical bore, pedantically repeating that being an optometrist is something entirely different from being an optician; the wellness products Paltrow sells through her Goop brand are scathingly described as “for rich white women”; and there are a number of jokes at the expense of Paltrow's daughter, Apple Martin, all revolving around her unusual first name. She occasionally appears onstage represented by an apple on a string – a low-hanging fruit, quite literally. It's schoolyard stuff – great fun, but largely devoid of humor – and it's telling that the play's strongest lines are lifted verbatim from the trial itself.

Meanwhile, at the nearby Udderbelly, a temporary venue shaped like a giant upside-down cow, “I Wish You Well: The Gwyneth Paltrow Ski-Trial Musical” is playing, a high-profile—if no less silly—affair. A three-piece band plays in the courtroom, and the proceedings are presided over by an extremely camp judge who goes by a different name from the actual trial judge. Judge Jude (Idriss Kargbo) is a failed showman who is so enthusiastic about entertaining celebrity members (“Nothing ever happens in this courtroom / All we get are bankruptcies and parking tickets”) that he frequently gets carried away. In one particularly titillating gesture, he strips off to reveal a sparkly leotard, then begins twerking.

Sanderson's obvious vision problems, which were discussed at trial, are exaggerated for comic effect, as is his lawyer's adulation of Paltrow. In this version of the story, VanOrman is not just fascinated by her stardom, but downright enamored, like a shy teenager talking to her crush. The duo is rechristened accordingly – Terry Sightworsens and Kristin Fangirling.

Under Shiv Rabheru's lively direction, the chemistry between all four actors is great. Marc Antolin is likable as the plaintiff, a hapless opportunist struggling to keep his story straight, who finally goes off the rails when Facebook posts reveal he's been leading an active life since the accident. (He, too, turns out to be a frustrated stage performer, eventually finding his calling as a cabaret artist.) But Diana Vickers and Tori Allen-Martin steal the show as Paltrow and VanOrman, who develop an unlikely friendship as the story progresses. Both are superb singers, and they deftly combine powerful vocals with dynamic action and clownish grace.

The show is incredibly lean, clocking in at just under an hour, and includes a catwalk scene in homage to Paltrow's court dress (which was the subject of much criticism at the time), and her penchant for fashionable remedies is played for laughs: Goop is renamed poop (simple but effective); she offers VanOrman a serum made from the venom of bees “hand-grown in a Tibetan monastery”; and there's some raunchy stuff involving a vibrating vaginal egg. The book, by Roger Dipper and Rick Pearson, is lyrically witty, and the humor is perfect: emotionally generous and irreverent, but not cruel. In short, it's a triumph.

The biggest laugh of the evening came from a brief metafictional remark in which Paltrow asks aloud: “A musical about a skiing accident, who would think of that?” To which VanOrman replies: “Gay men. It's always gay men.”

This article originally appeared in the New York Times.