EDINBURGH 2026: ANTIGONE 1989 - A TOWNHALL MUSICAL Q&A

BWW catches up with Ken Cerniglia to chat about bringing Antigone 1989- A Townhall Musical to the 2026 Edinburgh Festival Fringe.

Tell us a bit about ANTIGONE 1989: A Town Hall Musical.

This show is a fresh exploration of Sophocles’s classic through a double lens: 1) late-1980s culture and politics, and 2) the American musical. We’ll be inviting our real-world 2026 global audiences in Edinburgh to time travel with us through a prologue of touch-points from real-world 1989 into our mythical 1989 “Thebes, California,” where we are faced with a civic matter of life-or-death consequences. 

What are some of the challenges in retelling a classic?

Our biggest challenge in making a new work for now is that Sophocles’s original play is still so good – so relevant, so human, so devastating. With zero adaptation, it speaks to the human condition today as poignantly as it did 2500 years ago. 

At the same time, given the politics of our world in 2026, so many of our fellow artists have turned back to this play with their own, really compelling, spins. I’ve seen a lot of them recently, and I’m in awe. 

Contributing meaningfully to this historical and artistic conversation is a high bar… but we have a tremendous amount of talent and passion on our team, and in our cast. I’m cautiously optimistic that we – together with our audiences who bring it – can create more room at the Table of Antigone and make an impact at Fringe 2026. 

Why do you think it’s still so relevant today?

A century before the events of ANTIGONE 1989, Lord Acton wrote “Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.” Of course, Sophocles and his contemporaries were well aware of this human truth long before that. 

Having grown up in California in the 1980s, I’m both grateful to have survived and horrified to have witnessed how the seeds of power and corruption planted in that place and time are bearing intentionally rotten fruit four decades later. 

And yet, the fundamental tools for combatting that poisonous power, which we all possess and that saved civilization then – speaking out and acting up – can and must save civilization now… if we heed the call. ANTIGONE 1989 is designed to amplify that call.

What can you tell us about the creative team involved?

Our creative team spans three generations – Gen X, Millennials, and Gen Z – which I believe is our superpower. Although we came of age in different decades, and our relationship to the 1980s spans direct experience, received tradition, and just plain lore, we’ve harnessed what we collectively inherited from that time, and the 25 centuries since Sophocles, into explosive energy for our Gen Z cast to channel into our Fringe audiences, whom we know will only multiply it into productive action for our world. 

It’s now or never, people!

What would you like audiences to take away from it?

I want each audience member to feel empowered to do something. That their one voice not only matters, but is essential for a future in which we all matter. 

Fundamentally, ANTIGONE 1989 is a Town Hall, a gathering of citizens to tackle a civic problem through democratic means. 

It’s no accident that Western drama and democracy were born in the same place at the same time as essential, interdependent expressions of the ancient Athenian polis. 

If democracy in the modern world is to be saved for the millennium to come, investing in and harnessing the power drama – to imagine, to feel, and to rehearse our collective future – may be our only hope.

Antigone 1989 - A Townhall Musical will be at the Gilded Balloon: Patter House - The Other Yin at 3.05pm for tickets go to www.edfringe.com

Photo credit: Art by Soto

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