After spending basically the entire summer taking a little show called On Your Bike to the Edinburgh Fringe, we’re incredibly excited to be bringing it to Cambridge. On Your Bike is a new musical about love, labour, and leftover pizza, in which we follow the lives of Gemma and Aidan, who work for food delivery app Eatsaroo, as well as Daisy, from Eatsaroo senior management, and Felicity, who runs a chicken shop threatened by the arrival of KFK, a multinational chicken giant.

The process of producing a show at the Edinburgh Fringe was obviously a little different this year – both of us went up in 2019, although in slightly different roles, and we didn’t quite know what to expect from a pandemic version of the festival. We got brought on to work on the show back in April, and our team didn’t know for sure if it would actually happen until we arrived at the rehearsal period in July. Every five minutes, something new would come up – would there be a new lockdown? Would the venue cancel our show? Would we even be able to travel to Edinburgh in the first place? What if nobody goes to the Fringe and we sell no tickets and lose a lot of money and waste all of our time?

Somehow, against all odds, we actually made it up to Edinburgh, but it was a very different Fringe that even changed massively while we were up there. It was much more reduced this year, both in terms of audiences and shows; for a while, we were the only original musical there, and Edinburgh felt a whole lot quieter than it had in previous years. Our capacity went from 80 – or, in practice, about 65 because people were restricted to households – to 120 overnight, and suddenly we started selling out once more people started coming to the festival. Publicity also went almost completely digital. We couldn’t flyer in the same way, so we had to use new and exciting publicity methods: by which I mean a personality quiz and a lot of attempting to befriend other shows on Twitter.

“Potentially more importantly though, we had an incredible time doing it”

The show went pretty well (if we do say so ourselves). It was an unbelievable experience, as we got to go on BBC Radio Scotland to open their Fringe coverage, received multiple five star reviews, and won the Musical Theatre Review’s Best Musical award. Potentially more importantly though, we had an incredible time doing it. However, at the end of the six weeks, after several disposable cameras, a frankly concerning number of inside jokes, and a set of matching tattoos, we all headed home and thought we might be leaving it there – we were graduating and moving to different cities, and everyone else was moving on to new projects.

Fast forward two and a bit months, however, and here we are, heading back to Cambridge for a home run of the show (I guess it’s not hugely surprising, both of us will probably be attempting to accumulate Camdram credits from beyond the grave). It’s been a little odd trying to produce a show while not actively involved in the whirlwind of a Cambridge term, but we can’t wait to be back.

If you saw the show in Edinburgh and are looking for reasons to see it again in Cambridge, then you should know that it’s evolved and changed massively since the first few performances. This is courtesy of both our wonderful writers, Joe Venable and Ben James, and our lovely director Molly Taylor, who has been reblocking and reworking the show for the new stage. There is also a whole new song, which we can’t wait to see (we’ve heard rumours it features a kickline). We are very excited to go back to being absolutely blown away by the talent of everyone involved in this show.

We open at the Town and Gown Theatre on Thursday, and we run until Saturday – if you fancy an hour of songs about unemployment, veganism, first dates, and cycling, come and join us. We’d love you to see the project that kept us all so busy this summer and to witness the incredible talent of everyone involved in this show.