Edinburgh, Scotland • Terry Sanderson, a retired optometrist, was unsuccessful when he sued the actress turned wellness entrepreneur Gwyneth Paltrow over a collision on a Utah ski slope. Though he claimed that she had crashed into him, a jury determined it was actually his fault. The livestreamed 2023 civil case was an unseemly but strangely fascinating spectacle featuring two equally dislikable archetypes: the vexatious litigant and the preening, out-of-touch celebrity.
But in another sense, Sanderson won: His name is now forever etched into pop culture folklore, as not one but two new stage productions about the ski trial at this year’s Edinburgh Festival Fringe attest.
The more rough and ready of the two, “Gwyneth Goes Skiing,” at the Pleasance Courtyard, is a camp burlesque in which both parties are mercilessly skewered. Linus Karp, in drag, plays Paltrow with the drawling malice of a pantomime witch. She’s an entitled girlboss whose altruistic affectations mask a sociopathic character, while Joseph Martin as Sanderson is dull mediocrity personified. The characters’ partners are played by plucky audience volunteers, aided by a teleprompter, and Kristin VanOrman, Sanderson’s lawyer, is represented as star-struck and hopelessly incompetent by a disheveled ventriloquist’s dummy, voiced by Martin.
(Karp and Martin brought “Gwyneth Goes Skiing” to Park City for its U.S. premiere in May, at the Egyptian Theatre.)
In this telling, both Sanderson and his lawyer are driven not so much by monetary greed as by a pathetic desire to connect with Paltrow. They are moths to the flame of celebrity, and Sanderson’s vibe is that of a spurned lover. There are snowball fights, some jousting with skis and snatches of music. When Paltrow utters the immortal line that spurred a thousand memes, “I lost half a day of skiing,” the stage lighting switches to a deep red to emphasize the severity of her plight. At the end of the show, the audience gets to be the jury, voting via QR code to decide who wins.
The humor is blunt. Sanderson is a generic bore who pedantically reiterates that being an optometrist is totally different to being an optician; the wellness products Paltrow peddles via her Goop brand are acidly described as being “for rich white women”; and there are a number of jokes at the expense of Paltrow’s daughter, Apple Martin, all centering on her unusual first name. She intermittently appears onstage represented by an apple on a string — low-hanging fruit, quite literally. It’s schoolyard stuff — good fun but largely lacking wit — and it’s telling that the play’s strongest lines are lifted verbatim from the trial itself.
Running concurrently at the nearby Udderbelly, a temporary venue shaped like a giant upturned cow, “I Wish You Well: The Gwyneth Paltrow Ski-Trial Musical” is a higher-caliber affair — though no less silly. The courtroom is flanked by a three-piece band and the proceedings are overseen by an ultra-camp judge of a different name from the actual trial judge. Judge Jude (Idriss Kargbo) is a showman manqué who is so psyched to be hosting celebrity royalty (“Nothing ever happens in this courtroom / All we get are bankruptcies and parking fines”) that he frequently gets carried away. In one particularly excitable flourish, he disrobes to reveal a glittery leotard, then proceeds to twerk.
Sanderson’s apparent vision problems, which came up in the trial, are hammed up for comic effect, as is the fawning of his lawyer over Paltrow. In this version of the story, VanOrman is not just star-struck but positively love-struck, like a shy teenager talking to her crush. The duo are re-christened accordingly — as Terry Sightworsens and Kristin Fangirling.
Under Shiv Rabheru’s lively direction, the chemistry between all four performers is terrific. Marc Antolin is sympathetic as the plaintiff, a hapless opportunist who struggles to keep his story straight, and who eventually comes unstuck when Facebook posts reveal he has been living an active life since the accident. (He, too, turns out to be a frustrated stage performer and eventually finds 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 outstanding singers, and they nimbly combine powerful vocals with dynamic action and clownish grace.
Incredibly lean at just under an hour, the show features a catwalk sequence in tribute to Paltrow’s courtroom attire (which was the subject of much scrutiny at time), and her penchant for faddish health cures is played for laughs: Goop is renamed Poop (simple but effective); she offers VanOrman a serum made from the venom of “bees raised by hand in a Tibetan monastery”; and there’s some bawdy stuff involving a vibrating vaginal egg. The book, by Roger Dipper and Rick Pearson, is lyrically witty and the humor is perfectly pitched: emotionally generous, and irreverent but not cruel. It is, in short, a triumph.
The biggest laugh of the night came in a brief metafictional aside in which Paltrow wonders aloud: “A musical about a ski 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.
