Black Sabbath: The Ballet is heading to Edinburgh’s Festival Theatre this week after a successful run in London.
Though ostensibly working in hard rock, this show, billed as the “first true heavy metal ballet experience,” operates with a soft touch: Focusing on the band’s early years, it boasts choreography developed by the Birmingham Royal Ballet in collaboration with Tony Iommi, Sabbath’s lead guitarist, set against an original classical score shot through with electric guitar riffs from classics like Paranoid and War Pigs.
The show is “a strange beast,” Monocle wrote, and — like the bat that frontman Ozzy Osbourne may, or may not, have bitten the head off of — it “definitely contains a lot of blood and guts.”