Review: Spraywatch: A Beautiful Rescue (Edinburgh Fringe)

Spraywatch: A Beautiful Rescue is a musical from Low Fat Productions. The protagonist is based on a character from Baywatch, but this is not a retelling of any episode of that series. The show’s Instagram account made it obvious Spraywatch was going to be light hearted and not take itself too seriously.  I was keen to review it during my visit to Edinburgh Festival Fringe.

A relentlessly upbeat Santa Monica lifeguard (Izabella Webb) has a disastrous day at work when her colleagues realise she has cellulite on one of her thighs. This leads to her being dismissed for no longer being perfect. As a result, she leaves for struggling English resort, Spray, where she is tasked with turning the place around. As the lifeguard settles into her new role in Spray and gets to know the locals, it becomes apparent that not everything is as it seems within this team of lifeguards.

What can’t be left unmentioned is the song Hair! Tits! Teeth! Face! As sung by the cast (which also includes Abbie Ashall, Jamie Knapper, Ant McGinley and Natalie Hayes) at the start of the show, while locking eye contact with various audience members while thrusting their hips. This song was hilarious and a brilliant opener.  In fact, it was the one that ended up sticking with me after the show had finished, due to the comedy in the delivery.

The plot throughout is deliberately ridiculous, and the strengths in the show are the comedy, the songs and the performances. Every member of the cast is strong, with superb vocals too.

With all but one of the cast members playing multiple characters in the show but with distinct differences – costumes and a shocking wig in one case, it seemed as if there were many more people involved in the show than the five performers on stage would suggest.

I felt having an audience member up on the stage potentially broke the fourth wall a bit too much – somehow other spoken or eye contact with the audience enhanced the performance but this had the opposite effect and broke the continuity slightly for me. However, this scene was also really amusing once it got going so this observation is only a minor point.

This is the sort of show you can go to and know you will be laughing to yourself on the way out of the door. The nostalgia is there, with the slo-mo running, some references to music from the TV show, but there are other nods – for example to Murder She Wrote, which also keep the show moving forwards.

Spraywatch is a fun 70 minutes of entertainment guaranteed, due to the strength of every performance on the stage.

⭐⭐⭐⭐

Spraywatch: A Beautiful Rescue is showing at Edinburgh Festival Fringe until 29 August 2026. You can buy a ticket here.

If you would like to see my curtain call photographs from this and other shows, please visit my Instagram.

I was gifted a ticket for this show in exchange for an honest review.