Review: Tomatoes Tried to Kill Me but Banjos Saved My Life, Fringe 2026

I booked Tomatoes Tried to Kill Me but Banjos Saved My Life because I play a little banjo myself. Beyond that, I knew there was a cancer story somewhere in there, but had no idea what the tomatoes had done.

Walking into the venue, three banjos and what I (wrongly) assumed was a guitar sat in the middle of the room, along with a basket of tomatoes. Over the next hour, Keith Alessi makes sense of all of them.

Storytelling – but with banjos

Alessi isn’t your typical Fringe performer. An older Canadian man and in his own words “a recovering executive”, he’d only found himself on-stage relatively recently. He’s warm, dad-joke funny and unpretentious. He thanks us for applauding. He opens with a Duelling Banjos reference, immediately exposing the banjo nerds in the room, and makes affectionate jokes at his own expense. It feels like you’re listening to him tell a story in his own living room, which quickly helped me settle into the experience.

What I loved most though was watching his energy change as he told it. The format of the show is simple: he talks us through his life, picking up different banjos along the way to share their stories along with his own, and play us the odd tune.

There’s a bluegrass banjo, an old-time banjo and a gourd banjo that opens up the instrument’s African roots and America’s multicultural musical history. Then there’s that guitar-looking thing (I’ll let him tell you what it is), which carries one of the show’s most touching parallels between these objects and himself. With every instrument, Alessi becomes more animated, and it’s infectious.

Following joy

Musically, Alessi is no virtuoso, and he tells us that. I think that’s kind of the point. When he occasionally fumbles, he plays on and just seems delighted to be doing it. As an amateur musician with major performance anxiety, that struck a particular chord with me (pun unfortunately unavoidable). 

But you don’t need to care about banjos for this show to make you feel something. There’s something universal here about the things that inexplicably bring us joy, and why we’re so quick to decide they’re less important than the things that make us productive or impressive.

Towards the end, Alessi describes joining a jam circle and finally understanding what it means to “feel the music”. In that moment, he realises that being a part of that creative act, imperfect as it is, is enough. And, perhaps more importantly, that he is too.

Leaving inspired

I left Summerhall thinking about the parts of ourselves we neglect, particularly the creative parts. I loved that 100% of Alessi’s artist fees from the run go back to Summerhall to support local artists, keeping the cycle of creating and sharing alive.

When I got home, I took out my own banjo, tuned it – because obviously the poor neglected thing needed tuning – and fumbled my way through a tune. I can’t think of a better endorsement than that.

Overall

Alessi’s story is a warm reminder that the things we love don’t have to make us successful or impressive to be worth doing. An earnest, unexpectedly relatable show about choosing the life that makes you feel most alive.