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LIVE FROM THE EDINBURGH FRINGE: Joey Jennings and Little Pink Dress

OUTCAST WORLD

Friday, 28 August 2026 - 37 minutes

It's the last weekend of this year's Edinburgh Fringe and in our time in Edinburgh we've spoken to some of the most interesting new and established artists from around the world. OUTCAST WORLD is live from the Edinburgh Festival Fringe — the biggest arts festival on the planet — meeting some of the queer and queer-adjacent performers bringing their stories to Edinburgh this summer. In this episode, Graeme meets New York performer and musician Joey Jennings, creator of Little Pink Dress — a deeply personal one-man musical about growing up gay, chasing the Hollywood dream, family, addiction, recovery and finding your way back to the person you were before the world started telling you who to be. At the heart of the show is a real little pink dress Joey wore as a six-year-old — sleeping in it, dancing around his room in it and living out an uninhibited childhood love of performance, pop music and dressing up. Years later, it was Joey’s mother who suggested that if he was going to tell his story, the dress had to be part of it. Joey talks about spending more than a decade pursuing the “serious actor” life in Los Angeles — and how an industry obsessed with image, masculinity and youth gradually left him feeling increasingly disconnected from himself. He describes auditioning for straight roles, trying to inhabit a more hyper-masculine version of himself and eventually realising that the dream he had chased since childhood was damaging the very part of him that had wanted to perform in the first place. There’s also a frank conversation about drinking, getting sober in 2023, therapy, moving from LA to New York and beginning to rebuild his creative life. And then there’s his mum. Little Pink Dress is, ultimately, a love letter to the single mother who encouraged the artistic kid she was raising, introduced him to the country and folk music that now runs through the show, and whose voice Joey says has remained in his head telling him to keep going. The result is an unusual collision of country rock, musical theatre, queer identity, childhood memory and autobiography — including a cowboy version of Joey who represents the masculine mask he once believed he needed to wear. They also talk about why Joey stayed away from social media for years, the strange vulnerability of finally releasing songs he had kept private for so long, and what happens when you hand the most personal parts of your life over to an audience. Recorded as part of OUTCAST WORLD’s Edinburgh Fringe 2026 coverage. Joey Jennings: Little Pink Dress.