Brendon Ludlow
21 Aug 2026
Steve Burns: Alive — ★★★★
Blue’s Clues Grew Up and So Did We
There is something wonderfully strange about sitting in a Fringe audience watching someone who once spoke directly to you through a television screen as a child. Steve Burns Is Alive understands that strange relationship completely and turns it into something funny, clever, nostalgic and unexpectedly moving.
For an entire generation, Steve Burns was Steve from Blue’s Clues, one of the defining children’s television shows of the late 1990s and early 2000s. This show brilliantly bridges the years between the audience who once sat watching him as children and teenagers and the adults sitting in front of him today.
And Burns can still grab an audience. In fact, he may be even better live.
There is plenty of nostalgia here, but this isn’t simply a 90s-kid rehash designed to cash in on childhood memories. Burns uses Blue’s Clues as the doorway into a much more interesting conversation about fame, growing older, becoming detached from your past, and the peculiar experience of having millions of people remember a version of you that no longer exists.
He also addresses some of the stranger realities surrounding his disappearance from children’s television including the persistent rumours of his death. Being repeatedly reported as dead while you’re very much alive is fertile territory for comedy, but Burns also exposes the genuinely bizarre emotional consequences of celebrity and the desire to escape the rat race.
The staging is clever, the writing sharp and Burns remains a terrific storyteller. There were some minor microphone issues during the performance, adding occasional unwanted sound texture, alongside some noise bleed from surrounding spaces. Neither comes close to undermining the quality of what is happening on stage.
What makes Steve Burns Is Alive work is its authenticity. Burns doesn’t appear interested in recreating the person audiences remember from television. Instead, he acknowledges that person, plays with our collective nostalgia and then introduces us to the human being who lived through everything that came afterwards.
Funny, surprisingly emotional and beautifully pitched for the generation that grew up alongside him, this is one of those Fringe surprises you don’t necessarily see coming.
Steve Burns is alive. Steve Burns has still got it. And apparently, growing up was the biggest clue of all.
★★★★★