Interview: Roz Pappalardo - One Hour Wedding (Edinburgh Fringe Festival)

One Hour Wedding is an interactive comedy playing from 5 - 23 August at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival. They are coming all the way from Australia.

Forget the presents – your presence is required. One Hour Wedding is a high-stakes, crowd-built ceremony where the audience is wedding planners and we've got sixty minutes to pull it off. From vows written on the fly to a first dance choreographed in real time, hosts Roz and Rachel weaponise their skills in music, theatre and event production for maximum chaos. The couple have said yes; now the theme, music, vows, and dance are yours to decide. The clock is ticking, the bouquet is ready, and this wedding must happen.

Could you tell us a bit more about yourselves and how you came up with the crazy idea for One Hour Wedding/ or the role you’re playing in the show?

Roz Pappalardo (me) and Rachel Terry are both event and festival producers; Roz (me) is also a registered marriage celebrant in Australia and Rachel is a florist. Collectively, they’ve gone to, arranged, co-arranged or played a role in probably 50 weddings between them. We realised weddings and theatre have a lot in common - like heightened emotion, bizarre costumes, music cues that are never actually on cue, overenthusiastic audience participation, unpredictable in-laws and the constant possibility that something could go really, really wrong.

Roz and Rachel have been the best kind of friends for around 15 years. They met while cast alternately (Cast 1 and Cast 2) in the lead role of a new musical theatre work set in regional Far North Queensland. They brought very different skills to the table, but connected immediately through ambition, humour and a deep love of creating work. While Rachel was onstage, Roz babysat her beautiful children, who are now all thriving adults, and somewhere in amongst all that chaos, a true creative friendship was born. After the success of All Fired Up, the 80s mixtape musical they wrote and presented at Edinburgh Festival Fringe in 2025, they were eager to return to what they consider the absolute mecca of the arts. Day and night, every corner of Edinburgh is alive with artists, audiences and possibility. It’s truly intoxicating.

This time, they wanted to create something simpler and deeply interactive - a work built around their collective skillset as actors, songwriters, dancers, singers, directors, producers, florists, festival programmers and professional wranglers of chaos. As Roz was finalising her celebrant qualifications ahead of marrying two close friends back in Australia, they found themselves circling one big question: What if you could create an entire wedding in one hour with the audience making every major decision in real time? And so, One Hour Wedding was born.

For someone who has never heard of it, how does a “crowd-built wedding” actually work?

Well, we’re not sure who else is doing it, so we may have actually coined the phrase. In any case – it means that the crowd (audience) will be making the decisions about such things as hair styles, wedding dress style, the song that the couple will walk down the aisle to, and the first dance (and) so on!. The crowd builds the storyline!

Since the theme, music, and vows are decided by the audience in real time, how do you prepare for that much unpredictability?

We are offering the audience a choice of 3 for a host of the decisions (hair style, dress style, shoes, to name a few) – and whichever choice the audience lands on is a choice we’re prepared to deliver!

You are actually looking for real couples to get married live on stage! How has the response been so far?

It’s been good! We’ve got a few couples we’re talking to and have pencilled in their preferred date during our season. We’ve secured the services of a celebrant based in Edinburgh as my celebrancy qualifications are only valid in Australia.

What do you hope audiences (and the couples!) will take away from this unique experience?

We want people to remember that love is cool! How cool ritual can (sometimes) be? And the belief that sometimes you don’t need to labour over every single life decision – the quicker is sometimes the better.