Time for Stags to stop fighting his neurodiverse impulses & dive headlong into embracing his endless side-quests. After three months of following his focus, where will he find himself? Come hear his brand-new tale of Boxy (his cat) & their delightful digressions. Few things more charming... With nothing but a microphone and rain sound machine, Stags brings his audience into his memories. Audience doubled up in laughter' - Margaret Hall, Playbill

August 15, 2025    One4Review

Birmingham-born Stags Woodward feels like the kind of performer the Free Fringe was invented for: inventive, unpredictable, and capable of turning a cramped karaoke room into a communal experiment. He’s a poet, writer, and comic who thrives on the edges of convention, and today’s audience—packed tight into this makeshift panic-room-cum-stage—are rewarded with something strange, messy, and very much alive.
The premise itself—1290.5 Steps to Autistic Success—is knowingly daft. No list could contain the loops and sidequests of an AuDHD brain, and Woodward doesn’t even pretend to try. Instead, what unfolds is an hour of tangents-as-architecture: riffs on traffic cones, cat nipples, unwanted gifts, and numerical quirks, all stitched together by a mind in permanent motion. For some, the sheer scattershot nature of it may feel like three shows jostling for space; for others, it’s the very point. ADHD here isn’t chaos—it’s abundance.
There’s real charm in the way he frames his autism diagnosis too: not as a tragic backstory, but as a puzzle piece that finally made sense of years of quirks and obsessions. The tone is never heavy. He invites the audience into his world, buffering screens and all, with warmth rather than self-pity. The result is less stand-up “set” and more open window.
At times the tangents spill faster than they can be caught, but it’s hard to care too much when the room is roaring with laughter one minute and murmuring with recognition the next. He’s likeable, magnetic, and the hour brims with invention—even if the whole doesn’t quite match the promise of its best fragments.
And yes: there’s a cat, because of course there’s a cat.
This is a show that hints at something bigger, maybe with a more expanded running time. Stags Woodward has the tools, the energy, and the perspective to build something special, and 1290.5 Steps is worth catching precisely because you can feel him mid-flight. It’s not the finished article but maybe that’s part of it’s charm, and it’s very much worth tracking down. Click Here For Review