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The American High School Theatre Festival brings coachloads of US youngsters on to the stage at the Edinburgh festival fringe. Laura Barnett meets some of its organisers and star performers

Each summer, Edinburgh is awash with performers pursuing their dreams of stardom: mime artists and ukulele players, Russian contemporary dancers and comedians â€" and, perhaps most incongruously of all, hundreds of American high school students.

In the four years that I've been covering the festival, one fringe theatre company has always been particularly intriguing: the American High School Theatre Festival. Leaf through the densely-printed pages of this year's fringe brochure, and this name appears in confident, bold type next to a veritable smorgasbord of shows â€" among them, variously, Medea, The Mikado, A Midsummer Night's Dream, Bambi: A Life in the Woods and the tantalisingly-titled The Little Bab Snoogle-Fleejer.

My first port of call is Sarah Cook, the American High School Theatre Festival's programme director. We arrange to meet at the Church Hill theatre; this large, porticoed theatre on Edinburgh's genteel Morningside Road is the AHSTF's main performance space. It's a Tuesday morning, and a coachload of students from the Detroit country day school have just arrived for their 10.20am performance of Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street â€" a new version, the fringe programme claims, set in an asylum. Round the side of the theatre, the performers â€" costumed in sackcloth, their faces smeared with dirt and white stage-paint â€" form a circle and hold hands, in a surprisingly professional bonding moment before curtain-up.

Being an ambassador at the fringe is an expensive business, however. Cook doesn't want to give me even a ballpark figure for how much it costs each child to participate in the festival â€" the figure changes each year, she says, and she doesn't want prospective future participants to read this article and be put off. But Cook does say that schools and students spend up to two years raising funds, something that Jeff Nahan, a professional theatre director and head of the Conservatory of Performing Arts at the Detroit country day school, confirms when I meet him inside the auditorium, as the five-piece school band tunes up in the pit for Sweeney Todd.

"Coming here has cost each student $5,784 (£3,621)," he says. "That's a lot of money, of course â€" but our headmaster has been very supportive with fundraising, and the kids have worked hard to raise the money." For that money, the students get their flights, two days in London, their travel up to Edinburgh (on a specially-chartered AHSTF train), and then at least 10 days in Edinburgh, with tickets to the Military Tattoo thrown in. So is it worth it? Nahan's face lights up. "Oh yes. This is about pushing kids beyond the limits of their education â€" about showing them not to be afraid of pursuing a career in the arts. Here in Edinburgh, they see people who really are making it happen."

Watching Sweeney Todd, it's clear that several of the students in Nahan's cast â€" who are all aged between 15 and 19 â€" really could stand a chance of pursuing a career as actors and singers. The young cast handle the tricksy Sondheim vocal lines with aplomb, and 19-year-old Nathan Mondry, as Sweeney, seems as confident as a Broadway old-timer.

Outside the theatre, I ask him what he's getting out of being in Edinburgh. "It's lovely to see the city's history â€" the mix of old and new," he says. "And it's a challenge to perform in front of an audience of people who don't know us." Tim Markham, 18, who alternates with Mondry in the role of Sweeney and is going to the University of Michigan this September to study acting, agrees. "It's so exciting to see what other professional actors bring to the table," he says. "And we have a lot of fun. Yesterday, after the show, we had a massive pizza party."

As the Sweeney cast are stowed into their waiting coach, the next group arrives: the York County school of the arts from Bruton high school, Virginia, who are about to perform another musical (I'm sensing a theme): Rodgers and Hammerstein's Cinderella. While the audience â€" mainly teachers and kids from the other American high school groups, with a few local senior citizens thrown in â€" take their seats, I grab a moment with Shelly Cihak, the show's director.

Coming to Edinburgh, she says, gives the students a chance to see what it's like to put a production together on a professional scale: "We're working with an all-female technical crew, and I think it's really inspiring for them to see that women can make this their profession, too. They're getting so much out of this experience: all of them have risen above anything I could have asked of them."

For Cihak, it's the opportunity to see shows like these â€" and just to soak up the fringe atmosphere â€" that makes the distance and the hard work worthwhile. "The students can learn more about the arts just walking down the Royal Mile," she says, "than they do back home in a whole year."

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