I Made You a Mixtape review – frothy fringe fun as dorm mates party like it’s 1999

TheSpace Triplex, Edinburgh Nine college students fall out and make up as they dance to punk-pop and alt-rock in this lively show This is such a festival show: uncategorisable, buzzing, slightly chaotic and unlike anything else.

As director Christie Lee Manning of Response Theatre Company tells us at the outset, I Made You a Mixtape is not a play, not a musical, not (really) a dance show, even though it is pretty much only dance all the way through, plus some hand-written captions.

But it’s the kind of dance that real people do – or how you’d like to think you could dance, especially if you were nine girls at a college dorm party somewhere in North America in the 1990s, which is the setting here.

The show fully embraces nostalgia from the off: camcorder, cassette tapes, the Friends board game, Sporty Spice’s wardrobe, and a pop-punk, alt-rock soundtrack (Blink-182, No Doubt, Red Hot Chili Peppers – not the Britpop/trip-hop 1990s of the UK), with live drums and guitar to make it all the more visceral.

At theSpace Triplex, Edinburgh , until 29 August All our Edinburgh festival reviews Continue reading...