I Made You a Mixtape evaluate – frothy fringe enjoyable as dorm mates social gathering prefer it’s 1999 | Edinburgh pageant 2026

This is such a pageant present: uncategorisable, buzzing, barely chaotic and in contrast to the rest. As director Christie Lee Manning of Response Theatre Company tells us on the outset, I Made You a Mixtape isn’t a play, not a musical, not (actually) a dance present, regardless that it’s just about solely dance right through, plus some hand-written captions. But it’s the sort of dance that actual individuals do – or the way you’d wish to assume you might dance, particularly in the event you had been 9 ladies at a school dorm social gathering someplace in North America within the Nineteen Nineties, which is the setting right here.

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

Whether it’s the music of your youth or not, what’s common, and infectious, is the palpable sense of chance amongst these younger ladies about to set out on this planet, on the point of all the great issues to return. It’s the gorgeous time the place it looks like life is yours for the taking (perhaps the 90s felt extra like that than at present). You can go wild since you really feel protected, and the giddy power is frothing like that bottle of Dr Pepper they’ve bought on the snack desk. The ladies feed on music and friendship, they hug and cry and fall out and make up, and sway to songs, mouthing phrases with faraway eyes or punch out lyrics; all that pure pleasure and hope lived out by means of shifting your physique to music.

They every have their very own bodily signature: Latin dance, waacking, hip-hop, straight off MTV, however collectively they add as much as greater than that – that’s feminine friendship throughout. We’re launched to the ladies and informed that after tonight every can have a distinct path. Some of this performs out inside the songs, however there’s an actual missed alternative to make the emotional lifetime of the piece sing and a lot extra could possibly be made from the characters and interior drama. With a bit extra intention it could possibly be a CoverGirl mascara-down-the-face tearjerker in addition to only a good social gathering.