I Made You a Mixtape Review: Edinburgh Fringe Dance Show
Get the Culture newsletter
Daily culture — film, music, books, the trends and ideas worth your attention. Free.
- Christie Lee Manning directs 'I Made You a Mixtape' for Response Theatre Company, a dance-heavy Edinburgh Fringe show running at theSpace Triplex until 29 August that the director herself frames as neither play, nor musical, nor dance show — 'pretty much only dance all the way through, plus some hand-written captions.'
- The piece is set at a 1990s North American college dorm party with nine women, staging nostalgia through camcorders, cassette tapes, a Friends board game, Sporty Spice's wardrobe, and a pop-punk/alt-rock soundtrack of Blink-182, No Doubt, and Red Hot Chili Peppers — explicitly not the UK Britpop/trip-hop 1990s.
- Live drums and guitar accompany the soundtrack to give the dance sequences added visceral punch, distinguishing the production from a standard jukebox dance piece.
- Each performer carries a distinct physical signature — Latin dance, waacking, hip-hop, and MTV-era choreography — that the reviewer reads as a portrait of female friendship rather than individual showcase.
- The reviewer flags a 'missed opportunity' to develop the characters' inner lives and emotional arcs, arguing the show could be a 'CoverGirl mascara-down-the-face tearjerker' as well as a party if it committed more intention to dramatic stakes.
- Beyond 1990s nostalgia, the show's 'palpable sense of possibility' — the giddy threshold moment before young women scatter into separate lives — is framed as its universal, infectious core.
Why it matters: The review highlights a trade-off inherent to the Edinburgh Fringe's hybrid dance-theatre format: visceral nostalgia and party energy can captivate a festival audience, but the critic argues that 'I Made You a Mixtape' stops short of converting its premise into real emotional stakes. For Fringe programmers and makers of similar uncategorisable work, the piece illustrates how spectacle and character depth compete for the same runtime — and how the 1990s-dorm-party setting could anchor a tearjerker if the writing caught up to the dancing.
Ask SkimNews
