Edinburgh Fringe theatre and musical reviews: Girl Pop! | Girlz| This Blighted Star | Life’s a Drag + more

Girl Pop! ★★★

Gilded Balloon Patter Hoose (Venue 24) until 25 August

Girlz ★★★

Greenside @ George Street (Venue 236) until 23 August

The cruel rule of the manufactured pop band is that it’s all over once the members ask for more creative control or think that they can do better than the ruthless machine which created them.

Girl Pop! follows the eponymous four-piece on the comeback trail, older, wiser and ready to reminisce on the insane intensity of their years in the pop spotlight, weaving personal stories of relationships, both real and contrived, mental health and bereavement into a cautionary tale of music industry machinations.

Girl Pop!

Arabella (the talent), Hazel (the party chick), Ruby (the cute one) and Zoe (the token black girl) are cynically sold on their Spice Girls characteristics.

Behind-the-scenes, it’s all demanding donkey work and divide-and-conquer tactics. Out front, the tabloid and fan scrutiny is harsh even in a pre-social media age, especially when Ruby has the audacity to date a member of swaggering boy band Flame.

If the plot of Girl Pop! doesn’t feel particularly original, that’s probably because it is played out repeatedly in real life. Equally credible are the handful of catchy songs, well delivered by four strong singers, including Bubblegum, a fun pastiche/affectionate tribute to girl gang attitude from a pre-TikTok time.

You wait ages for a musical about a girl group and then a rival production shows up. These Girlz are different though - there are five of them, moving in sync, harmonizing impressively as they audition for music industry mogul Colin Cashman.

They all deserve the gig, they all make the grade. Once again, the trajectory is rise and fall, but there is more acute tragedy and soap opera melodrama in this production.

Most of the behind-the-scenes action centres on Nicky’s domestic dilemmas and Australian Alex’s trauma and addictions, but the show is also peppered with sweet moments of female solidarity, some standard seize-your-dreams musical theatre solo songs and far superior sparky, irreverent girl group numbers.

Fiona Shepherd

This Blighted Star ★★★

Underbelly George Square (Venue 300) Until 24 August

A big screen dominates the stage in this debut solo play by writer and performer Alfie Jones.

When Ivan, a promising student, goes missing in a Midlands town, his friend - a local CCTV operator - obsessively plays and replays the footage of his last known moments.

But CCTV, our nameless protagonist tells us, captures only 12 frames per second. It is not the whole story, there is more to be read in the gaps. Rumours spread about Ivan on social media; a mouthy young TikToker spouts conspiracy theories.

Jones’ play, directed by Alice Harding, is about rather more than a young man turning detective to investigate the disappearance (or it is death?) of his friend. As we learn more about the “friendship”, and about the CCTV operator’s home life - he cares for his mother, whose dementia is worsening - we realise that Ivan had opportunities this young man could never dream of.

There are times when the plot could be clearer, but this is difficult to do when you want to keep the audience guessing about the reliability of your narrator. This is a highly promising debut which has some interesting things to say about the screens which dominate all our lives.

Susan Mansfield

Life’s a Drag ★★★

theSpace on the Mile (Venue 39) until 23 August

On the set of Life’s a Drag, a TV competition suggestive of Ru Paul’s Drag Race, three drag queens prepare for the season finale.

There is an unfortunate crossover in the title of the piece, with the show dragging in numerous places – it currently sits at an hour and 15 mins, and it could comfortably run at half that time – but there are biting moments of humour throughout, and they are worth the wait.

The three queens have their own personal stories and histories, which are revealed and unravelled by the TV producers who are cooking up a narrative of their own.

This is a vital theme, and one easily forgotten when engaging with the reality TV genre, that on-screen events are structured or semi-structured, and information is elicited. Indeed, the term ‘reality’ is used in the loosest possible sense.

The presence of the production team, who are beamed onto a backdrop (ostensibly through a two-way mirror), or buzzing about between the scenes that they conspire to bring about, is a little on the nose and deserving of greater nuance.

But ultimately, the queens themselves, with their queer politics and behind-the-scenes dramas, traumas, hopes and fears, do not disappoint.

Josephine Balfour-Oatts

Hold the Line ★★★

Pleasance Courtyard (Venue 60) until 25 August

In a work environment where having or not having a “productive shift” can mean life or death, we follow NHS 111 call centre operator, Gary, an upbeat Geordie living in London through just-another-day filled with ringing phones, rigid scripts and raucous characters often as interested in having a chat as discussing their medical conditions.

Rattling through the rhythm of standard questions for non-standard situations, writer/performer Sam Macgregor’s heightened approach treats everyday comic and tragic moments with the same broad brush.

Inspired by Macgregor’s real-life experiences in the job, the brightly characterised patients and multi-tiered management structure feels more authentic than an on-the-nose critique of the politics behind the system mid-way.

As Gary is taken through an investigative process after someone dies, the mounting pressure is evoked by two excellent performances, from Macgregor and Gabriela Chanova, who switch between roles with the exhilarating energy of powering through a busy shift.

The sketch-like slicing structure sometimes feels like it gets in the way of something more truthful. But Gary’s ultimately “a proper kind bloke” and that’s what this warmly delivered piece focuses on – as well as capturing the best of men and women who fuel the NHS.

By the end his “star of the month” feels well earned and I’m very happy to award him two more.

Sally Stott

Bing! ★★

Greenside @ George Street (Venue 236) until 23 August

Jason Woods’ eloquent oration and wonderful wordplay creates a wall of endless alliteration in a seemingly limitless world of fairytale magic, where two brothers go on an adventure to tackle a dragon, source a “chalice in a palace” and defeat an evil queen.

Playing all of the characters, including a lively New York witch, Woods’ talent as an actor makes this episodic, endlessly evolving epic, with its non-stop plot points, more engaging than it would be in lesser hands.

But its largely archetypical ensemble of fairytale figures, with their emotions buried in the density of the language, make things difficult to care about, particularly within the challenging one-man storyteller format.

Sally Stott

Well Behaved Women ★★

Glided Balloon Patter Hoose (Venue 24) until 25 August

There’s no doubting the sheer professionalism and commitment of the cast of this curious farce by Amy Yeo.

Three young women attempting to find their way in Victorian society, faced with the arrival of a horrendously eligible aristocrat, are compelled to lie, obfuscate, assume identities and hold a fake seance — all at a relentless clip.

It’s breathless stuff but often the cast look like they’re trying to re-inflate a soufflé. Incident piles upon incident with ever decreasing effect. Yeo also wrote the very funny Crash and Burns in 2023, which was also similarly pacey, but this in comparison just seems like a rather hollow pastiche.

Rory Ford

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