Got A Text – Edinburgh Festival Fringe – Gilded Balloon Patter Hoose

Got A Text: A Musical Parody continues at Gilded Balloon Patter Hoose, Edinburgh until 26 August 2019.

Star rating: three stars ★ ★ ★ ✩ ✩

This is a fun staging of the worst and best bits of a reality TV show in the sun. The performers work hard and there is an unexpected arrival, of course, who gives us a great chance to cheer.

Billed as a musical parody – this just doesn’t go far enough. The few musical numbers are versions of an obvious original Broadway show tune with some adjusted lyrics, and fundamentally the company is taking a genre of entertainment which is a parody of life itself already.

There really is nothing which a cast of characters can do to parody the exploits of a reality show like Love Island or Big Brother. They offer sketch-deep, unpleasant and flawed characters, put them together with a big voice telling them things to do, and then they become mean, become sad, become needy, or find a form of love.

The audience is there, in a sense, in exactly the same manner as they might be in front of their TVs watching the real thing. A darkened room, a few laughs, and a beer. I really wanted to be taken further and to have a laugh or be surprised by where the company took this. But special congrats to Matt who offered us some great one-liners and demonsrated his honesty and vulnerability.

Chris Grady