Edinburgh 2018: Review: NOTFLIX, Gilded Balloon Teviot

There's a growing trend of films and TV shows being adapted for the stage. Just look at the list of this year's Tony Awards Best Musical nominees (Mean Girls, Frozen, Spongebob Squarepants and The Band's Visit) or your local UK regional theatre summer/autumn programme (Summer Holiday, Flashdance etc.).

Taking suggestions of films from the audience, the six-strong Notflix band of actors, adorned in black T-shirts adorned with "Notflix and chill", put to a vote whether the audience want to see them improvise a musical version of Chasing Mavericks, a surfer film, or So I Married an Axe Murder on the date of this performance. The latter won the vote, and what follows is a rather repetitive hour of butcher-themed numbers.

Notflix begins as a typical improvisation show, with an individual within the group compering, however once the actual musical improvisation is under way, this previously established MC made no attempt to step out of character to move on the story when it was much needed.

This leads to a few very samey numbers about death, murder and toughening up which detracted far from the original film premise - to be expected since only one member of the group had seen the film that had been suggested. A number of the plot points decided on at the top of the show from the audience participant's synopsis were largely abandoned by the group of improvisors.

The actors themselves were very enthusiastic throughout in their performances, yielding axes with much gung-ho, and the three-piece band supported them well in a variety of different musical styles.

However, the singers seemed to over-rely on simple repetitive choruses made up of few words and singing different things over each other - e.g. using "One Day More" to sound like impressive chorus numbers. While some skill of coming up with entire rhyming verses out of nowhere was demonstrated, this particular show proved challenging for the group.

It may have been the particular choice of film, but Notflix may well have disproved their theory that "everything is better as a musical" on this occasion.

Notflix at Gilded Balloon Teviot until 26 August

Photo credit: Gilded Balloon

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