Corona Cutie: A Digital Quest For Love (Ed Fringe Digital)
Corona Cutie: A Digital Quest for Love
Spotlight Musical Theatre & The Green Room (Edinburgh Fringe Digital)
★ ★ ★ ★
This August, the single greatest celebration of arts and culture on the planet, Edinburgh Festival Fringe is back! For three weeks, the city of Edinburgh welcomes an explosion of creative energy to bring joy and excite audiences from around the globe. Due to the uncertainty of rules and anxieties for the arts industry, this year the Fringe has been given the opportunity to put their festival online! You still have the opportunity to see Edinburgh Festival Fringe in person, how to plan your visit is available here.
Corona Cutie: A Digital Quest for Love pokes fun at quarantine and creates a production that is relatable of the emotions people experienced from the comfort of their home. The show, written and produced by students Lucy Geller and Rosie, was created completely remotely during the COVID-19 pandemic. What started as a student theatre production at the Claremont College Consortium in April is now taking on the international stage on Ed Fringe’s digital platform. Writer Lucy Geller based the creation of Corona Cutie on humorous personal experiences she undertook when she joined an online dating Facebook group for Jewish college students. The result is a musical that shows the trials and tribulations of rejection before finally accepting and loving the person you are is far more important.
It follows Claire, a young woman who decides that now it’s time to venture into the world of online dating whilst she quarantines because of the coronavirus pandemic. She stumbles upon the dating platform Corona Cutie and embarks on a quest for love within the confines of her small New York City apartment.
The delivery of this 45-minute musical surely makes you smile, the score perfectly reflecting the tempo in which this production runs at. The time lapse sequences help to transition us through Claire’s journey with online dating. Ghosted! is a highly amusing number that is dressed up with some epic video editing from the 3-member strong team (Timi Adelakun, Skylar Masuda, Julia Cox). Although admittedly some of the musical numbers didn’t sync in time with the cast singing, it didn’t distort too much from what I was watching. Ready is a fantastic musical number that includes the wonderful line “the best thing you can wear is you” within it. It is a perfectly placed ballad number within the production that doesn’t fall short of perfection.
The cast do an epic job of bringing their characters to life through the screen, Annika Hoseth does a great job at leading lady and really portrays the frustrations, curiosity and fun that embarking on online dating can portray. The 3 cuties (Tray Hammond, Siena Hinshelwood, Emma Paulini) also bring some real light to the online platform they are portraying.
A fantastically created musical that packs a lot of warmth and joy in to just 45 mins – it definitely has room to build and develop further in the future.
Corona Cutie: A Digital Quest for Love is available to watch online through Edinburgh Fringe until the end of August. You can find out further information and book your tickets here.