Jay Foreman's show is a nostalgia trip for the young. This mixture of stand-up, songs and audience participation explores our relationship with the recent past and the experience of living in an age, the fanciful year of 2011, that should definitely be some kind of futuristic paradise - but isn't.It’s a great conceit for a show, allowing Foreman to lift observational comedy about the banality of everyday life and popular culture to a much higher level than such well-travelled topics – the royal wedding, text language, social networking etc. – should ever be able to reach. But where Foreman really shines is in his technical brilliance as a musical comic, dazzling the audience with his vocal versatility and perfect synchronicity between comic and musical timing, skipping over sudden obscenities into joyous break-downs and hitting the punchlines on the most ingenious of rhymes.Those familiar with Foreman’s earlier work, such as his most famous viral hit ‘Moon Chavs’ from a few years ago, will marvel at the intelligence and skill he demonstrates today, creating the same sense of dissociation from the past that underpins the routine’s content. Even one of the only two 'old' songs in the set, 'The Procrastinator', has to be rewritten so that its verse about MSN Messenger is now in the past tense, bridging an unfathomable historical and artistic distance of barely any time at all.It wouldn't be true to say that Foreman is yet amongst the top echelons of Fringe performers – some songs work better than others and many of the references may get lost on the over-35s. But the future, as this show reminds us, is a different place and I have a feeling we’ll be seeing him there.
