Barbershopera

Connoisseurs of the barbershop tradition, will almost certainly be appalled: when Tony the tenor drops out of the quartet in the run up to the Eurovision Barbershop Contest, the rest of the guys have two options. Resign themselves to close-harmony wailing and let their Swiss counterparts (played by the same cast, cleverly sporting fake moustaches and suspect accents) win the final, or find themselves a replacement. Conveniently, Toni happens to passing at the time. Less conveniently, Toni happens to be a trained soprano. Man alive! A woman.

Surely no woman can produce the correct timbre required for barbershop’s famously magical "ringing chords"? Surely no female voice can sit comfortably in the mix of three male voices? And surely no woman can sport, let alone jazzily waft, a ribboned straw boater? Well, tonight’s story, told through the untested dramatic medium of unaccompanied close harmony singing proves otherwise. Musically inventive, cleverly choreographed and overwhelmingly funny, Barbershopera expands not just the vocabulary of English, but the capacity of musical theatre to offer genuine entertainment. Of the hundreds of a cappella Rocky montages I’ve witnessed, none come even close to that of Toni & the Guys.

But Barbershopera is more than a welcome—and, one suspects, conclusive—addition to our key modern debate regarding the essential masculinity of barbershop quartets. Simmering an octave or so below the surface harmonies lies a moving drama: a love story between Toni and one of the titular guys; a love story whose progress is fraught by jealousy, misunderstanding and split loyalties. Their obstacles are paralleled in the music: the troupe’s competition piece, ‘I fell in love with a girl’, consistently screeches to a discordant halt during rehearsals.

It’s kitch all the way, but the harmonic resolution when, at last, the lovers are fully united during the competition is touching indeed.