Barbershopera - Apocalypse? No!

Now in their third year at the Fringe, Barbershopera have built up quite a following. There's whooping and cheering – lots of it. And mostly with good reason. Apocalypse? No! bolsters Barbershopera's well-earned reputation for making extremely fun, frivolous musical comedy.

Musically the quartet are superb, using the three guys and a girl setup to extraordinary a cappella effect. They've lost some of the delightful campness that accompanied their strictly barbershop mode, but offer a suitable substitute with a much broader range of musical influences, squeezing grand soul-infused ballads and jazzy ditties out of their unaccompanied windpipes. One tune falls flat because the bass can't handle the tricky, funky riff. Frustratingly, it's a repeated number and marks a rare ill-advised compositional choice.

Also present are other hallmarks of Barbershopera's success: sharp humour (most brilliantly achieved by setting big issues against domestic annoyances); some of the funniest and most inventive rhymes in Edinburgh; wonderful visual gags (God as a bearded old man? Not here).

But the most obviously poor choices are fundamental ones regarding the plot – the pairing up of a primary school teacher and three horsemen of the apocalypse to avert the destruction of the human race. It's an interesting idea, but one which appears to have meandered uncontrollably throughout the writing, twisting itself into corners it can only escape from via the clumsiest of devices. It's beyond outlandish: it's amateurish, and sits in stark contrast to almost everything else that this group of professionals have created here.