The Choir of Man. Produced and directed by Nic Doodson. Music supervisor and arranger: Jack Blume. Poetry guru: Ben Norris. Choreographer and movement director: Freddie Huddleston. The Canberra Theatre. April 11 to 13 at 7.30pm. canberratheatrecentre.com.au or 62752700.
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Free beer!
If that sounds like your kind of show, be one of the first 100 people up on stage before The Choir of Man begins.
Director and co-producer Nick Doodson says, "We come from all over the United Kingdom and Ireland. It's all about dancing and singing and we give away 100 pints of beer to the audience before the show."
If you're brave enough to climb up to claim a pint, who knows? You might end up becoming part of the the show, as many an audience member has before.
"It depends on how enthusiastic they are. There are sometimes 100 people on stage."
The beer selected is usually a local brew, Doodson says. It can help loosen some people's inhibitions, feet, and vocal cords. Those who are of a musical but less exhibitionistic bent can join in from the safety of their seats.
The Choir of Man is set in a working-class Irish pub. The nine men in the cast play "versions of themselves", Doodson says.
Some of the character names are self-explanatory, some a bit more mysterious, and not all are flattering: they include Beast, Hardman, Casanova, Joker, Barman and Pub Bore.
There's also a Narrator (George Bray), who helps guide the audience through the characters and the songs they sing. But it's not simply a concert, Doodson says.
"The songs are all theatrically linked. That was the one rule - every song had to tell a story. It's most definitely a show rather than a gig."
There are plenty of songs, though - Australian, British, American, Irish - ranging from pub tunes to folk to opera to rock. Among them are numbers by Adele, Guns'n'Roses, Katy Perry, Red Hot Chili Peppers, Paul Simon, Queen and Sia - and Johnny Farnham's You're the Voice.
"That's one of my favourite songs because it's all about singing."
Doodson says he came up with the idea for The Choir of Man - a combination of group singing and dancing in an Irish pub setting - and brought it to his co-producer, Andrew Kay. Together they've presented such acts as Soweto Gospel Choir.
The Choir of Man premiered at the Edinburgh Fringe in 2017 and became an international success. There are now three companies touring the world - they were in Chicago, Sydney and the Caribbean at the time of speaking.
Doodson, whose music career goes back two decades, says he sang in a local church choir when he was a child in Britain.
"It was alway my thing."
Now, he's on the other side of the stage. But things might have been very different if he had followed the discipline he studied at university - physics.
Not that it was a waste of time: "It taught me about problem solving and critical thinking."
As for music, had kept up singing in ensembles while at university, enjoying the camaraderie of making music with other people, and founded and performed in the a cappella group The Magnets, who went on to record three albums for EMI.
In 2015, he created the a cappella stage show Gobsmacked! that toured internationally, and he's produced shows in Britain, Australia, New Zealand, and other countries.
Although The Choir of Man has toured Australia before, this will be its first time in Canberra.
