Before the inevitable harbingers of doom and vitriol come knocking at my door, hoping to pay their show-debt with a pound of critics’ flesh, I would like to begin this review with an earnest caveat:

I am not predisposed to hate showchoirs/people in showchoirs/shows abouts showchoirs that have people in them. Nor do I have any repressed musical trauma from my youth - some incident where I was humiliated by a showchoir in the canteen - which has bred in me a dormant but vicious hatred for the art.

As it happens, I am currently sipping from an ‘I’m a Gleek mug’ (an Easter-egg gem care of Mrs. King) and listening to the Barbershop quartet championships on youtube with the beatific smile of someone who unashamedly revels in the kitsch. (I may also be attempting to sing all four parts at once, but that’s neither here not there.) The point is, my tepid response to this production is fuelled, not by a secret vendetta, but rather a fervent love for the a capella genre, which Oxbridge students have embraced and conquered in recent years, with groups like Out of the Blue proving just how much amateur performers can achieve. While theatre critics at Cambridge seems almost maniacally fond of finding fault with plays, any negativity towards a musical production is deemed both misinformed and nigh-on blasphemous, but if you ask me, a bum chord magnified through a chorus is about as close to sacrilege as man can get. And I have to admit; this evening was far from perfect.

Sadly, many of the glaring issues are not related to the choristers themselves, but rather a villainous conspiracy of technical issues, which blighted our merry band at almost every turn. I have the utmost respect for performers that are forced to battle against adversity, and to their credit this group remained staunchly ebullient, despite being kneed in the groin with missed lighting cues, intermittent, crackling microphones and a somewhat kamikaze approach to direction which had every member of the cast changing costume between songs like a line-up of sartorial schizophrenics. The ensuing chaos left yawning caverns of time between acts, filled respectively by orgiastic cries from the audience and increasingly desperate glances from the band (no doubt they’d glimpsed the worrying sight of 20+ people struggling into saris/capes/togas backstage), and seemed to eclipse anything that followed.

Moreover, while gimmicks like the Star Wars battle undoubtedly added a whimsical tone to events (said comedy did not always seem intended), it detracted from the singing, and I suspect distracted the singers from performing to their best. And here, ladies and gents, we reach the crux of the matter. This show was by no means devoid of talent, but the organizers seemed determined to impede it at every juncture. Certain soloists, in particular Esther Kezia Harding, Freddie Tapner, Alexandra Bright and Michael Hamway (whose buttock gyrations sent me briefly into a dark but wonderful place), were extremely good, in the wake of Once Upon a Dream and other such productions I felt the choir should have championed its Unique Selling Point - group singing - as there are plenty of platforms better-suited to the individual performer. For me, the truly magical moments came within ensemble pieces, such as the choral Double Trouble, where a wall of harmonic sound showcased the group’s true technical finesse, and silenced even the most boisterous heckler (of which there were many, although their inane squawkings failed to shake me from my tushy-induced stupor).

All in all, the future is not bleak. I think CU Showchoir, which we must not forget is a wee bairn of a society, has all the potential to ascend to bigger, better (and hopefully buttock-ier) things in the future. And if you’re looking for enjoyment, the rapturous applause of my fellow spectators certainly implied they were having a good time. But on this occasion, as far as I’m concerned, the show was just more ‘damp’ than ‘camp’, and there’s nothing worse than a shimmy gone awry.