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	Pleasance Dome (venue website) Musicals Until 29 Aug, 10:55pm (11:55pm)

Mixing side-splitting humour with – er – barbershop quartet, Barbershopera is a real favourite here at FringeGuru.  Most of the team made it along to last year’s show, and we all agreed with our reviewer Lee Zhao: “roaringly funny… a gem of an original script… a true delight to see them perform”.

In case you somehow missed the hoop-la over the last two sell-out years, this is an original musical sung in barbershop harmony – and played strictly for laughs.  Full of energy and brimming with great ideas, previous scripts have seen the a cappella foursome compete at Eurovision and blunder into a bull-fight.   This year, it seems, the Horsemen ride… and the Apocalypse has never seemed so tempting.

Giggles aside, it’s remarkable to see an hour-long musical performed without amplification or accompaniment, and it’s dangerously easy to overlook the musical skill which underpins it all.  There’s an argument that the group is short of a true bass, but few who go along will mind in the least; we confidently expect the third dose of Barbershopera to be just like the first – an ambitious, hilarious and quintessentially quirky staple of the Fringe.