The Choir Of Man

A beer-garden idea, then the Assembly Rooms

Doodson and Kay had already worked together on the a cappella stage show Gobsmacked! when, in 2016, they settled on a premise: ordinary men who sing in their local pub's choir. The show was tried out in a small north London venue before premiering at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe in August 2017, at the Assembly Rooms Music Hall on Princes Street. The first cast of nine multi-instrumentalist singers included John Sheehy, Aidan Banyard, Mark Loveday, Tom Brandon, Jami Reid-Quarrell, Ben Norris, Freddie Huddleston, Peter Lawrence and Andrew Carter, performing on a set dressed as a British or Irish pub with a working bar from which pints were poured for the audience.

Doodson has put the show's travel down to the ubiquity of the format rather than anything novel: on tour as a musician, he found that promoters in almost every city took bands to an Irish or British bar, and that audiences therefore arrive already fluent in the setting. The Fringe reaction, he has said, was what first suggested the piece had legs beyond the festival.

Adelaide Fringe followed in 2018, in Gluttony's Flamingo tent, where the production added Connor Going as pianist — the first appearance of the virtuoso-pianist role — and took the BankSA Best Music award for its week plus the festival's Pick of the Fringe. A date at the John F. Kennedy Center in Washington came in November 2018, and a cut-down version opened aboard Norwegian Escape in 2018 and Norwegian Encore in 2019.

The format is the work

There is no plot. The structure is nine archetypes — Barman, Joker, Poet, Maestro, Handyman, Romantic, Hard Man, Beast and Bore — who sing, play, tap-dance and deliver direct-address monologues written by the performance poet Ben Norris, who was also in the original cast. Jack Blume, Doodson's co-creator on Gobsmacked!, supplies the vocal arrangements and musical supervision; Freddie Huddleston, a tap dancer in the first company, choreographs.

The song list runs to sixteen numbers, almost all of them rearranged pop and rock, plus one original, Bring Tomorrow On. Material credited across the 2026 productions includes Queen, Guns N' Roses, Adele, Sia, Luther Vandross, Paul Simon, Avicii, Katy Perry and Red Hot Chili Peppers. Recent reviews name Welcome to the Jungle as the opener — the pub itself is called the Jungle — along with The Impossible Dream, Chandelier, Dance with My Father, Fifty Ways to Leave Your Lover and Somebody to Love.

The monologues carry the show's stated subject: male friendship, and by extension male mental health. Doodson framed the December 2026 London return around the line that there will always be a place at the table whoever an audience member is and wherever they have come from. The design team is stable across versions — Oli Townsend on set, Richard Dinnen on lighting, Verity Sadler on costume, Sten Severson on sound.

Cleveland, the Arts Theatre, and more than 1,000 performances

The production's commercial break came out of the pandemic. From June to September 2021 it held a residency at Playhouse Square in Cleveland, billed as the first musical to perform in the United States after the Covid shutdown. It opened in the West End at the Arts Theatre on 29 October 2021, with a cast including Miles Daley, Daniel Harnett, Mark Loveday, Tom Brandon, Ali Higgins, Freddie Huddleston, Ben Norris, Dickie Locke and Tyler Orphe-Baker.

An Olivier nomination for Best Entertainment or Comedy Play followed in 2022, and the run was extended more than once. It closed on 31 December 2024 ahead of renovation work at the Arts Theatre, reopened on 12 March 2025 with a company led by Jason Brock, Benji Lord, David Booth, Paul McArthur and Oliver Jacobson, and played its final performance there on 4 January 2026. The producers put the total at over 1,000 performances.

Alongside the London run the show accumulated three sold-out seasons at Sydney Opera House, a sit-down production in Chicago from early 2024, seasons in Tampa and Melbourne, repeated North American and European tours, and dates in Korea and China. Doodson named Broadway as the ambition in an October 2023 interview, citing Six as the precedent, and said proof-of-concept stagings in real pub rooms had been run in New York and London.

Two tours at once: where it stands in October 2026

2026 is the year the operation split. A fourth North American tour ran from December 2025 through March 2026 across 45 cities and 68 performances, including two residencies in West Palm Beach and a return to Playhouse Square in Cleveland from 3 to 8 March 2026, with a date in Nashville on 15 February. Doodson's line on it was that the company would be playing return engagements alongside new markets.

In parallel, and announced on 2 October 2025, came the first UK national tour: 38 weeks, 32 venues, opening at New Wimbledon Theatre on 14 March 2026 and closing at the Edinburgh Festival Theatre on 5 December 2026, produced by HH Productions and Global Creative with Kay. Stops this autumn have included the Cliffs Pavilion in Southend on 15 September, the Lowry in Salford from 13 to 17 October, Wolverhampton Grand from 20 to 24 October, Mayflower Theatre Southampton from 3 to 7 November, Wycombe Swan from 24 to 28 November and Edinburgh in the first week of December.

A separate company played Brisbane Festival through 26 September 2026 in the Magic Mirrors Spiegeltent at Southbank, with a cast including Ifan Gwilym-Jones, George Knapper, Mark Loveday and Tyler Orphé-Baker — several of them Arts Theatre alumni.

The next fixed point is London. The show returns on 10 December 2026 for a run to 14 February 2027 at Arts at Marble Arch, the TodayTix-operated venue, with press night on 16 December 2026 and tickets released at the end of August 2026. Casting was announced separately from the venue announcement.

The critical split

Reviews of the 2026 tour divide less over the singing than over the drinking. East Midlands Theatre gave five stars at Curve Leicester on 8 July 2026, praising the harmonies and the monologues and singling out a finale sung with a 90-voice guest choir. Theatre and Tonic awarded four stars on 10 July, calling it a hybrid of concert and play, but argued the original 90-minute one-act hit harder than the touring edit. The Reviews Hub scored the Lowry performance 90% on 14 October 2026.

The dissent is consistent and worth recording. Reviewing New Wimbledon on 19 March 2026, Gary Martin for Everything Theatre found the staging slick and the vocals strong but the company dynamic cold and contrived, the business of pulling audience members on stage lazy, and a number performed at a urinal misjudged; he wanted an actual story. Writing on the Southend date of 15 September 2026 for Seen and Heard International, Jim Pritchard rated the performers highly but concluded the piece could have been more than it is, with thinner character writing than the premise invites. Reviewing the Brisbane season on 5 September 2026, Regan Baker gave four stars and described it as warm, funny, well sung and almost aggressively likeable.