There is something special about the human voice that a musical instrument can try to emulate or even manage to enhance, but never duplicate.  The Accidentals are an eight-voice a cappella group that filled Dillon’s Reprise Room with sounds of Christmas music, both secular and sacred.

The lack of instrumental accompaniment was amply swept out of mind by the ingenuity of the arrangements that orchestrated the eight voices into an effervescent symphony of sound.  They were more than a great choir however.  The singers were alive— animated, responsive to one another, and smartly aware of the value of their body language for communicating the sense of the song.

The voice-only stricture was broken to invite songwriter David Friedman to the piano to play and sing (not badly, either) his raucously funny “My Simple Christmas Wish” and his “Truth About Christmas.”  More to the serious side was his moving paean “We Can Be Kind.”

The Accidentals did a bang-up job. “O Tannenbaum” in both German and English, and “Seasons of Love” from the musical, Rent (“525,6000 minutes—how can you measure the life of a woman or man?”) were choice.  They encored with “Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas” using the arrangement The Accidentals leader, Margaret Dorn, prepared for Petula Clark, then closed the show with a reverent “Silent Night.”  ‘Tis a shame that Christmas comes but once a year.

Peter Leavy
Cabaret Scenes
December 17, 2007
www.cabaretscenes.org