Spiegel & Wolpow Blend Sketch Comedy With Barbershop Music In Video Series
Spiegel & Wolpow Blend Sketch Comedy With Barbershop Music In Video Series
Barbershop is the black belt of a cappella. Adam Spiegel and Dan Wolpow have put out a few barbershop sketch videos that we know you'll enjoy!
In the fall of 2010, Adam Spiegel and Dan Wolpow were attempting to figure out if their student project, "Back to the Future: The Musical," had the potential to be picked up by industry producers. After their naiveté was thoroughly snuffed out, they started looking for a new project.
While they were kicking around ideas for what would eventually become their original musical "Cloned!," they came up with an idea to have a barbershop quartet gleefully deliver a sinister singing telegram to an unsuspecting woman.
Both Spiegel and Wolpow are big fans of "The Music Man," which features a significant amount of barbershop singing, and had even incorporated the style (and other a cappella singing) into their songs in the BTTF project. They were primed to explore it further.
The first barbershop sketch video they put out in 2010 was called "Evil Barbershop Quartet."
Cut together from a handful of takes, the video was filmed on a shoestring budget on a lovely fall afternoon in Brooklyn and sung completely live. The mustaches are all real as well (see full credits at the end of the video).
"After many thousands of people inexplicably viewed 'Evil Barbershop Quartet' on YouTube, we thought it could be fun to make it an ongoing series," Spiegel said. "We were at a 'Friendsgiving' party and tossing around ideas for where else the quartet could pop up and ruin someone's life. One of us mentioned a bathroom, and we both instantly envisioned four grown men with mustaches and boater hats taking a bath, and the idea was born.
They wrote the song pretty quickly, with a notably less malicious tone than its predecessor -- it was simply a song about good, solid bathtime fun!
For the sketch itself, they envisioned a hapless schnook preparing for a big date night with his wife only to have it ruined by the unexpected appearance of the quartet.
After writing out a shot-for-shot treatment, they realized that it was going to be a complicated, expensive shoot because it required a larger cast/crew and a fairly elaborate set that included a bathtub big enough to fit five adult humans.
Because of their lofty ambitions, the inability to locate a sufficiently sized bathtub, and the stage musical "Cloned!" taking precedence, they had to shelve the project for a few years. When "Cloned!" won Best of Fest at the New York Musical Festival in 2014, they felt they had the cachet to finally make JGB happen.
After realizing that Spiegel's parents had the perfect bathtub out in the suburbs of New Jersey, they partnered with friend Eric Mann at Unreel Films, lined up a cast and crew, recorded the vocal track in a recording studio, and then spent an entire day taking over Spiegel's parents' house for the ridiculous film shoot.
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While they were kicking around ideas for what would eventually become their original musical "Cloned!," they came up with an idea to have a barbershop quartet gleefully deliver a sinister singing telegram to an unsuspecting woman.
Both Spiegel and Wolpow are big fans of "The Music Man," which features a significant amount of barbershop singing, and had even incorporated the style (and other a cappella singing) into their songs in the BTTF project. They were primed to explore it further.
The first barbershop sketch video they put out in 2010 was called "Evil Barbershop Quartet."
Evil Barbershop Quartet
Cut together from a handful of takes, the video was filmed on a shoestring budget on a lovely fall afternoon in Brooklyn and sung completely live. The mustaches are all real as well (see full credits at the end of the video).
"After many thousands of people inexplicably viewed 'Evil Barbershop Quartet' on YouTube, we thought it could be fun to make it an ongoing series," Spiegel said. "We were at a 'Friendsgiving' party and tossing around ideas for where else the quartet could pop up and ruin someone's life. One of us mentioned a bathroom, and we both instantly envisioned four grown men with mustaches and boater hats taking a bath, and the idea was born.
We have a simple metric for whether an idea is good enough to pursue: how hard the concept makes us laugh. This one had us in stitches to the point that people at the party started to think we were crazy, so we knew we had a good one.They then went on to make a fully produced video with "Jolly Gay Bath" in 2015.
Jolly Gay Bath
They wrote the song pretty quickly, with a notably less malicious tone than its predecessor -- it was simply a song about good, solid bathtime fun!
For the sketch itself, they envisioned a hapless schnook preparing for a big date night with his wife only to have it ruined by the unexpected appearance of the quartet.
After writing out a shot-for-shot treatment, they realized that it was going to be a complicated, expensive shoot because it required a larger cast/crew and a fairly elaborate set that included a bathtub big enough to fit five adult humans.
Because of their lofty ambitions, the inability to locate a sufficiently sized bathtub, and the stage musical "Cloned!" taking precedence, they had to shelve the project for a few years. When "Cloned!" won Best of Fest at the New York Musical Festival in 2014, they felt they had the cachet to finally make JGB happen.
After realizing that Spiegel's parents had the perfect bathtub out in the suburbs of New Jersey, they partnered with friend Eric Mann at Unreel Films, lined up a cast and crew, recorded the vocal track in a recording studio, and then spent an entire day taking over Spiegel's parents' house for the ridiculous film shoot.
The final product is staggeringly close to matching the original vision we hashed out at that party all those years ago -- creepy clown, raw steak, Russian czar, and all.
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