Last year’s a cappella champions, Smoke Ring, who acted as host of the 41st annual Harmony Sweepstakes.
By WOODY WEINGARTEN
The national finals of the 41st annual Harmony Sweepstakes, an a cappella festival, proved Saturday night just how exquisite an instrument the vocal cords of soloists for many disparate groups can be.
Ditto the blended notes, traditional and modern, of a barber shop quartet. Or those from a sextet. Or an octet. Or a 12-member ensemble.
The highly entertaining 2¼-hour event in the Marin Center’s exhibit hall was repeatedly filled with horn-like, drum-like, and bass-like human vocals. Moreover, with jazz and hip-hop and romantic ballads.
Every bit of it harmonious. With one or two moments of exception, all upbeat and fun.
If there were any doubt, all one had to do was look at virtually any face in the vanilla 600-member audience to see a perma-smile the music imprinted on it.
Their pleasure, of course, may also have been due to the absence of gangsta rap, rape allusions, and f-bombs, or political bullet points about headline violence.
The finalists, from four areas of the United States, each crammed as many songs as they could in 12 minutes. All of them made sure to insert humor.
A fifth regional winner, the Bookmarks, a mid-Atlantic sextet, was supposed to appear but was kept from attending by our federal government, which blocked members’ visas.
The new national a cappella champs, Linc 182.
A panel of four judges, each with a different specialty, jointly picked Linc 182, from the Chicago district, as the 2026 sweepstakes winner. The group stood out partially because its tenor was 14-year-old Lincoln Beutel, son of the baritone, Tim Beutel. The teen’s actually been singing with the quartet since he was 10.
The group showed how bouncy an a cappella song could be when it performed “My Girl.” But its most memorable tune — “When Words Fail” — was laugh-out-loud funny and poignant at the same time. It starred a single long-stemmed flower.Mountain division winners hailed, was judged to be the best regional arrangement. The five women and three men also provided something different, gospel-like vibes that included the idea of “got me in chains.”
Coda Conduct, with a dozen singers whose choreography was particularly impressive, represented the Bay Area. Some of its lyrics were muffled, unfortunately, an anomaly for the evening.
The 7th Variety, yet another barbershop quartet, this one from Orange County, was the jazziest entry, also coloring songs with its “doo dah, doo dah, do wop” trope. Their top lyric centered on a long search for “a major chord.”
The show’s emcee was Paul Nathan, who’s appeared on HBO and in Eddie Murphy’s film, Dr. Doolittle. He inserted his own brand of cleverness and prestidigitation — and used a competition cliché when announcing the winners. It was really close, said the balding, salt-and-pepper-bearded guy.
That, in truth, was no surprise because all the groups had signature pieces that were outstanding.
Nathan’s schtick was accented playfully by a little girl named Alice that he invited on stage as a stooge for his magic tricks. Although the emcee was skillful, the kid turned out to be funnier — especially when she tried to high-five him as he towered over her.
“Special guests.” from Sacramento, were Outta the Vox, who had been an opening act for Foreigner. Their finger-snapping was unique, as was the “time-keeper” at the end of their line whose always in-motion right hand sometime resembled a beat-box tool, sometimes an air-guitar.
The crowd went wild, meanwhile, when the 11 group members performed “Jolene” as a foot-stomping tribute to the recently deceased Dolly Parton, proof that a country tune about husband-stealing can fit well into an a cappella gathering.
But perhaps the best group to perform was last year’s national champs, Smoke Ring, a mixed voice barbershop and contemporary a cappella quartet based in New York. They wore tight black costumes with an abundance of leather, the most striking outfits to appear on stage (men of many groups wore boring suits ties, and vests, with the women clad in floor-length skirts or gowns).
The Harmony Sweepstakes was the original brainstorm of San Anselmo-based John Neal, now president of Primarily A Cappella, “the nation’s leading vendor of a cappella music including recordings, arrangements, DVDs, songbooks and instructional material for singers.”
All told, he can be held responsible for truckloads of good music and comedy and memories. Enough of each, in fact, to last a year, until the 42nd annual sweepstakes rolls around.
Woody Weingarten, a longtime voting member of the San Francisco Bay Area Theater Critics Circle, can be contacted via his website, https://woodyweingarten.com, his email — voodee@sbcglobal.net — or his other website, https://vitalitypress.com. His four books include Rollercoaster: How a caregiver can survive a partner’s breast cancer or any other lethal disease; MysteryDates — How to keep the sizzle in your relationship; The Roving I, a compilation of 70 of his newspaper columns; and Grampy and His Fairyzona Playmates, a whimsical fantasy intended for 6- to 10-year-olds that he co-authored with his then 8-year-old granddaughter.
