Gotta tell you. I wasn’t expecting a lot. The blurb in the RIFF program describes Shut Up and Sing as “a group of guys who sang a cappella together in college and are now reuniting fifteen years later to sing at a friend’s wedding”.

“Great,” I thought, “I’ve been assigned to see The Big Chill with bad barber shop music.”

Color me wrong. Okay, it is about a group of guys who sang together in college. And they do now have wives and babies and divorces. And they do all get together the night before a friend’s wedding at one big house in the Hamptons. And secrets are revealed. And some lives do come to, well, you get the idea.

But they never drifted as far apart as their Chill counterparts because they did keep singing together. And they didn’t lose their sense of humor.

That’s because they got good comic actors who know how to deliver a line like Molly Shannon of Saturday Night Live. And someone taught them how to really sing a cappella.

Far from dreading each moment of singing that I knew was inevitable, the music added to the film in a wonderful way. The characters were engaging, funny, and real. In other words, Writer/Producer/Director Bruce Leddy’s film about a bunch of u who yell “SHUT UP!” instead of saying hello is the film The Big Chill should have been.