Michael Ball and Alfie Boe’s business is booming. The stage veterans, who first met in 2007 during an unloved ENO production of Kismet, know a thing or two about projecting a stirring melody so it rattles the back row, thanks to Ball’s storied career in West End musicals and Boe’s in opera and pop-classical. But at a time when the ubiquity of streaming has kneecapped album sales, the duo have managed to buck a spiralling trend.
Their first collaborative album of show tunes and standards, Together, cornered the 2016 Christmas market and became the biggest-selling album released that year. Their dulcet bromance has since become a cottage industry, with stocking-ready CDs released almost every fourth quarter, celebratory ITV specials, and large-scale arena shows. This latest live tour, in support of their recent third album Back Together, will culminate at the O2 in London next month.
If there is a secret sauce that explains this success, it might be that Ball and Boe have embraced the joys of being a double act while mostly disregarding traditional duets, preferring to playfully hand lines off to each other and provide sturdy harmonies as required. On the promo circuit, they also wind each other up constantly, like the Classic FM answer to Ant and Dec. This daft schtick works because Ball, who is more than a decade older than the 46-year-old Boe, seems heroically determined to be the most mischievous.
Their live show mostly stows the comedy and foregrounds the music. Backed by a 21-piece band that includes six backing singers, a deft string section and a drum kit with added timpani, it is a grandiose revue that still briskly hits its marks. It begins with a hijacking of Hugh Jackman’s ubiquitous curtain-raiser The Greatest Show, a suitable mission statement of circus maximalism. In smart suits with waistcoats but no ties, the pair look vaguely similar but have distinctive energies: Ball is unhurried and regal in a mildly self-mocking way, while Boe has a prizefighter bounce and occasionally sprints across the stage.
They rattle through more than 20 songs in just under two hours, their choice of material ranging from recent Broadway showstoppers (You’ll Be Back from Hamilton) to retro pop ballads (Something’s Gotten Hold of My Heart). Among all these road-tested classics, they do carve out space for one new song, giving the full slowburn-build treatment to Army, written by Ben Earle from UK country duo the Shires.
There is tangible excitement when they perform Wishing You Were Somehow Here Again from Phantom of the Opera. But when the setlist finally moves on to Les Misérables – a show that has loomed large in each of their careers – the predominantly middle-aged audience of 10,000 explodes like a WrestleMania crowd, thunderously cheering Ball’s strident Stars, Boe’s sonorous Bring Him Home, and their combined One Day More.
That polished sequence opens the crowd-pleasing floodgates, with back-to-back hits from The Lion King stage show and a thumping Queen mash-up. Any nuance there might have been is overwhelmed by sheer, ear-ringing spectacle, but it certainly makes for a barnstorming final furlong. If an encore of My Way feels a little self-indulgent, they finish with a high-speed medley so surprising and cheesy it deserves not to be spoiled. It underlines Ball and Boe’s determination to entertain at all costs, and they earn those final bows.
• At P&J Live Arena, Aberdeen, 23 February. Then touring until 7 March.
