Mary McPartlan and kd lang feature in today's reviews.
Mary McPartlan
Cherry Tree, Dublin
She belongs to a long line of singers that stretches from Delia Murphy to Liam Weldon and detours briefly to Dolly Parton country. Still, Mary McPartlan's own home place of Leitrim seeps through the pores of her music like sweetness through a honeycomb. After the triumph of her second solo album, Petticoat Loose, she's been judiciously scattering her songs through the country in a series of intimate gigs, breathing fresh life into old songs, and birthing others in the company of poet Vincent Woods, among others.
Accompanied by Thom Moore, McPartlan turned the pages of her eclectic songbook, bathing each one in the loving attention of a parent urging an offspring to take flight. The Tide Full Inshowcased her spirited vocal style, with Moore providing a congenial backdrop to the richly punctuated storyline. Her borrowing of Delia Murphy's The Lovely Sailor Boysent us ricocheting back decades with its refreshing naivety and her reading of Vincent Woods's Kiss The Mooncaptured to perfection the innocence of childhood.
Bernie O'Mahony and Ruth Dillon (aka the Sisters Of Mercy) lent beautifully modulated harmonies to Leonard Cohen's song of the same name, and together with McPartlan, turned their a cappella reading of Barbara Allen into a thing of great beauty, their three voices communing with the seamlessness of Emmylou Harris, Gillian Welch and Alison Krauss on O Brother Where Art Thou?
Thom Moore cut a distinctly Utah Phillips-like shape with his deliciously curveball solo contributions, and the quartet tackled a raggle-taggle version of Moore's Saw You Runningwith glee, revelling in the addictiveness of its melody lines.
McPartlan is still polishing up her solo performances, but this was a snapshot of a woman on the verge of musical magic. Fingers crossed that she mines further the harmonic variations with the Sisters Of Mercy in the near future.
Sweet Pretty Love Jam
Smock Alley Theatre, Dublin
PETER CRAWLEY
"I really think he's unhinged," one character says of another in Jesse Weaver's strange comedy of love and dysfunction. Late in the play, this observation comes as news to no one. Indeed, the further we wade into each character's mangled psyche, picking through tissues of lies to uncover incestuous family secrets, it would be a sweet relief to encounter anyone who seemed even remotely hinged.
Faela Stafford's June, for instance, is a neurotic young woman, recently returned from extended psychiatric care, who scribbles obsessively in her diary. Her brother, Simon Ashe-Browne's maddeningly logorrheic Gary, has brought her back to the opulent family home on Lake Michigan, which he now owns, for a strained homecoming.
Their aloof, disapproving parents have died mysteriously in June's absence, while Gary's childish yearning for the intimacy of "the old times" is aggravated by his sister's selective memory loss. On top of that, their pet iguana is at death's door, while a curiously accented vet, Dr Sugarman (Shawn Sturnick), is keen to hasten its demise while offering himself as the third point of an increasingly queasy love triangle.
With its elliptical, circuitous dialogue, occasionally lyrical flourishes and heavy theatrical self-consciousness - "That is a dramatic device!" shouts Gary when June produces a shotgun, "That is a bulls**t dramatic device!" - Weaver has written an unsettling (if unwieldy) comedy along the lines of Edward Albee. Caroline Staunton's production for Clean Canvas struggles to find a tone to contain it, though, with Smock Alley's cavernous space and Keith Siew's blanket illumination often making both the words and the dramatic pivots indistinct.
That's why Ashe-Browne's naturalistic, murmurous performance is largely swallowed up by the stage, where Stafford gives greater clarity to her neurotic patter and prattle. Sturnick, meanwhile, whose dashing vet is described as a Redwood tree of a man, rarely seems quite so flexible.
It gives nothing away to say that June's fantasy of a well-adjusted life, or a happy ending, are dispelled with a final twist. But if the tangles of our journey there become enervating, the untangling of that revelation feels overly neat and unsatisfying. It certainly could do with a few more hinges, but in a play about convoluted lies and dark truths, murkiness is partly the point.
Until Saturday.
PETER CRAWLEY
kd lang
The Olympia, Dublin
Besuited and barefoot, kd lang cut an initially tentative figure on stage: her voice tight and devoid of that elastine grace of old. Backed by a humdinger of a five-piece band though, who enveloped her in a wash of luscious strings and the subtlest of percussion, she gradually unfurled herself into the music.
Despite the appalling sound and lang's evident nonchalance when it comes to matters sartorial (she must surely have found the worst tailor in the northern hemisphere), she unleashed the innate sensuality that celebrates that voice like no other.
Her reading of Neil Young's Helplesswas a revelatory exercise in taking possession of a classic and remoulding it to another shape entirely, unearthing the traces of feminine vulnerability that lurked deep within its core. At times, lang idles almost absentmindedly in torch-singer mode, veering dangerously close to the middle of the road, but instinctively she veers back towards that languid, jazz-tinged world where night and day collide, where smoke-filled stories colour and shade life's more interesting moments.
She generously mixed old and new material, coaxing and luring her audience in with the panoramic sweep of Miss Chateleineand then into the naked emotion of her most recent collection, Watershed.
With the help of Joshua Grange's steel guitar and keyboards, Grecco Buratto's guitars and Daniel Clarke's piano, lang whooped and hollered her way through playful versions of Paydirtand Jealous Dog, and even donned her "chick magnet" banjo for the latter, much to the delight of her rapt fanbase who worshipped her every note.
That voice finally traced a magnificent arc through breathtaking covers of Leonard Cohen's Hallelujahand Jane Siberry's The Valley. Inevitably, Constant Cravingunleashed a longing tangible in the auditorium from the get go. A slow burner that finally ignited with spectacular effect.
SIOBHÁN LONG
The Ballroom of Romance
The Rainbow Ballroom, Glenfarne
The women filing into Glenfarne's infamous Rainbow Ballroom outnumber the men by at least four to one. It is a striking gender imbalance that writer/director Michael Scott could not possibly have orchestrated but one that complements the themes at the heart of this extraordinary piece of community theatre.
Loosely inspired by William Trevor's story of the same name, The Ballroom of Romanceseeks to recreate an evening at the local dancehall in the late 1950s. The audience of men and women - as teddy-boy-ed and bee-hived on this occasion as the performers - are seated on opposite sides of the hall. Contrary to expectation they are not merely spectators, they are potential suitors for the sex-starved characters who have cycled up to 18 miles looking for a court. There are old bachelors still hoping for an heir; spinsters swooning at the memories of old and lost loves; young women dying to have their first dance; and cocky young fellas full of fear for the future as emigration looms large.
Four professional performers complement a community cast of 32, whose individual characters each add to the fabric of life created by the play's simple story. Mary McEvoy's Patsy and Noel O'Donoghue's neighbourly Petie provide central symbols for "the soggy romances" of the stolen generation, Sharon O'Doherty's Connie Fox and David O'Meara's Donnie Evans - performing a perfectly pitched dancehall repertoire - shed light on the emerging showband era, which will ironically signal the end of this ballroom's life.
Michael Scott does not quite manage to marry the more self-conscious dramatic moments with the volatile reactions of an unruly audience, who relish their chance to take to the floor. But all value judgments seem irrelevant as the younger and older generations, the locals and the visitors, form a new, ephemeral community through this active recreation of memory in dance.
And this single night in the ballroom will surely provide fuel for another canon of local folklore, carrying forward the memory of the Rainbow Ballroom for a new generation.
Until Saturday.
SARA KEATING
