First Irish Theatre Festival

House Strictly Private and For Love – The Irish Voice; Reviews

lucyhk — Tue, 13 Nov 2012 23:25:49 +0000

Two Irish playwrights emerged from the recent 1st Irish Theatre Festival in New York, and it’s time to mark their achievements. House Strictly Private, a pitch-black comic drama, is an unexpected follow up to Kerr’s rollicking festival debut…For Love, by debut playwright Laoisa Sexton, is the most impressive first play I have seen in two decades. Featuring a flawless cast that included the writer herself, the play took us on a whirlwind tour of contemporary Dublin seen from a young woman’s perspective in a way that was so authentic and casually funny that it disarmed you from the first scene….The 1st Irish Theatre Festival deserves accolades for bringing these talents to an American stage, and Irish drama has been enriched by their appearance.
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The Next Generation and Beyond: The Irish Examiner, review

lucyhk — Sun, 21 Oct 2012 21:09:30 +0000

They might not have boldly gone where no playwright has ever gone before, but the four writers whose plays went up last week as part of the “next generation”of Irish playwrights in the 1st Irish Theatre Festival created pieces that deftly explored the universe. One, in fact, was set in Heaven.

And one of them was my pick of the festival. For Love by Laoisa Sexton was tightly constructed, hilariously performed, strongly directed, and brought a fresh take to stories of 30-something friendship and sex. read more

Best found in Fledgling Shows – The Irish Echo, reviews

lucyhk — Fri, 19 Oct 2012 14:32:36 +0000

“House Strictly Private,” by Jimmy Kerr, was my favorite of the festival shows seen. It combined a dramatic tale and compelling characters with the performing talent witnessed in other 1^st Irish hits: “Fly Me to the Moon” (reviewed in the Sept. 19 issue) “Hard Times,” the musical (Sept. 26), which will be revived in November; and “Silent” (Sept. 19), Pat Kinevane’s solo showing, going on to the Odyssey Theatre in LA, from Nov. 23 to Dec. 9. read more

Jimmy Titanic – Woman Around Town; Review

lucyhk — Wed, 17 Oct 2012 10:13:44 +0000

A remarkable piece of pared down theater manages to entertain, inform, move, and comment from a completely original point of view….The sweep and momentum of Jimmy Titanic is born by a single shape-shifting actor (Colin Hamell) who plays some 20 characters including John Jacob Astor, a prissy, Puckish Angel Gabriel and God (who chain smokes.)

Colin Hamell has the energy and passion of a holy roller evangelist. They must carry him out on a stretcher. The mercurial actor zips from role to role with only a change of lighting and blink between, if that. Most characters have distinguishing cadence. His portrayal of the unsophisticated, jaunty, and likeable Jimmy is irresistible. Hamell occupies the stage with dynamism and focus.

Director Carmel O’Reilly utilizes the small space with terrific ingenuity. Her actor is rarely still for long and manages to effect location changes by interacting with a single piece of movable set. read more

Review Round Up – The Irish Examiner USA

lucyhk — Sun, 30 Sep 2012 15:13:59 +0000

The 1st Irish Festival, now in its fifth year, is halfway through. Some of the shows have closed, others will be closing next week, and others will begin this week.For details and to buy tickets visitwww.1stirish.org.Here’s our take on what we’ve seen so far:…Silent: Kinevane, as he did with The Forgotten in 2010, engagingly talks to the audience to pull them into the show, and uses his physicality engagingly…Hard Times: There’s energy to spare in Kirwan’s play, which resets some of Foster’s 19th-century ballads in a rock and roll vein, and also includes some Kirwan originals. read more

Silent – The Irish Echo; review

lucyhk — Sat, 29 Sep 2012 10:05:49 +0000

The story feels less compelling than the telling.

Direction is in the sure hands of Jim Culleton from Dublin’s Fishamble, back in New York with a bang for the annual 1^stIrish Theater Festival. Like a stand-up comic, Kinevane dismantles “the fourth wall” and interacts with a couple of audience members. (At one point, Tino tells one participant he’s not as mad as the other.)

As an actor, with little more than a blanket to play against, Kinevane mimes through scenes that have it sweep between his legs convincingly as his ballroom-dancing partner. Later, the blanket nods a puppet-style “I do” in a wedding scene where Kinevane’s facial expressions of a groom feigning bravado are perfect. And as a writer, he has some inspired touches, including a scene where Tinto lays out his theory that Cork and France have lots in common, “Both aggressive, arrogant… But most of all—the accents—la toilette, de toilette…Voila – Malla! [Mallow] … read more

Hard Times – The Irish Echo; review

lucyhk — Sat, 29 Sep 2012 10:03:15 +0000

Musicals can be irritating, their manufactured emotion unbearably phony. Larry Kirwan’s “Hard Times,” however, is not just the best of the genre I’ve seen, but truly affecting.

The rest of the audience was also demonstrably moved at one of the extra performances laid on during the show’s largely sold-out run through Sunday as part of the 1st Irish Theater Festival.

As the musical ended, it transformed from your typical theater experience to a “seisiún.” Switching from spectators to participants, the audience clapped to the beat of the last song. So in synch with the performers were they that when individual actors performed solos within that final number the crowd automatically self-modulated to a slower clap less likely to drown out the singer. read more

Fly Me to the Moon- The Irish Echo; review

lucyhk — Sat, 29 Sep 2012 10:01:34 +0000

Loretta and Frances are perfectly opposed as a kind of working-class Belfast Laurel and Hardy. It’s fun to see the penny drop, again and again, on Loretta’s face—and interesting later, when a little role reversal ensues. Now into it, and wondering how to conceal a bruise on Davy’s face that might be seen as suspicious, she’s rummaging through make-up, asking was his complexion “fair” or “peach melba.” As their consciences grow louder, the women hold a religious service for Davy, there in his flat. Preparing for this impromptu event unearths the greatest surprise yet. The audience is left back to earth, as the play concludes with the characters uttering their final words from what appears may be the dock: “We promise to tell the truth… so help me God.” Or is it just a reminder that this is a yarn, spun like a spider’s web all the way to the moon? read more

Hard Times – The New York Times; Review

lucyhk — Fri, 21 Sep 2012 15:30:02 +0000

“Gangs of New York” may have helped to revive the memory of Five Points, the notorious 19th-century slum in Lower Manhattan, but no one probably considered it the stuff of song and dance — until Larry Kirwan, the novelist, playwright and, not incidentally, leader of the rock band Black 47. Now at the Cell Theater as part of the 1st Irish Theater Festival, Mr. Kirwan’s rousing “Hard Times: An American Musical” examines the clashes among nativists, Irish immigrants and free blacks, ingeniously using the life and works of Stephen Foster,America’s first great songwriter, to tell the tale.

Under Kira Simring’s sure-handed direction, “Hard Times” bursts with vitality: the Cell, an intimate space, becomes the saloon, burlap draped along the walls, a tattered flag hanging. The choreography, by Joe Barros, morphs Irish step-dancing into something close to tap. And the show’s band of five men, led by Andrew Smithson, feel like characters themselves, joining in the revelry when the pace quickens.

By the end of the evening, the audience is up, cheering and stamping. In “Hard Times,” Mr. Kirwan has not only delivered a knockout entertainment, he’s done a public service, reacquainting us with the Foster songbook and the striving, teeming America for which it was written. read more

Celtic Cross Over Discussion – Playbill; Preview

lucyhk — Tue, 18 Sep 2012 19:40:47 +0000

Presented as part of the 1st Irish Festival, the free 6:30 PM panel discussion will center on how “Irish drama, music and literature have impacted America’s business culture from Broadway to Wall Street.”Playwright and novelist McKeon will moderate the discussion that features theatre producer Carragher, actor/writer McCourt, as well as journalist Gwen Orel, Irish rocker Larry Kirwan and television executive Catrin Brace. read more