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Theater Review Irish Rep benefit a star-studded affair

February 16, 2011

By Staff Reporter

By Joseph Hurley

CIRCASIA! A CELTIC CIRCUS, a benefit for The Irish Repertory Theatre. Hosted by Shirley Jones. Directed by Charlotte Moore. Featuring Sean Campion, Conleth Hill, Pauline Flanagan, Tommy Maken, Frank McCourt, Malachy McCourt, Henry Winkler, Pauline Flanagan, Milo O’Shea. At the Golden Theater. June 4.

The Irish Repertory Theatre’s artistic director, Charlotte Moore, came across the word "Circasia" while she was leafing through a Gaelic dictionary, formulating plans for the group’s annual fund-raising.

The term was defined, she told the near-capacity audience at Broadway’s Golden Theater on Monday evening, June 4, as "a celebration, or a festival."

Thus was born the organizing principle for "Circasia! A Celtic Circus," the 2001 running of an event that has become something of a highlight on the city’s Irish event calendar, a celebration that, in past years, has focused in on writers such as Oscar Wilde and W.B. Yeats, and, on one particularly stirring occasion, the Irish peace process.

Hosts of past evenings have ranged from Katharine Hepburn and Angela Lansbury to Rosie O’Donnell and Sinead Cusack. This time, the mistress of ceremonies function was performed, with elegance, grace and wit, by Shirley Jones, the daughter of a Smithton, Pa., coal miner who rose to movie stardom in the movie versions of such Rodgers and Hammerstein stage musical classics as "Oklahoma!" and "Carousel," in 1955 and 1956, respectively, in addition to which she won an Academy Award in 1960 for her work in Richard Brook’s film adaptation of the Sinclair Lewis novel "Elmer Gantry."

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In 1962, Jones stared opposite the late Robert Preston in the film version of Meredith Willson’s stage hit "The Music Man," and then co-starred with her stepson David Cassidy in the long-running TV series "The Partridge Family."

The galaxy of Irish, Irish-American and Irish-oriented notables who gathered for this year’s benefit evening included such familiar faces as the brothers Frank and Malachy McCourt, Tommy Makem and his musician son Rory, and the husband-and-wife team of Milo O’Shea and Kitty Sullivan, in addition to Rep regulars Pauline Flanagan, Terry Donnelly, Rusty Magee, Ciaran Sheehan and the group’s producing director, Ciaran O’Reilly.

Other guest performers, drawn from the list of past and present Irish Rep productions, included Celeste Holm, Carmel Quinn and singer Marian Tomas Griffin. New this year were Sean Campion and Conleth Hill, stars of Marie Jones’s comedy success, "Stones in His Pockets."

Since Jones’s winning two-actor, 20-character romp is the Golden’s current occupant, the participants in the Irish Rep benefit found themselves performing in front of "Stones" designer Jack Kirwan’s massive film strip backdrop of roiling cumulus clouds moving across County Kerry’s gentle mountains.

Early in the program, Tommy Makem, accompanied by Rory, performed a pair of familiar, well-received numbers, after which Jones introduced a "surprise" guest in the affable person of Henry Winkler, who was starting out his final week as one of the six stars of Neil Simon’s hit "The Dinner Party," playing almost directly across West 45th Street from the Golden.

Frank McCourt followed, with a reading of a story about his relationship with a library in the Washington Heights branch of the New York Public Library.

Next came Carmel Quinn, who did a condensed version of the informal song-and-chatter routing that she’s been charming audiences since her days as a member of the TV cast of "The Arthur Godfrey Show."

Quinn’s performance was an object lesson in just how well certain stars come to know and understand the nature of their own particular audiences, and how deeply they are able to please them.

Kitty Sullivan joined with tenor Ciaran Sheehan for a subtle and moving performance of "I Have Dreamed," from the Rodgers and Hammerstein classic "The King and I."

Milo O’Shea, donning a fruit-bearing straw hat, did his familiar pantomime about a woman attending a theatrical matinee, only to encounter a wide range of audience hazards. The benefit audience was as pleased by the actor’s broad comedy as Dublin vaudeville patrons must have been nearly half a century ago, when O’Shea’s amiable drag act was new and fresh.

Actress Pauline Flanagan joined singer Sheehan for a charming, but altogether too brief setting of words and music, with the tenor performing "Red Roses For Me," the words of which were penned by Sean O’Casey, who, like James Joyce before him, was a great lover of music. Flanagan read, in alternation, stanzas of Seamus Heaney’s "At the Well Head."

Marian Tomas Griffin sang "Come Back, Paddy Reilly," and then a Texas-styled song she claimed to have learned as a child growing up in Ireland. Celeste Holm followed with a reading of a brief poem by Wexford playwright Billy Roche.

One of the evening’s decided highlights was a much-too-brief scene from Samuel Beckett’s "Waiting for Godot," performed by Sean Campion and Conleth Hill, on the stage where they do "Stones in His Pockets" eight times a week.

Campion was Didi, aka Vladimir, while Hill was Gogo, short for Estragon, roles the two shining stars had performed a few years ago in a well-remembered Belfast production of the play.

Three excellent performers contributed genuine and finely honed circus skills to the program, justifying Moore’s theme, and, because of their excellence, even the exclamation point she added to the show’s title.

From the popular "downtown" troupe known as "The Bindlestiff Family Cirkus" came the organization’s owner-operators, Keith Nelson and Stephanie Monseu. Nelson, a skillful, self-trained sword-swallower, caused a good portion of the audience to look away from the stage out of feelings of fairly genuine terror, while his partner, Monseu, in a strong whip act evoked a variety of decidedly startled expressions from the circle of on-stage performers. Not least of the terrified looks came from an ashen-faced Malachy McCourt, whom Monseu had drafted into acting as her partner in a number involving whip-cracking the head from a long-stemmed rose the actor and writer held between his teeth.

The trio of actual circus folk was rounded out by Ismail, a 22-year-old, Moroccan-born contortionist who’s been practicing his art since he was seven.

As has become the custom with Irish Repertory Theatre benefits, the evening concluded with an informal dinner at Sardi’s.

As generally happens with the printed programs for such events, there were a couple of names listed who, for whatever reasons, never made it to the stage of the Golden. One of them was a normally loyal Rep participant, Eric Stoltz, while another, Macauley Culkin, currently appearing off-Broadway in Richard Nelson’s play, "Madame Melville," would have been making his first appearance with the Irish Rep, had he been able to make the date.

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