Muldoon is a name with “certain resonances.”
Some are comic, according to the prominent literary figure who shares it. Indeed, Paul Muldoon can recall two examples in that category from the popular culture of his early years.
He was inspired, though, by something from much further back in time when he founded a regular “music-hall” type happening a decade or so ago.
“‘Muldoon’s Picnic’ was an entertainment,” said the County Armagh-born poet, “that was very popular in New York City at the end of the 19th century. It was so popular, in fact, there were two competing versions of it.
“It started out as a sketch, ‘Who Owns the Clothesline?’” he said, “[set] in a tenement on the Lower East Side, with a Muldoon being one character.”
The modern Muldoon’s Picnic is essentially a “music hall, vaudeville show.” It’s currently being hosted by the 92nd Street Y, or 92NY, with the third edition of the current season on tonight, Feb. 25, and follow-ups on April 29 and May 19.
In its modern guise, Muldoon’s Picnic might have a prose writer, a poet, a musician and perhaps a comedian, in addition to the house band.
“Basically, it’s an evening of jollity,” said the former professor of literature at Princeton and poetry editor of the New Yorker. “It’s meant to be a fun evening.”
Things move along quickly. Nobody is on stage long enough to outwear their welcome, and so acts tend to leave the audience wanting some more — which was the case, for instance, with the star turn by American singer-songwriter Suzanne Vega, accompanied by Dublin-born guitarist Gerry Leonard, in the January show.
Paul Muldoon at the January edition of Muldoon’s Picnic at 92NY.
As for those comic Muldoons in living memory, the poet cites, first, the sitcom “Car 54, Where Are You?” which had Fred Gwynne starring as Patrolman Francis Muldoon opposite Joe E. Ross as Patrolman Gunther Toody. It ran from 1961-63 on NBC.
Second, there is the mostly forgotten 1965 song by British TV satirists Peter Cook and Dudley Moore (later a Hollywood star), “The Ballad of Spotty Muldoon.”
“Which I had to endure as a kid in Ireland in the ‘60s,” remembered Paul Muldoon. “When they had a hit with that, I was known as Spotty Muldoon.”
Cook, its singer, says in a somber preamble (not long after the death of Winston Churchill), “Some are born spotty, some achieve spottiness, and some have spottiness thrust upon them.”
It’s not the only song with that surname in its title. There was “Muldoon, the Solid Man,” which was covered by the late Mick Moloney among others. It tells the story of the immigrant who “came when small from Donegal.” The scholars say it was written by Edward Harrigan and performed for the first time in 1874 or ’75.
But there was another Muldoon known as “the Solid Man.” And like the winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 2003, and in contrast to those other Muldoons, he is not, or was not, the product of someone’s imagination.
In fact, William Muldoon was born in Alleghany County, N.Y. in 1852 and died in Purchase, N.Y., in 1933, at age 81, not long after he’d published his memoirs. This Muldoon fought as a mercenary in the Franco-Prussian War (1870-71) before he got a job as a New York City cop, thanks to the intercession of the Tipperary-born bare-knuckle boxer, state senator and member of Congress, John Morrissey.
Muldoon was “renowned for his skills in amateur competitions of wrestling, running, weightlifting, and caber tossing,” according to author and performer Trav S.D. (www.travsd.com). He won the World Greco-Roman Wrestling Championship in 1880, and “he quit the police force the following year in order to follow his career in the physical arts, billed as ‘The Solid Man.’”
Trav S.D. says that “Muldoon’s Picnic” was unveiled by the Irish vaudeville act Barry and Fay in 1882, “which they presented at venues like Niblo’s Garden and Tony Pastor’s.”
He continues, “The name was in the air then. Muldoon himself broke into the theatre. He was in Helen Modjeska’s 1883 production of ‘As You Like It’ (as Charles the Wrestler, of course), which also featured Maurice Barrymore [patriarch of the prominent acting clan].”
Thereafter, he was a personal trainer to the famous, both sporting and artistic, while intermittently taking part in stage and film productions.
Trav S.D. writes, “William Muldoon is buried at Kensico Cemetery in Valhalla, New York, where you can find many a vaudeville vet.”
William Muldoon.
The 92nd Street Y, the host of Muldoon’s Picnic, is aware of this history and paid homage to it during its celebration of 150 years of the Young Men’s Hebrew Association in 2024. As part of that, it referenced five boys who, when the Y moved to its current address in 1900, lived in a small flat at 179 East 93rd St., on the next block, with their immigrant Jewish parents and grandparents.
The mom’s brother was music hall’s Al Shean, who was partners with Ed Gallagher, something Mick Moloney liked to talk about, while also mentioning that four of Al’s five nephews would become, to use Trav S.D.’s words, the “greatest ever vaudeville act” and the “most perfect act in show business.” They were the Marx Brothers.
Muldoon’s Picnic, of course, is usually rather more relaxed and sedate than the Marx Brothers in full flow, but Paul Muldoon promises an enjoyable night nonetheless.
Al Shean in 1940.
“Generally quite interesting people have done it,” he said. “I invite them for various reasons, but the main reason is they’re very good at what they do.
“People enjoy being in it,” Muldoon added, “People enjoy being at it.
“We’ve done a lot of them in Ireland, in England, various places,” he said. “There is an element of flying by the seat of one’s pants always, because you never know quite what’s going to happen when you put bunch of people in the same room.
“It’s kind of got a life of its own, I feel myself just to be a steward of it.”
This season he’s noticed that almost each show has two performers who are related. In the case of May, it’s three on the bill who are connected — non-fiction author Robert Sullivan (best known perhaps for “Rats” and “My American Revolution”) and his children, Sam and Louise Sullivan, a musical duo based out of Philadelphia.
Muldoon is delighted, too, to be involved with the Y because of its associations with poetry. “They are one of the great poetry or indeed literature venues in the U.S., or the world,” he said.
When first new to America in the late 1980s he was part of a program with two other Irish poets, Derek Mahon and Paul Durkan —“Both of whom have now moved on to the parallel universe.”
Muldoon said, “Three poets would usually do 20 minutes each. That’s what would happen in a sane world. Durkan kicked off and he read for 45 minutes, followed up by Mahon, who also read for 45 minutes.
“At that point, it was time to go. I think I read for 5 minutes,” Muldoon said.
In contrast to that experience, Muldoon’s Picnic is guided by the idea, a music-hall principle, that “less is more.”
“Less is definitely always more, in my book,” Muldoon said.
For more details, go to 92ny.org.
