A look at books - the Magdalene Laundries, Reverend Ian Paisley and the Irish Diaspora

It Doesn’t Ring a Bell
By Racer Lynch

It hasn’t been two decades since the last Magdalene Laundry in Ireland closed in 1996. That’s well within the living memory of young adults. The question is, what to do with all that suffering now that its come to light?

Even now most would prefer to look the other way, exactly the way they used to when these unpaid gulags were in operation. The Irish government had to be browbeaten for years by a group of committed former inmates and their offspring before finally offering a full apology. That apology was offered in February 2013, by the way, just two months ago.

So the Irish reluctance to face up to the legacy of widespread physical and sexual abuse has been one of the most remarkable aspects of the now three decade long crisis in the Catholic Church.  Instead of principled stock taking, denial, defensiveness and even blaming the victims have been the standard responses.

So what happens to the nation that fails to confront its own traumas? Does it hand them and their legacy on to the next generation without comment?

What is the best way, culturally and spiritually, to recall the wrong roads taken, to discuss the lessons learned?

Fiction has long been one of the most reflexive fields for the Irish to consider their history and what it has made of them. In It Doesn’t Ring a Bell, author Racer Lynch quietly paints a picture of a different aspect of convent life in Ireland in the days before the outraged Magdalene headlines.

Based on factual stories, Lynch reminds us that life for the postulants training to become nuns could be every bit a dehumanizing and traumatic as the lives experienced by the banished women they would eventually minister to.

Set mostly in the 1940s and 1950s, the era when Ireland’s theocracy was at its zenith, Lynch paints a picture of a dysfunctional and out of control culture where bullying and oppression were the norm and protests of any kind were suppressed, often with tragic consequences.

It Doesn’t Ring a Bell makes for disturbing but important reading, and provides a cultural context for the abuses that have come to light in more recent times.

PublishAmerica, $22.46

The Second Coming of Paisley
By Richard Lawrence Jordan

In the 1970s the Reverend Ian Paisley had twin obsessions. The first was to save Ulster from popery and the second was to save it from sodomy.

You can judge for yourself how successful he was at either enterprise, but the time has come to study the relationship between his brand of militant evangelical fundamentalism and similar brands he encountered in the U.S. in the period immediately preceding the outbreak of the Troubles in the 1960s.

In his absorbing new study The Second Coming of Paisley, author Richard Lawrence Jordan traces how the exposure to the idea of leaders of the American Christian right such as Carl McIntire and Billy James Hargis enabled Paisley to develop a toxic militant brand of highly politicized religious fundamentalism to successfully bock the advance of civil rights for the north’s Catholic population.

Fascinatingly, Jordan also demonstrates that this cross-fertilization didn’t happen in a vacuum. In fact it happened in the context of centuries of interaction between Ulster and America. Paisley, the author claims, used a religious culture imported from the U.S. to shake up religion and politics in the north.

Syracuse, $39.95

Other People’s Diasporas
By Sinead Moynihan

Ireland has long seen itself as a land of emigrants, so what happens when it is asked to welcome immigrants? In her new book Sinead Moynihan, a lecturer in 20th century Irish literature at the University of Exeter, asks what happens when other nation’s diasporas converge on the homeland of a diasporic people?

These are provocative questions and ones that will clearly reflect on what we have learned as a culture in our travels.  Moynihan plunders the literature of Ireland since 1998 to explore the representations of developing race relations on the island, and she points to the ways contemporary Irish culture looks to the history of Irish American and African American relations in an effort to understand its own immigrant communities.

It turns out the centuries long tradition of Irish emigration to the U.S. has much to say about prevalent trends in contemporary immigration. This dialogue has been going on in a one sided way for hundreds of years, but the good news is the Irish in Ireland are finding a new language to greet immigrants with the lessons they learned over the centuries themselves.

Syracuse, $39.95

Roald Dahl's Matilda battles bullies on Broadway

Bertie Carvel steals scenes and carries the show.

The truth is Matilda isn't one of Roald Dahl's most interesting works. Oh, it's a charming and typically dark effort by the old master and you'll certainly find yourself rooting for his bright and put-upon young creation, but there are contradictions in the narrative that make you wonder why it takes the time it takes for the story to end happily.

That's not the case with the Royal Shakespeare Company's absurdly entertaining new musical Matilda based on Dahl's book, now playing on Broadway.

This high octane production, which features choreography that's sometimes so athletically over the top it's a little exhausting to witness, manages to do the near impossible and outfit the slim story line with songs and dance routines that add immeasurably to the source material.

With it's theme of the imaginations power to push back against the ugly realities of life, and the power of books to transform any existence, you'll cheer as smart as a whip little Matilda learns to push back against the bully who wants to boss her around.

As Miss Trunchbull, actor Bertie Carvel inhabits the role of the headmistress from Hell so successfully you might as well award him a Tony right now (it's all but inevitable). His grotesque makeup, his hunched back, his shuffling walk and his vocal stylings are captivatingly sinister and unspeakably funny.

The four young American actresses who alternate in the title role have all successfully mastered their British accents, but in the first act their projection occasionally faltered in certain songs. But these are the teething troubles of a new production, the over all performance never misses a note.

Try to book your tickets now because they're going to become sought after. This show delivers the best new musical on Broadway since The Book of Mormon broke the bank.

A look at books - photography, music, and coming of age stories

The Irish: A Photohistory
By Sean Sexton and Christine Kinealy

Sometimes a photograph can be a door you can walk through into the past. In The Irish: A Photohistory, Sean Sexton and Christine Kinealy have assembled one of the most evocative and moving collections of the life of the Irish over the past two centuries that I have ever seen.

The first Irish photographs date from 1840, six years before the unforeseen catastrophe that would come to define the tragedy of British colonialism in Ireland.

Many of the images contained in this collection are heart-stoppingly beautiful. You can actually see and feel the progress of Irish history contained in these moving portraits of smiling young men and women, all unmistakably Irish, whose grandchildren were long dead before this collection even commenced.

Sexton and Kinealy (the noted historian of the Irish Famine) have taken it upon themselves to conjure 200 years of Irish history in all of its grandeur and tragedy. Many of the faces in this collection are lined with sorrows, others are carefree, their whole lives still ahead of them.

In 1839, when the first photographs were taken in Ireland, it was one of the most densely populated countries in Europe with over eight million inhabitants. One hundred years later its population had fallen to five million, a decline that was unique in Europe.

The consequences of all that struggle and change are contained within this remarkable book. If you only buy one study of Irish history this year, make it this one.

Thames & Hudson, $21.95.

Rory Gallagher: His Life and Times
By Marcus Connaughton

It's not a bad old life, being a guitar hero. Ireland has produced master musicians in every generation, but you can still count on one hand how many have made it out of Ireland onto the world’s stage.

Rory Gallagher was one of the few. In 1963 at the age of 15 he bought his trademark Fender Stratocaster and his rise, as they say, was meteoric.

Talent finds its own level. Gallagher discovered the blues in Ireland at a time when it was difficult to buy a pop magazine or hear a blues tune on the radio. The music was somehow already in him and he went on to inspire players like The Edge, Johnny Marr, Slash and Gary Moore.

In this handsomely illustrated biography Gallagher’s contemporaries and fellow musicians tell stories about the legendary rocker who won the Melody Maker Guitarist of the Year award in 1972 (when there was plenty of competition).

Shy and retiring in the Irish way, it was when he was on stage that his talent took over, leaving audiences and critics astounded by his dexterity, the Irish blues man who even startled the genres trailblazers with his gift.

Dufour, $34.95.

Screwed
By Eoin Colfer

Colfer made his reputation as a best-selling author for young readers with his Artemis Fowl series, but his equally best-selling crime novels have attracted a whole new audience for the gifted Irish storyteller.

Screwed is an mordantly funny second outing for Dan McEvoy, the down on his luck owner of a New Jersey dive bar, whose uneasy truce with the local criminal kingpin Irish Mike Madden is being tested by an unexpectedly sudden death.

Colfer has an ear for dialogue, and the back and forths between characters are a highlight of this immensely entertaining Irish American noir. This is a tale that’s crying out for the big screen, but in the meantime revel in its inventive mastery.

Overlook, $29.95.

The Gamal
By Ciaran Collins

Things rarely end well for the weird kid in an Irish town. It’s usually because they can’t find a chapter in the story of their home place that will willingly include them.

From Roddy Doyle to John McGahern to Patrick McCabe, the outcome of all this exclusion and casual cruelty is rarely ever in doubt -- violence, separation or even death.

In The Gamal by Ciaran Collins we meet poor young Charlie -- the gamal, short for the Irish word “gamalog” meaning, roughly, simpleton. Always in trouble, always being run out of places, he’s the perfect foil to expose the prejudices of the little town he lives in.

It’s as old as the Bible, this dance. Just fall in love with the wrong person and watch the sparks fly.
The darkness that lurks in the hearts of others gets a workout in this poignant and bitingly funny book, which marks Collins’ debut.

Bloomsbury, $17.

A look at books - Irish history, fiction and biography to get your teeth in to

Vengeance 

By Benjamin Black

Benjamin Black is the pen name of award winning Irish novelist and Booker Prize winner John Banville, which means that the prose stylings of this impressively literary whodunit (and the focus on fully realized characters) are much finer than the genre usually affords.

Black/Banville assembles a cast of upscale but sulphurous Dubliners, including one of Ireland’s most successful – and, it turns out, suicidal -- businessmen, then he exposes the corrupt and corrupting world they live in where money and sex trump all other considerations. 

Detective Inspector Hackett and his pinstriped consultant pathologist sidekick Quirke find themselves pulled ever deeper into the mysterious case and into dangerous the orbit of Dublin’s elite. 

What Black/Banville does with particular facility is to create a climate of suspicion and dread that turns this surprisingly sordid tale into a page-turner of the highest order.

Picador, $16.

Murder, Mutiny and Mayhem: The Blackest Hearted Villains From Irish History

By Joe O’Shea

Who could resist a book with a title like this? 

Ireland’s produced some of the world’s greatest writers, so it stands to reason we’ve offered the world our fair share of epic blackguards too.

Luke Ryan, for example, lived a marvelously immoral life as a pirate, sailing under every flag and no flag, eventually redeeming himself a little by fighting for Benjamin Franklin in the American War of Independence.

But there are much darker chapters in this diverting book. Did you know that James “Sligo” Jameson, the heir to the whiskey empire, found only madness and cannibalism in the heart of Africa? 

A 19th century explorer, Jameson had started a principled man with the best of intentions, but the isolation, brutality and sickness of life in the Congo quickly turned him into something much darker. 

A gem in the rough is the wonderfully named Beauchamp Bagenal, whose good looks, short fuse and deadly skill with a pistol made him one of the most feared duelists in Europe. Born and raised in Co. Carlow, Bagenal eventually blazed his way his across Europe terrifying and delighting his observers in equal measure. 

This book lays his life, and those of other notable Irish rakes, out in a timely reminder that our gentle nation doesn’t always lay out a hundred thousand welcomes. 

Dufour, $21.95.

Everybody Matters: My Life Giving Voice

By Mary Robinson

It's impossible to overstate Mary Robinson’s political impact on the life of the nation. Ireland’s first woman president, a tireless advocate for the marginalized and the forgotten (and a principled lifelong trailblazer), sometimes single-handedly she ushered the nation toward modernity. 

Human rights, women’s rights, and gay rights -- she pursued them all, even when it was neither popular nor profitable.  Her passion for social justice and her awareness that equality had to include everyone or it wasn’t worthy of the name pitted her against some of Ireland’s most conservative politicians. 

As her new book makes clear, those who were taken in by her mild manner soon found themselves astonished by her tenacity and courage. Even the notorious Irish Prime Minister Charles J. Haughey was galled to find himself easily bested by her over her constitutional mandate. 

Robinson was a constitutional lawyer, and there wasn’t a politician in Ireland, male or female, who was her match. 

Everybody Matters: My Life Giving Voice reminds us of the accomplishments of this extraordinary figurehead, but it also allows us to hear a little about the personal cost of such a spirited public life.

Walker, $26.

Almost Home: Helping Kids Move From Homelessness to Hope

By Kevin Ryan and Tina Kelley

It isn’t just strangers who can be bullies, sadly. Sometimes your own parents or siblings can be more of a threat to your future happiness than anyone you’ll encounter on the streets.

Family violence, sexual abuse, teen parenthood, prostitution, gay kids rejected for their sexual orientation -- the list of home wrecking possibilities is seemingly limitless, and once it starts it often veers into tragedy or flight. 

Those are among the main reasons why every year 1.6 million American teenagers become homeless. Their problems only start there. Trading in one identity for another can be a powerfully disorientating experience, sending many into a tale spin from which they never recover. Five minutes ago you were a teenager, minutes later you’re just a nameless street-walking statistic waiting to happen. 

Almost Home tells the story of one brave organization that dares to stand in the way of the inevitable. Covenant House is the largest charity serving homeless, trafficked and runaway youth in America. 

And in their new book, Irish American president Kevin Ryan and journalist Tina Kelley tell the story of their involvement with the organization, including some of the most illustrative and striking stories of the many teens they have met – and saved – from lonely fates. 

Wiley, $16.95.

Reviews by Irish Voice Arts Editor Cahir O'Doherty

Girls just wanna have fun - preview of 'For Love' at the Irish Rep, New York

John Duddy and Laoisa Sexton in For Love.

There are countless Irish plays about the national question. There are drama libraries stacked with Irish plays about emigration and return.

There are seemingly endless numbers of Irish plays that present quaint rustics being cruel to each other. We even have a new body of supernatural Irish tales.

But there are very few Irish plays that contemplate love and sex, their temptations and complications, that that are written by a woman or with a woman’s perspective, for some reason.

It’s a curious thing. It’s not as if Irish women don’t have opinions on the matter.

Take Irish actress and playwright Laoisa Sexton. It’s safe to assume the actress got so tired waiting for Irish roles she could strongly identify with that she decided to write them herself. Generations of Irish actresses have been forced to do likewise, in the process often creating some of the best theater companies in the nation.

But Sexton didn’t set out to start a revolution. She just wanted to encounter roles she could identify with and believe in.

In For Love, her new play opening at the Irish Repertory Theatre in New York this week, Sexton has done something so simple and yet revolutionary that you can’t fail to appreciate it -- she has fashioned living and breathing Irish women from the experience of being one herself.

Sounds straightforward in theory, but it’s really not. Plays from Ireland that don’t feature Aran Island dwelling yokels who do be expressing themselves in the heighted parlance of the whest aren’t as generally popular as plays that do.

It turns out that the world, or at least American theater-going audiences, believe it’s still 1904 in Ireland and that indoor plumbing is a terrible novelty altogether, begod.

If you don’t live like this, if you prefer to go shopping and are interested in fashion and music and contemporary art say, you’re not going to find much among contemporary Irish playwrights to latch on to.

That’s what makes For Love such a singular play. It leaps to life from the lived experience of contemporary Dublin women, and it speaks in their vernacular about the issues that actually absorb them.

It will be interesting to see what New York audiences (and critics) make of Sexton’s hilarious and absorbing drama. I suspect they’ll be surprised by its modernity, and probably challenged by it to.

The thing about contemporary Irish drama written by men is that, like Irish men themselves, they tend to do most of the thinking for you.

In contrast, Sexton seems more interested in exploring the unintended consequences of actions that reveal character. Her women are brittle, smart, hard-bitten and ready to laugh or cry in a heartbeat.

These women are romantic realists, aware of their contradictions and reveling in them. They’re not the enskied and sainted paragons of Irish nationalist drama, they’re not the terrifying harridans of Irish rural farce, they’re living breathing Dublin women whose wit and wisdom could cut the heels of you. And they want a drink and a dance, now.

The questions For Love asks are as old as the world. Is there more than a one night stand in Val’s future? Can the right dress take Tina’s mind off the wrong man? Is Bee falling herself falling for a married man that feeds her lines and he reels her in on one?

For Love does something else that the boys forget to include in their dramas. It explores female friendship, the tensions, petty jealousies and the immense affection that guide them in a way that feels so fresh you’ll realize how much they’ve been missing in Irish drama.

What would you do for love, the play asks? The answer, of course, is just about anything.

That’s a perspective that isn’t clouded by the national question or the tensions of modernism versus the parochial or any of that navel gazing malarkey. These girls just wanna have fun, and when the fun is over, they want someone to come home to.

They want what we all want. It’s just amazing to see that awareness being presented in a modern Irish play.

The Irish Repertory Theatre, and 1st Irish Theatre Festival where the play originally debuted, are both to be thanked for taking a chance on a drama that isn’t at all typical of the work coming out of Ireland. They are also to be commended for knowing it deserves to be seen.

For tickets to For Love visit www.irishrep.org.

A look at Irish books for St. Patrick’s Day - heroes, villains and other characters

The Origins of the Irish
By J.P. Mallory

About 80 million people trace their origins to Ireland.  The question that hasn’t really been asked in nearly 80 years is how did the Irish people come into being themselves?

Employing the varied disciplines of archeology, genetics, geology, linguistics and mythology, the author traces the disparate influences that shaped the Irish people and their language.

Mallory carefully evaluates the reasons why the earliest colonists decided to settle in a fairly inhospitable land that at the time offered little enough to farmers, and he traces their impact on the island, which he calls monumental. What really brought the emerging nation to the attention of early Europe was the work of metallurgists in copper, bronze and iron, he argues.

Relatively recent scientific advances in genetics are complicating rather than explaining the origins of the Irish people themselves, however. But Mallory’s immensely scholarly study offers every kind of explanation, and the reader is left with multiple absorbing possible answers.

Thames & Hudson, $29.95.

The Cold Case Files: On the Trail of Ireland’s Undetected Killers
By Barry Cummins

Unsolved murders often haunt the lives of those left behind, but thanks to books like this one the uncaught killers will never be allowed to rest easy.

One of Ireland’s most respected crime journalists, Barry Cummins’s latest book charts five decades of unsolved killings in Ireland, including the 1981 shooting of Lorcan O’Byrne, tragically attacked by robbers on the night of his engagement.

Cummins also examines the case of Grace Livingstone, who was found shot dead in her Malahide, Co. Dublin home in 1992. Another unsolved case is the abduction and murder of Brooke Pickard, who was last seen in Co. Kerry in 1991.

These cases, shocking in themselves, remind us how many cold blooded killers still walk among us, hoping never to hear the dreaded knock that signals justice is about to be served.

The book ends with a case recently solved by the cold case unit, the murder and secret burial of Brian McGrath in Co. Westmeath in 1987. Justice may sometimes take slow steps Cummins writes, but with committed detectives like these on the case, its march is unstoppable.

Dufour, $26.95.

Jane W. Shackleton’s Ireland
Photographs Complied by Christiaan Corlett

Christiaan Corlett is an archeologist with the Irish National Monuments Service and has extensive knowledge of the early photography of Ireland. The nation should probably raise a monument to Corlett himself for producing this remarkable book.

In 1881 the photographer Jane Wingham Shackleton visited the Aran Islands and ended up recording how the islanders lived and dressed. She made eight more trips there over subsequent years, but her Victorian eye was also drawn to signs of emerging industries and the people who worked them.

Unlike many of her contemporaries, Shackleton is particularly drawn to the people she photographs, giving her portraits an emotional heft often lacking in other works of this era.

That her subjects are Irish is unmistakable. These are the faces of our tribe, but these faces are long gone, as indeed are most of their grandchildren already. To open this book is to step into Irish history portraits that cannot fail to move and astonish you.

Dufour, $44.95.

Broken Promises: Whatever Happened to Vatican Council II?
By Finbarr M. Corr

After serving 28 years in the priesthood of the church he loves, Finbarr M. Corr knows about the inner workings of the Catholic hierarchy and has decades of pastoral experience of his own; both of these qualifications make him an ideal guide to the challenges facing the church in the 21 century.

Many of the church’s current crises can be traced to its refusal to enact the promises of the Vatican Council II 50 years after it was first convened, Corr contends in his new book Broken Promises: Whatever Happened to Vatican Council II?

In particular, the Vatican’s failure to embrace shared authority and openness has been disastrous, he argues. The author, who served as a priest before, during and after the council, explains why that there is still time for rescue and renewal of the church even though the most damaging result of the hierarchy's failed follow through – the cover up of sexual abuse of children by clergy – now threatens the church's very survival.

Trafford, $15.

Katie Taylor: Journey to Olympic Gold
By Jason O’Toole

Cometh the hour, cometh the woman. Just when Ireland (mired in financial crisis and hemorrhaging emigrants) desperately needed a hero, along came the unstoppable Irish boxer Katie Taylor.

Taylor made Olympic history by winning gold in London in 2012 (the ninth Olympic gold medal won by an Irish athlete since the foundation of the Republic), adding her to the all-time greatest list.

But it didn’t just happen overnight. O’Toole’s book charts Taylor’s ascent through the ranks of women’s boxing.

At 15 she was a trailblazer, participating in the first officially sanctioned women’s bout in Ireland. Soon after she became the first woman to win four successive world titles, followed by five European amateur championships and four European amateur titles.

But her road was always going to pass through the London Olympics last summer (via the delighted hearts of every Irish person who watched her at home and abroad).

This timely book reminds us that even the worst Irish summer in history couldn’t best her. The sun shone and the day turned out grand for the thousands who turned up for her homecoming, O’Toole reminds us.

Sometimes heroes do come when you call.

Dufour, $22.95.

Race and Immigration in the New Ireland
Edited by Julieann Veronica Ulin, Heather Edwards and Sean O’Brien

The Celtic Tiger boom and bust contained two different but equally valuable lessons for the nation -- if it has the honesty to see them.

One lesson is that we need not fear the more secular society that Ireland is becoming. The other lesson is that we need not throw away all the values and traditions of the past to achieve this.

The Irish know all about emigration, but little enough yet about immigration. It’s a conversation that should get started, and this scholarly and engaging book takes us through the social and political challenges and opportunities that immigration presents to us.

Notre Dame, $24.50.

The Magnificent Desolation
By Thomas O’Malley

Most children have rooms in their imagination that they can journey to in times of crisis or loss. So it is in O’Malley’s hypnotic new novel, which tells the tale of young Duncan Bright, a boy who wakes up at the age of 10 with only one memory -- that God had spoken to him when he was born.

O’Malley writes prose that’s clear as glass, and this story offers us all he knows about love and loss, which turns out to be a great deal. The Magnificent Desolation is a novel to shake you out of your torpor and see the world afresh through the transformative magic of a child’s imagination, an astonishingly creative feat in itself.

Bloomsbury, $26.

Dark Times, Decent Men: Stories Of Irishmen in World War Two
By Neil Richardson

Think of the evil of Nazism. In recent weeks it was revealed the Nazis opened over 42,000 camps across Europe, mostly to exploit and kill their enemies, which were legion.

The sheer darkness of that era can be hard to fathom, so it’s salutary to see that over 130,000 Irish men and women answered the call to fight the Nazis during World War II (7,500 of them never to return).

In Richardson’s book he gathers dramatic first hand accounts from Irishmen who went to war, fighting in Dunkirk and North Africa and on the D-Day beaches.

Irishmen were also RAF aces, they served as sailors in seas infested by U-boats, they served alongside the US 101 Airborne Division and some won Victoria Crosses for their heroism. Seen now, decades after their service, they look like heroes they were, not the traitors they were often accused of being.

Dufour, $29.95.

Always and 'Forever Dusty' Springfield - New York show tells tale of Irish Catholic schoolgirl turned legendary singer

Kirsten Holly Smith as Dusty
 Springfield in Forever Dusty.

Mary Isobel Catherine Bernadette O'Brien was one of the greatest soul singers of the 1960s and ‘70s. You’ve probably heard of her legendary stage name, Dusty Springfield, but did you know she was born a shy Irish Catholic schoolgirl?

Making your way through the heady atmosphere of Swinging Sixties London required talent (she had enough for several lifetimes), but it also required nerves of steel (and she found that the way many Irish people have, via the end of a vodka shot glass).

Being a woman in the male dominated music business was challenging enough, but her own inner struggles, which included a complex and competitive relationship with her talented brother and a series of discreet gay affairs at a time when they could have ended her career, all took their toll.

In Forever Dusty, now playing at New Word Stages at 340 50th Street in Manhattan, Springfield’s talent and troubled existence are restaged for an appreciative new generation in a show that the main player and co-writer Kirsten Holly Smith absolutely puts her heart and soul into.

“I’m a singer and that’s what led me to her,” Smith tells the Irish Voice. “Alongside her talent, which is incredible, her personal story is completely fascinating. She was this shy Irish schoolgirl called Mary O’Brien who would hide behind all the makeup and wigs that allowed her to become Dusty Springfield.

“People think they know her.  I thought I did, but then I discovered how rich her life was.”

One of things Springfield was, the show tells us, was a principled anti-racist. Against the wishes of her African American girlfriend at the time (played by the remarkably gifted stage performer Christina Sajous) Springfield naively took her show to Cape Town in South Africa, insisting on performing in cinemas, one of the few venues in the Apartheid state that permitted interracial attendees.

But even this proved too much for the authorities and she was placed under house arrest, with government goons insisting she sign a letter condemning her own actions. She refused and instantly became a hero to the back majority.

How have we not heard more about this inspirational Irish life, you will ask yourself as the play progresses?

Alongside Springfield’s deep humanity is the unforgettable music: “Son of a Preacher Man,” “You Don‘t Have to Say You Love Me,” “The Look of Love” – all of these can be found on her catalogue, and her critically celebrated album Dusty In Memphis is still the greatest enduring tribute to the famous Memphis sound.

The band in Forever Dusty is the show’s secret weapon. They rock out when they need to, but their soul grooves are completely irresistible. I defy anyone to attend this captivating musical drama and fail to be transported by the soul music that lifts this performance into the stratosphere.

Be warned, though, this is not a magic carpet ride. In her storied career Springfield endured enough challenges for several lifetimes.

Among the cast of villains are musical executives who were too free with their hands, bullying producers, a brother (played thoughtfully by Sean Patrick Hopkins) who wanted her to tailor her career to his wishes, and a girlfriend who loved her but not the challenges that came with her.

The one constant in Springfield’s career was her incredible voice. It never lost the ability to transcend every challenge that life threw her and audiences (particularly those in the know) adored for it.

The biggest challenge of her life was reconciling the shy Mary O’Brien to the fabulous Dusty Springfield. The former never felt good enough to be the latter. The greatest struggle of Springfield’s life was to unite the two strands of her private and public identity and come to accept herself.

“She was a Catholic girl and she was gay and I think her religion contributed to her negative feelings about herself throughout her life. She became self-destructive and that came from somewhere, you know?” says Smith, who was raised Catholic herself before converting to Judaism.

One detail of Forever Dusty is particularly moving for Irish viewers. Toward the end of her life when she was suffering from breast cancer, Springfield insisted on returning “home” to Ireland.  Later, after she passed her brother scattered her ashes along the Cliffs of Moher, her favorite place in the world, Smith says.

“That’s how Irish she was. This legendary singer wanted to come home to Ireland,” Smith says.
For tickets call 212-239-6200 or visit www.newworldstages.com.