Mary Deady’s American songbook at the West Bank Cafe

Mary Deady

Some singers are so good you can literally hear how much a song means to them as they perform it. It doesn’t happen very often, but it did last week at the West Bank Cafe on 42nd Street as Irish singer Mary Deady unveiled her latest musical journey at the Broadway hotspot.

A familiar face on the Irish scene in the city, it felt as though we were being collectively re-introduced to her since she is perhaps best known for singing Irish music. For many, including myself, this was our first introduction to her as a singer of the American songbook.

Aided by the utterly flawless musicianship of pianist and musical director Jeff Cubeta, Deady’s show From Ireland to America: A Musical Journey In Song was a marvel from the opening number.

It was Deady’s good fortune to be born in Co. Kerry, holy ground for generations of world-class singers and musicians. There she learned to play the harp, and later she left for Dublin for classically trained singing lessons that would eventually take her far from home on the musical journey that was her own life.

Deady chose songs that conveyed the immigrant love (and sometimes secret pining for) the homeland, and this she did as well as I have ever had the good fortune to hear. But the show has wider ambitions than merely relying on all too easy sentiment. Deady has a compelling tale to tell, and that is part of what takes this performance to the next level.

What I did not anticipate was being so moved by the deep connections between her life and the music that she took ownership of, each time from the first note.

Deady also sang songs in praise of the fairly demonic energy of New York City itself, and her version of the 1930 Cole Porter classic I Happen to Like New York seemed to conjure the whole damn city in a tribute that delighted the hard bitten New Yorkers in her audience. Believe me, that takes some skill.

“Last Sunday afternoon I took a trip to Hackensack,” she sang. “But after I gave Hackensack the once over, I took the next train back. I happen to like New York. I happen to love this burg.”

You know you’re deeply connecting when your audience is applauding you wildly before you’ve even reached the final chorus. That happened many times during Deady’s performance, and it’s a tribute to her skill as a singer that she could switch between the conflicting demands of the American songbook with its changes of mood and melody so nimbly.

You can’t sing a Stephen Sondheim song until you lived it first, and you can’t match his phrasing until you know exactly what he means. When you do, though, you can nail an audience to the wall with sincerity, experience, yearning and smarts that are his hallmark, and Deady did this so effortlessly that I found myself hoping selfishly she will consider offering an exclusively Sondheim evening in the near future.

In particular Deady’s rendition of “No One Is Alone,” culled from Sondheim’s masterful musical Into the Woods, found its emotional mark, conveying both rueful experience and the wisdom that it brings in the same note.

“Anyone Can Whistle” did likewise, but her version of “Not While I’m Around” from Sweeney Todd, which on the night she dedicated to her daughter, was so heartfelt and so carefully conveyed that it became one of the high water marks of the night.

There was fun to be had too. “Look to the Rainbow,” an irresistible number from the equally irresistible musical Finian’s Rainbow, lent some golden age of Broadway lyricism to the proceedings. In life as in song you won’t go too far wrong by following the fellow who follows a dream, and Deady made time for this reflection in her well-chosen set list.

I would have liked to have heard even more detail about her life and her relationship to the songs she sang on the night, but that was because Deady’s a natural storyteller, gifted with identifying the lessons of her own experience (and knowing how to have a laugh about them in the process). Hopefully that will be a feature of future productions.

Deady has travelled the world as the lead singer with the National Folk Theater of Ireland, but luckily for us she has found a home in New York City, where she has sung at signature venues throughout the city.
Knowing her audience on the night, Deady led a spirited encore of “Molly Malone,” and sent everyone home singing. What could be more Irish, or more delightful, than that?

Tiny Dynamite displays new Irish talent

Love's essence is always intangible, but it produces substantial consequences. In Abi Morgan's absorbing new drama, which has been given a compelling production by Origin Theatre Company at 59 East 59 Theatre, who we are to each other is at the heart of a bruising lifelong dance between three characters.

Lucien was a shy boy who has grown into a overly cautious and haunted young man (Christian Conn) and Anthony (Blake DeLong) is a ne'er-do-well who was struck by lightening when he was six and looks fated to live out a damaged existence under the watchful eye of his old friend.

Morgan underscores the enduring love between the two friends, which crucially runs just a little deeper than the mistrust that occasionally brims to the surface between them. As adolescents we learn that both men once loved a young woman who took her own life. The affection was so deep, the loss so profound, they can barely bring themselves to speak of it.

Instead what they do is go on an annual ritual: Lucien makes his yearly attempt to rehabilitate Anthony by taking him on a back to nature summer vacation. Fresh air, a bath, some new threads, regular meal times - these are the fairly patronizing moves Lucien makes to reconnect with his old pal and his past.

But gratitude and affection share the stage with moments of snarling anger and clearly unfinished business. Morgan knows that the two men, locked in a dance they can not end, have reached an emotional impasse and so she introduces a blow-in in the shape of Madeline (Olivia Horton) a free spirit who works the spot during the summer vacation months.

Left to their own devices the two men have worn themselves out with abstract philosophical speculations about the nature of creativity and destruction, which they at all times seem on the edge of themselves, until Madeline makes all that fine talk concrete through her presence and through recognizing the wrenching heartache that's behind all the smoke and mirrors.

Men, the playwright reminds us, can exhaust themselves with drunkenness and competition indefinitely, and perhaps Morgan indulges them too much in this respect. It is left to Olivia to be the foil and to bring the plays overarching themes of betrayal and redemption into focus.

But along the way the play meanders and then focuses in a way that can prove jarring to the viewer. Each time we find ourselves getting closer to the three characters and the interior objectives that motivate them it seems a philosophical debate erupts that pushes us away again or holds us at arms length. It's a frustrating tic that throws a veil of uncertainty over the proceedings just at the points when you most hope to connect. Morgan certainly seems as interested in experimenting with the plays form as she is in creating compelling characters and although this is admirable artistically it continually undermines the drama onstage.

Director Matt Torney has created one of the most lucid productions of a new play that I have witnessed in New York in a decade. Torney strips the stage and the production to their theatrical essence as though to compensate for and clarify the abstractions in the text. In the process he has mined the emotions that propel the three young characters and he has added immeasurably to the depth of this work. Torney's staging is eloquent, immensely confident and frequently beautiful to look at, coaxing remarkable performances from the cast.

In the end though it's Morgan's curious and reflexive introspection in the text that fails to satisfy. We learn of the private passions that have driven her characters and we come to care for them too, but the plays thematic obsessions consistently trump all other considerations.

Love may be intangible, but after witnessing how it has first leveled and then promised to redeem her three characters, there's a steep human dimension to these engagements that the play demurs.

A looks at books - Irish food and fiction

Call of the Lark
By Maura Mulligan

Maura Mulligan is perhaps best known to the Irish community in New York for her works as a dancer and actor at the Irish Arts Center, and as the founder of the Irish language school An Scoil Gaelige.

In Call of the Lark, her atmospheric and heartfelt new memoir, she conjures an Ireland and a way of life that may be as irretrievably lost to us now as Atlantis.

Starting life as a servant girl in a big house in Ireland, Mulligan sailed to America at the tender age of 17 where she soon answered a higher calling, entering a Franciscan convent to become a nun.
In the 1960s the reforms of Vatican II were only very slowly being implemented, and the preeminence of the Church in the life of the Irish was still paramount.

For Mulligan, a comely country girl with a reverence for God, church leaders were representatives of an authority that was never to be questioned. Her portrait of her own timidity in their presence is instructive, as is her slowly growing awareness that the life of a nun was not for her.

Other portraits in the book are unforgettable. Mulligan carries the wounds of her early childhood in Ireland with her for decades, the book makes clear, only to see them emerge in therapy years later.

One particular act of shocking cruelty by her own mother may have contributed to her long courtship with authority figures and her eventual decision to step out of their shadow.

Call of the Lark is the call of a holy spirit, Mulligan’s own as it happens, which as often happens takes years to find its voice and make its wishes known. But the delight of the book and her tale is that she has the wisdom to follow its promptings and step into herself at last. Mulligan’s tale is the nation’s, really.

Greenpoint Press.

The Dream of the Celt
By Mario Vargas Llosa

Irish patriot Roger Casement’s brief but brilliant life has inspired generations of scholars, activists, political leaders and, most crucially for his lasting legacy, artists.

It was Casement’s compassion for the oppressed people of the world –which must have found its origins in his own experience of oppression as a discreetly closeted homosexual at the turn of the 19th century – that got him into trouble.

When Casement dared to draw a parallel between the oppressed people of the Belgian Congo and the Amazon with the present condition of the pre-Easter Rising Irish he attracted the attention of the British authorities.

Witnessing the abuses meted out on colonized people first hand and shocked by their savagery, Casement eventually traded theory for practice and became involved in the cause of Irish freedom that ultimately led to his imprisonment and execution. 

For decades Ireland has refused to give this martyr for freedom his due because he came with baggage they didn’t want to acknowledge (he was gay). British intelligence, who were themselves known to harbor a few gay men in their lineups, ruthlessly exploited Ireland’s public morality to prevent Casement’s legend or activities from inspiring others.

As is so often the case with our most inspiring champions, it was non-Irish authors who understood and celebrated his challenge first. In The Dream of the Celt Mario Vargas Llosa restores this ahead of his own time figurehead to history and literature, where he deservedly belongs.

FSG, $27.

Flavors of Ireland: Celebrating Grand Places and Glorious Food
By Margaret Johnson

Gradually the Irish are realizing that the reputation of their home cooking skills has surpassed their near neighbors in Britain.

Right on cue there’s been a glut of genuinely sought after cookbooks to celebrate traditional Irish cooking and baking, and Flavors of Ireland is an example of the kind of modern Irish cookbook flying off the shelves internationally.

Margaret Johnson’s new book reflects the new enthusiasm for Irish cuisine and its signature elements.
With its emphasis on fresh and seasonal ingredients, it reminds readers that Ireland has a very distinctive food culture thanks to its geography, climate and unique history.

All of the familiar elements of Irish cooking are included in the new book: beef, lamb, and insanely rich dairy produce take pride of place alongside smoked, cured and spiced fish and meat.

But the book also takes time to remember other crucial Irish cooking ingredients like barley, wheat and rye too. For the weeknight hobbyist to the most sophisticated gourmet, Johnson’s knowledgeable book is sure to appeal to all comers.

Ambassador International, $19.99.

A look at books - Irish history and biographies

Oscar’s Shadow
By Eibhear Walsh

After his imprisonment and death, poet and dramatist Oscar Wilde continued to be a visible presence in popular culture in Ireland in a way that did not happen in England.

James Joyce had a lot to do with it. He wisely read Wilde’s sexuality and his art as challenges to the dominant political and moral hegemony of the British Empire (bolstering his own fight with official Ireland in the process).

For Ireland’s benighted writers Wilde became a standard bearer, a patron saint and a battering ram against officialdom in all its forms, which had the unintended effect of keeping him current, in a way that simply didn’t happen in Britain.

There Wilde had been imprisoned and made an example of.  No one imagined that they had actually added to his legend.  In England Wilde was a gay man -- in fact he was the gay man (the image that would define the stereotype for generations after) -- but in Ireland he was also the dissident and the patriot, which rehabilitated his reputation faster.

Walsh’s fascinating and meticulously researched new book examined unpublished archival material, and delves into a wealth of Irish critical studies and dramatizations of Wilde’s life and sexuality.  As a father who was also a homosexual, as a Anglo Irish writer who was unmistakably nationalist, as an aristocrat who was also marginalized to the outer limits of society, Wilde has been a mirror that an anxious postcolonial Ireland gazed into in search of its selfhood.

His legend will endure, as will his challenge.

Cork University Press, $50.

A Good Man: Rediscovering My Father, Sargent Shriver
By Mark K. Shriver

Is there anything more miraculous than a genuinely good man? Or more mysterious, frankly? For years writer Mark K. Shriver has grappled with the inspirational legacy of his father, and this book is the expression of a grateful son.

Sarge, as he was known, lived an incident filled life. He had served in the navy in World War II. With his brother in law John F. Kennedy he started the Peace Corps.

He was the architect of President Johnson’s War on Poverty campaign. He served as ambassador to France. In 1972 he was a vice presidential candidate and in 1976 he ran for president.

Sarge was also married to Eunice Kennedy Shriver for 56 years, raising five children. Both were deeply committed to their family and their Catholic faith.

In sharp contrast to the conservative Christianity that has come to the fore in recent decades, Sarge saw his faith as a call to service to help the poor. He saw a continuum between his political life and his advocacy. His faith was a call to service, not a call to arms.

But to Mark Shriver he was simply dad. From a young age he was aware of his father’s standing on the political stage. His family was revered but it was also scrutinized and criticized.

A Good Man is his own estimation of his father, a love letter of sorts and an astounded thank you for encountering such a soul.

Henry Holt. $24.

Banished Babies
By Mike Milotte

Much has been written about the children abused by priests and about the tens of thousands of women condemned to indentured servitude in Ireland’s Magdalene Laundries, but what about Ireland’s once lucrative baby export industry?

The extend to which the Irish church and state stood side by side in organizing the export of thousands of Irish children in the 1950s is a tale to make your blood boil.

These helpless infants were not being sent off to well-to-do families in the U.S. In fact, there was a wealth of evidence to show that many of the children the church exported were being sent to people whose suitability as parents had not been vetted. Often they went to parents who had been rejected
previously by America’s own child welfare services.

But these babies were still sent out, and even when the alarm was raised the response was to do nothing. A child’s welfare during the most dominant years of church influence in Ireland in the 1950s mattered less than ensuring there was no bad publicity.

This shattering and scrupulously, even passionately, researched book brings us face to face with our own past. It will shock and infuriate all who read it as it uncovers the hidden truth about the nation’s utterly sordid past.

New Island, $22.

Steve Kazee and "Once" score Tony triumps - VIDEOS

Irish musical Once walked off with the largest haul of trophies at the 2012 Tony Awards last night and in this clip Steve Kazee (who won Best Actor in A Musical last night) shows us why.

Kazee, 36, who gives his all to his portrait of a wounded young Dubliner with a song in his heart, lost his mother at Easter whilst the show was still in preparation. Lat night Kazee remembered her in an emotional tribute that brought supporters to their feet.

In his acceptance speech he quoted Arthur O'Shaughnessy, the poet of Irish descent, saying : 'We are the music makers and we are the dreamers of dreams.'

For Kazee and for the cast and crew of Once, those dreams came true last night.

Review - Not drowning but swimming - “Jump in and Start Swimming”

Cover of James P. Naughton's new book

Author James P. Naughton’s Irish parents taught him a thing or two about resilience growing up. Arriving in the U.S. for the first time in the fiercely cold winter of 1930, at the very height of the Great Depression, his Co. Mayo-born mother and father learned the hard way how to survive -- and thrive -- against the odds.
Naughton’s own story is one of learning how to overcome hardships, too. After almost dropping out of high school and then being refused by every college he applied to due to his poor SAT scores, Naughton finally heeded his Irish mother’s wise words.

What she told him eventually became the title of his new book, Jump In and Start Swimming.

Heeding her never-say-die approach, Naughton finally found a college that would accept him. Although he intended to become a teacher and majored in English, he ultimately chose a business career instead, with spectacular results.

As a businessman he went on to great success, in his last post managing to raise a billion dollars in a single year.

With that kind of business acumen and experience behind him, it occurred to Naughton to share his practices with others, and this inspirational book is the result.

Some people will groan at the idea. American bookshelves are already heaving under the weight of every kind of Get Rich Look Good Be Happy self-help title out there, so what makes Naughton’s so special?

“I think that half the country doesn’t know that there’s a recession on,” Naughton tells the Irish Voice.

“I live in Rhode Island, and if you go to the restaurants and bars the lines are four deep. But if you visit Providence, parts of it look like a war zone.

“During the Great Depression during the 1930s you knew the country was in trouble because you could see the bread lines. Now we have another terrible recession, and this time the people most affected are harder to see.”

Naughton says he wrote his book to remind young people of his favorite saying -- you have to go along to get along. If you’re jobless and feeling the pinch, he says, try to land the first paying position you can because it can lead to better opportunities down the road.

“My own kids don’t want to hear that message because we wanted to protect them from the harsher side of life. But now that we’re in a more challenging economic climate they will have to get used to the idea that they won’t have a career and big bucks handed to them as a kind of birthright.”

The situation in 2012 is a tale of two economies, Naughton says.

“My own friends, people I’ve worked alongside on Wall Street, will deny to my face that there is a new level of hardship out there. For them it’s the best of times. They literally don’t see that half the country is often despairing.”

Naughton has personal experience of the economic winds that are prevailing since what he calls the atomic bomb of the second Great Depression began in 2008. It ended his own Wall Street career.

Working as a financial wholesaler, he was laid off without warning. “I thought I was invincible, I was the number one guy in the industry, let alone my firm, and then my oldest son got laid off -- and he has three kids,” Naughton said.

Naughton got laid off in what the financial industry calls a Reduction In Force (an RIF).

“It’s a new age term for a layoff,” he scoffs. “I assume the company decided that they would cut my job because of my age and everything else.

“But I remembered that my father came over in the worst economic crisis to ever hit the country and I don’t believe it can ever get that bad again because we have Social Security, we have unemployment, we have better protections now,” he adds.

To battle the challenges of the current time, the economic survival skills from an earlier age, first taught to him by his own parents, will be necessary to relearn. So Naughton’s book’s title refers to having the faith in oneself to navigate the looming icebergs.

“This is a great book for anyone who is seeking post-college employment, the returning veteran, the unemployed and the underemployed. It’s based on my own life and career and the lessons it taught me that can’t be taught in school.  The book also offers high school students a reason to stay in school,” Naughton explains. “My message is start somewhere. Take a position. Trust your own abilities and create your own path. That’s the best way to thrive that there is.”

For information on Jump In and Start Swimming, visit www.keypublishingcompany.com, or call 401-486-9601.

A look at books - Irish fiction and non-fiction literature to get your teeth in to

The Reckoning

By Jane Casey

Jane Casey’s life looks like an audition for the role of first-rate crime writer. Born and raised in Dublin, she graduated from Oxford University and Trinity College Dublin, and then worked in London for a time as a book editor until the urge to write her own works eventually became too strong.

Marrying a criminal barrister in London who specializes in prosecution, her husband’s day to day life is filled with police officers, criminals, reluctant witnesses, judges and juries – basically the entire stock and trade of a crime writers life.

So if The Reckoning, her second thrilling tour of London’s back streets, is filled with the kind of illuminating details that ground it in reality you’ll know why.

When London detective Maeve Kerrigan sets out to find the killer of a series of sex offenders, she starts with the theory that it’s the work of a mobster who’s hoping to track down a missing girl. But the facts keep pointing in other directions and the lid keeps coming off more and more long buried grudges, with explosive results. 

Casey is a particularly acute reader of human behavior, and there is more than a hint of the psychological depth of the classic crime drama Prime Suspect at work in this tense and twisted tale.

Minotaur, $24.95.

Malarky

By Anakana Schofield

Well, this is a particularly lively tale by an Irish Canadian with a superb understanding of the cadences of Irish speech. In Malarky we meet an Irish widow named Philomena who refuses to be sunk by whatever indignities life tries to serve her. 

Recently bereaved, she has caught her son in the fields with another man. Then a half mad local informs her of all the real or imagines infidelities of her late husband. It’s enough to oppress the spirits of the brightest, but Philomena is made of stronger stuff. 

Schofield’s richest gift is for spirited dialogue which crackles with humor and energy in this blackly funny, half mad tale. Portraits of working class Irish female eccentrics are pretty thin on the ground, and for that reason alone this divertingly brilliant book is entirely worth your time. 

This is the most distinctive novel of its kind I’ve read in a decade. 

Biblioasis, $16.95.

A Fierce Local: Memoirs of My Love Affair With Ireland

By Harvey Gould

Harvey Gould is not your typical Irish moniker, but nonetheless he’s a “fierce local” in his adopted homeland, which he clearly loves unreservedly. So how did a nice Jewish boy from Chicago become a (literally) full-blooded Irishman?

It may have been thanks to the blood transfusion that saved his life during his 13th trip to Ireland. Suffering from a chronic blood disorder, he visited a local doctor when he started feeling poorly. 

She drew some vials and sent them – and him – to the hospital immediately. Three hours later he was having the blood transfusion that saved his life.

Gould, who was a former trial lawyer in California, enjoys the symbolism. All his American blood was replaced by Irish blood, which is taking matters to a bit of an extreme. 

Marrying Karen Duffy, an Irish American girl from Washington Heights, was the transformative event in Gould’s life. Both had been married before to people within their own faith traditions, both subsequently divorced and took a long time to decide they belonged together, but eventually they did.

Because of that union Gould eventually discovered the other great love of his life, Ireland. Visit after visit brought him closer to the elusive character of the Irish themselves, and this memoir is a vivid and clearly heartfelt celebration of the land and its people.

iUniverse.com, $22.95.

On the Run

Colm O’Gaora

When Colm O’Gaora’s mother was young there were still people living in her locality that had an excellent memory of the Year of the French. O’Gara’s father was a sailor as a young man and remembered hearing of Lincoln’s death whilst stopping at Cape Verde. 

O’Gaora himself was fated to live in interesting times, writing one of the most vivid accounts of the Irish War of Independence in the Irish language. This remarkable new book is a translation into English of his classic telling. 

O’Gaora was an important figure in the development of republicanism and the Irish Republican Brotherhood (IRB) in the west of Ireland. In the early 1920s that meant living your life on the run from British forces. This turbulent era of Irish history leaps to life in a memoir that is deservedly reprinted year after year.

Dufour, $26.95.