Irish Times writers give their verdict
George Benson Olympia Theatre, Dublin
Peter Crawley
George Benson's predicament is understandable. You can please some of the people all of the time, and all of the people some of the time, but you can't please all of the people all of the time.
For the determinedly populist musician, who excelled in jazz as a gifted hard-bop guitarist in the 1960s but progressed (some might say defected) to R&B crooning through the 1980s, his concerts attempt to reconcile his styles and his audiences. Such a peripatetic career might be measured in peaks and troughs, but tellingly there's no consensus over which is which.
As Benson surveyed the audience with bedroom eyes, the pneumatic hips of bassist Stanley Banks announced the groove of Lady Love Me. Lady consented quite deafeningly. Following with the slinky licks of Off Broadway, the tone of the concert was teasing. Soul-jazz? Funk-pop? Jazz-rock? Such is the ambivalence of a career in hyphenation.
Inevitably, the bankable love ballads dominated, oozing steadily from Benson's slush fund - Love X Love, Nothing's Gonna Change My Love For You, Turn Your Love Around - all delivered with such wincing earnestness they were impossible to take seriously.
With Kenya Hathaway as a backing singer, The Ghetto (by her father, Donny) possessed an easy sensuality that the beatific Benson largely eschewed. Picking up his guitar at last for an intricate, effortless Breezin', or scatting magnificently along with his solos on Beyond The Sea and Give Me The Night, you glimpsed a smooth confluence of jazz and pop, the point before the road forked.
Between the roles of improviser and entertainer, Benson must be one of the few jazz guitarists to end up dodging volleys of underwear. But for all the wide grins, smoochy soul and occasionally dazzling fretwork, the night was tame and well behaved. Even the knickers were spotless.
NT Shell Connections Everyman Palace, Cork
Mary Leland
Style triumphs over substance in Boat Memory, staged at the festival by Cork School of Music Youth Theatre. Written by Laline Paull, about the impact on a small English town of the forced arrival of three islanders from Tierra del Fuego, the play is too long for its one-act format, and its host of characters overcrowd and confuse an already shifting focus. In this production, however, directors Regina Crowley and Trina Scott disguise most of the flaws: the cast is well drilled, the set and costuming strongly impressionistic, the lighting dramatic and the sound design, though it stutters a little, thrilling and evocative. The acting too is often impressive, and the cast is unified by the overall design and by a commitment to, and confidence in, the material.
Cultural exchanges always have their problems and their solutions, and in The Musicians, presented by Independent Theatre Workshop, Patrick Marber has fun with the idea of a school orchestra stranded without its instruments on the evening of a performance in Moscow. This is a crisp comic piece, and although the girl characters in the orchestra are an unpleasant group of middle-class princesses, one could imagine sending away as musical ambassadors the cast, led by Dan Colley as the ineffectual conductor. Without instruments, they realise the music in dance, and as no credit is given for choreography Orla Dunne, the play's director, must be responsible for the sequence's ease and grace. Although he can write with a very light hand, Marber always deepens his material, and in the role of Alex, the Muscovite theatre cleaner, Robbie Perkins finds the pathos and realism that strengthen the play as a whole.
Festival ends tomorrow
