One of the highlights of the day for today's reviewers was a trip to see Pygmalion at the Gate theatre in Dublin.
Pygmalion
Gate Theatre, Dublin
In Greek legend, King Pygmalion of Cyprus was a sculptor who, though he hated women, fell in love with his own ivory statue of one. At his earnest prayer, Aphrodite gave life to the effigy, and he married it to live happily thereafter.
Aeons later, along came George Bernard Shaw to fashion an updated version of the myth. Pygmalion became Prof Henry Higgins, a specialist in phonetics, and his "creation" became Eliza Doolittle, a Cockney flower-seller condemned, because of her illiterate speech and giveaway accent, to spend her life in the social gutter. Henry fixes her linguistic defects, but the story's ending is not a happy one, because Eliza is a person and not a statue. She learns how to use her painfully acquired freedom.
It is a brilliant concept, filled with amusing and credible characters, and containing within its structure a mordant commentary on the values of the social classes and on the gaps between them. The author's humanity shines through it all, a champion of the underdogs and an iconoclast in their cause. At the ending, as Henry sits alone, gradually realising the cost of his emotional bankruptcy, it is clear who has been the true realist in his experiment in creation.
There is enough intellectual and comic energy here for half a dozen plays, and a splendid cast use it with elan. Stephen Brennan is a hugely entertaining Henry, obsessed with his science and oblivious to the travails of his human robot. Dawn Bradfield is Eliza, moving confidently from a squalling street vendor to a stately beauty who has acquired a sense of her own possibilities. The good-hearted Col Pickering, in a winning performance from Alan Stanford, completes the trio of linguistic adventurers.
Outstanding in smaller roles are Mark Long as Alfred Doolittle, Susan Fitzgerald as Mrs Higgins, Barbara Brennan as Mrs Pearce and Michael Fitzgerald in a hilarious vignette as Eliza's vapid admirer, Freddy.
Robin Lefevre directs with total control, against a very good set by Liz Ascroft, well lit by Mick Hughes. Over it all hovers the shadow and spirit of Shaw, still a winner.
Runs until August 28th
Gerry Colgan
Macy Gray
Olympia, Dublin
"Dublin, Ireland!" a fuchsia-shirted musician hollers over a squat funk beat. "Are you ready for love, sex, drugs and music?"
Not in that order, necessarily, but Dublin, Ireland seems to have brought its collective groove-thang to the right place. The question is: can Macy Gray still shake it? With a startling debut album that went multi-platinum, a lesser follow-up that scraped gold and a third so disappointing it might hope for tin, the Amazonian Nu-Soul singer isn't the force she once was.
But then all eight feet of her totter onstage (two of which constitute a sun-eclipsing afro, careening with grey and blonde corkscrews) and pitching her utterly unique voice, childish and raspy, to Sex-O-Matic Venus Freak, Gray sets the record straight, Gloria Swanson style. She is big; it's just the venues that got smaller.
What makes a Gray concert (and her best songs) so glorious is that nerve-tingling thrill of imminent collapse. Her voice, her balance and - if we are to believe the lyrics of Relating to a Psychopath - her sanity teeter on the verge of cracking. But behind those narcoleptic eyelids, her voice and humour stay alert to every moment.
By Gray's standards - and given her nude encore the previous night in London - tonight is fun but tame; a PG cut of the R-rated version.
There are still some surprises: the lubricious groove of Caligula, the most belligerent version of Give Peace a Chance yet heard, the whirling oom-pah of Oblivion and the still-gorgeous soul ballad, I Try.
Extending her love to include people "who smell funny" and "tell bad jokes", R&B's endearing misfit treats her audience like superstars. We are especially sexy, she tells Dublin, Ireland, if we join in a dance that resembles a toddler attempting the hokey-cokey.
Inscrutable as she is, you have to love her: she sees the sex-o-matic Venus freak in everyone.
Peter Crawley
Fuzzy Logic
John Field Room, Dublin
Their name belies their music. In the NCH's John Field Room, composer and Hammond organist Dylan Rynhart's impressive 10-piece ensemble produced music that could hardly be called fuzzy and certainly had an undeniable logic of its own. It was also, not incidentally, hugely enjoyable, not only for the rich orchestral palette it used, but also for the generally sure-footed way the ensemble negotiated this emerging composer's demanding music.
This amazingly young group - Sue Brady (voice), Bill Blackmore (trumpet), Matt Berrill (clarinet), Nick Roth (alto), Robert Fagan (French horn), Rob Geraghty (bass clarinet/tenor), Lee Tobin (guitar), Mercedes Carroll (bass), Phil MacMullan (drums) and the leader, Rynhart - is drawn from the worlds of jazz and classical music. In this concert, their repertoire of 10 originals by Rynhart and one by the late, great trumpeter, arranger and composer, Thad Jones, reflected Rynhart's wide-ranging influences from both these idioms. He also acknowledges an interest in Balkan music.
But "influences" is a loaded word. From a jazz perspective, in terms of sound, it could be argued that Rynhart's writing has echoes of such as Miles Davis's Birth of the Cool band, and the groups led by pianists such as Tadd Dameron, Herbie Nicholls and perhaps Thelonious Monk. But whether these are actual influences is a moot point, because Rynhart has created an ensemble music quite unlike anything that has preceded it on the Irish jazz scene. It's a composer's band and Fuzzy Logic is very much his creation.
The instrumentation offers him a considerable range of orchestral colour, and it is handled with authority. Closely wrought ensembles contrast with the simplest of settings, contrapuntal lines shift back and forth in varied voicings, yet it's all done with a satisfying deftness and clarity of direction. From an audience point of view, however, the acoustics in the John Field Room weren't entirely kind to the separation of voices - for example, the stairwell was not masked, as it has been for the IMC's piano series.
Fuzzy Logic has several capable soloists in Blackmore, Roth, Tobin, Geraghty and the leader, who were impressive in subordinating their improvisations not only to the wry, surprising and constantly changing backdrop of the music, but also to its emotional climate, which has a gentle, quirky beauty of its own. The band is also blessed with an exceptional player in Berrill, whose clarinet solos on A Child Is Born and No Fehr were so logical and so well-sited within the pieces that they could almost have been written out.
It wasn't all sweetness and light though. A certain similarity of tone hung around some pieces, and the ensemble could do with greater rhythmic thrust. This is a matter of taste, since Fuzzy Logic displays a consistency of tone and approach that must surely reflect Rynhart's requirements above all.
But it would be a pity to end on a negative, however slight. This is a group to savour.
Ray Comiskey
