Irish Timeswriters review a selection of events from the world of the arts.
Gruagairí
Axis Arts Centre, Ballymun
It's a particularly slow day for the hairdressing business in Dave Duggan's new play for Aisling Ghéar, but a reasonably pacy one for a soap opera.
Fiona (Nuala Ní Néill) and Josie (Sarah Nic Loinsigh) run a small, Irish-speaking, pastel- bright hair salon on the Falls Road in Belfast where they engage in expository twitterings about their failing business plan, recent advertising push, Josie's hurling boyfriend or their randy old goat of a landlord, and settle into a tumble of humdrum events, betrayals and bewilderingly happy resolutions.
If there is any political subtext to this weightless depiction of contemporary Belfast, where the Falls Road appears to be teeming with sparkling empty hairdressers and busy Polish cafés, it is largely blow-dried out of the show's tresses like so much unwanted frizz. That seems entirely deliberate: "A brand new play set in a hairdressers on the Falls Road, Belfast" declares the show's poster; adding, "and why not?!"
Much as you might admire the company's desire to shrug off seriousness in favour of the politics of frippery, Bríd Ó Gallchóir's dizzy, awkward production answers its own question.
Any production that trades on fright wigs for comic impact has to decide on a recognisably broad tone, but, with the exception of Diarmaid Murtagh's manically energetic hurler, none of the cast seems comfortable with that demand.
Perhaps they are merely as bemused as the audience by a play that forces them, at regular stages, to break into a little jig under a sudden lighting shift.
Such confusion makes it resemble a comedy created by people unacquainted with the phenomenon of laughter, but it also leads to some seriously dodgy kinks in the narrative.
When Fiona's mother, the object of the randy landlord's desire, agrees to "go upstairs" with him, providing he financially assists her daughter's irredeemably stupid business, does Duggan mean to present this as another jovial comic conceit?
"You're a business woman, Fiona," commends the landlord, happily fulfilling his side of this dubious deal in the oldest business there is. - Peter Crawley
Iron and Wine
The Ambassador, Dublin
The success of most live performances can best be gauged by how much the bands can get a crowd to move - an audience pogoing in unison and waving its arms to the heavens is a crowd that is enjoying itself.
The brilliance of an Iron and Wine concert, however, can be seen in the way the crowd is rendered still by the music, absorbing every note, listening to every softly sung lyric.
The lucky music fans who made their way to the Ambassador to catch the folk sounds of Sam Beam and his band were a model of stillness for most of this show, at most swaying dreamily during the more rootsy songs.
In a week of hyped-up concerts in tents and more illustrious venues, no concert was more rewarding than this beguiling display of musicianship.
Even the support, from English country folk singer Johnny Flynn and his band the Sussex Wits, was excellent.
Country folk, however, doesn't remotely capture the rich songwriting of South Carolina-native Sam Beam.
His earlier material, dating back to 2002's The Creek Drank the Cradle, was sparsely arranged, but his new album, The Shepherd's Dog, features a much fuller sound, and he is now touring with an eight-piece band, including his sister Sarah on backing vocals and violin.
Beam played much of the gig with his back to the audience, but with his huge hair and long, leonine beard, he doesn't have to try hard to be the centre of attention.
The band let the music do all the work, the general passivity of their performance in marked contrast to the liveliness of their playing, with gentle melodies often building into squalls of sound.
The Ambassador is to be turned into a library, an excellent choice for a venue that was never a perfect auditorium in the first place.
But on this utterly beautiful night, when Beam's voice and gently-plucked guitar filled the air and captivated the crowd, the round room on O'Connell Street seemed to be the most perfect venue of all. - Davin O'Dwyer
Sligo Festival of Baroque Music
Model Arts and Niland Gallery
Wexford Opera Festival is not the only festival encountering disruption due to building work. Sligo's Model Arts and Niland Gallery, home to festivals of new music and baroque music, is to close for redevelopment next year. The plans for the Model will increase the size of the gallery by a third and add a new performance space.
The Sligo Festival of Baroque Music, held every October, seems to have peaked in 2002, when Martin Adams described its programme in these columns as "the best line-up of baroque music this country has ever seen".
Sligo has since been leap- frogged by the East Cork Early Music Festival, which is longer and has managed to tackle music much larger in scale than has featured in Sligo. The new performance space may well provide the Sligo festival with the fillip to take on the sort of challenges relished in east Cork.
The two concerts I attended at this year's Sligo festival offered interesting contrasts and similarities. The ensemble Armoniosa, two violins, violone and lute, offered a programme called For Several Friends, the title borrowed from 17th- century English composer Matthew Locke's use of that description for a series of suites.
Oddly, in the circumstances, it was not the music by Locke himself which made the greatest impression in Armoniosa's playing. There was something too inward-looking, too much a matter of music-making for friends, perhaps, in their approach to the three suites by Locke that the programme featured.
The players sounded much more at ease, and much more communicativeness, in a suite of theatre music drawn from the works of Henry Purcell, in a lively Suite in D minor by Nicola Matteis, and, especially, in the direct give-and-take of the Suite No 5 in G from Georg Muffat's Armonico Tributo.
The members of Armoniosa offered ramblingly half-hearted and poorly-focused spoken introductions to their pieces.
Harpsichordist Matthew Halls, who played an all-Bach programme, gave thoughtful, informative introductions, which also elaborated on his personal responses to the music he was playing.
Halls traced strands of lute influence and improvisation in Bach's music. He was at his best in the lute-inspired Suite in E minor, where he projected the sonorous richness of the harpsichord's lower register with a strong and gripping rhetorical freedom. - Michael Dervan
42nd Street
Gaiety Theatre
Consider the plot. A young girl arrives at a Broadway theatre hoping to audition for a new musical. At first she is laughed off the stage, then taken on for a place in the chorus line. When the top performer breaks an ankle, the girl is given her big chance and the producer visits her dressing room on opening night to say: "You'll leave here a youngster - but you've got to come back a star." Happy endings are guaranteed.
It's pure, clichéd schmaltz; isn't it? But 42nd Streethas been around since 1933, continually evolving and still thriving after a 10-year run on Broadway in the 1980s. The schmaltz is still there, but now offered as a knowing comedy that evokes the laughter of nostalgia.
It is a kind of binding material that joins song, dance and characterisations in an irresistible melange of sheer entertainment. Many of the songs have acquired the status of standards and in this production, cast locally by Jim Molloy Productions, they are memorably sung.
Brenda Brooks as the fading star delivers About a Quarter to Nine, the lovely Shadow Waltzand I Know Nowwith real feeling and impact. Bronwyn Andrews as her successor is blessed with a bell-like voice and a bubbly personality to fit the title number.
The dancing, mainly but not exclusively tap, is choreographed by Daryn Crosbie and delivered by an exceptional dancing team whose precision is infectious.
Thomas Creighton's young singer-dancer leads the way here and other prominent performers are Kathy Kelly's middle-aged trouper, Joe Conlan's funny man and Andy Lee's chorus-line leader. The whole team are exceptional.
Nostalgia is not dead yet. - Gerry Colgan
Les Savy Fav
Crawdaddy, Dublin
Tim Harrington must be every venue manager's nightmare. After just three tracks, he is up to his neck in a crowd that has turned into a brawling mass of random limbs and roaring lyrics, his microphone cable held aloft by a delighted crowd.
A few minutes later, he has climbed on top of the PA system to get a different perspective on the madness he has created below. Towards the end of the set, and obviously enjoying the advantages that height bring, he has clambered up on to the first-floor balcony in Crawdaddy to sing a few bars from the sober seats, before he inveigles two audience members to lower him, upside down and now in a filched devil outfit, into the seething throng below.
Oh, and the band played a few tunes as well.
Les Savy Fav are something akin to indie rock survivalists. They are now touring Let's Stay Friends, their fourth album proper and first in six years.
Although sales have been consistent in their career, the limelight has never quite captured the band in full flight, which is probably the best position to be in. The innovative jarring edges to their music betrays a musical sensibility that puts the independent back into indie.
The band's PR claims that their latest album is "a sophisticated metaphor all people can relate to about how we marry the consistent with the inconsistent" and their extraordinary live show delivers just this.
Plagued by technical problems, the band struggled to get a sound grinding out, while Harrington held the fort front of stage, dressed as a ghost and telling spooky tales of "mysterious Ireland, land of mystery, haunted by pubs stuffed with unpublished authors".
The sound was less than perfect, but the playing was full of swagger and brimming with jabbing energy. The bass kicked and rolled, trading punches with the kit, as the guitars surged, shimmered and punked their way through a set of rough-edged experimental indie pop.
The exhibitionism of Harrington has its foil in the airtight playing of Seth Jabour, Harrison Haynes and Syd Butler in an explosive, scary package that all but sets the room on fire. - Laurence Mackin
