Artscape: The Irish are well represented in the nominations for this year's Tony Awards which will be presented in New York tomorrow, writes Ian Kilroy. Irish actors Brian F. O'Byrne and Aidan Gillen both picked up nominations in the "best performance by a featured actor" category.
For Cavan native O'Byrne, this is the third time he has been nominated for a Tony Award - theatre's answer to the Oscars. The 36-year-old was previously nominated as best featured actor in Martin McDonagh's The Beauty Queen of Leenane and as best actor in McDonagh's The Lonesome West. Maybe with this year's nomination - for his role as drifter Ralph in Bryony Lavery's Frozen - third time will be lucky.
If the reviews are anything to go by, he certainly is a strong contender. New York's Daily News called O'Byrne's performance "remarkable" in Frozen, while the New York Times said O'Byrne delivered a "rivetingly focused performance" in the play.
Reviews were equally glowing for Dubliner Aidan Gillen, 37, for his role as Mick in the Broadway revival of Harold Pinter's The Caretaker.
The New York Times said Gillen was "smashing" in what was his Broadway début. The newspaper's reviewer also suggested that the Irishman, best known for his role as Stuart in Channel 4's Queer As Folk, was stronger in the production that his famed co-stars, Patrick Stewart (Star Trek) and Kyle MacLachlan (Blue Velvet).
From Crash to council
After a long delay, the Arts Council has filled the new consultancy post of music specialist, originally advertised last September, writes Michael Dervan. Fergus Sheil, who's currently director of the Crash Ensemble, will from next month assist the council on a number of fronts. He will have to produce "a strategy for the development of music, and to monitor its implementation", to advise the council "on artistic promise and achievement in music", and to work with council staff "in delivering the council's strategic objectives for music".
Although he will have to relinquish his managerial and conducting role with Crash, Sheil expects to continue to develop his freelance conducting career. He conducts the opening programme in the RTÉ NSO's lunchtime series next Tuesday, and appears with the Irish Ring Orchestra in excerpts from Maritana, The Bohemian Girl, and The Lily of Killarney at the National Concert Hall on July 10th.
He will also be honouring Crash commitments that are "in the pipeline". He conducts the ensemble's next concert, at the O'Reilly Theatre in Great Denmark Street on June 12th, when the programme includes a new work by Kevin O'Connell, and pieces by three Estonian composers, Erkki-Sven Tüür, Helena Tulve, and Kairi Kosk, plus works by Steve Reich, Donnacha Costello and Crash's artistic director, Donnacha Dennehy. He will also conduct two concerts at the Gaudeamus Music Week in Amsterdam in September and a concert in conjunction with DEAF (the Dublin Electronic Arts Festival) in October.
As music consultant to the Arts Council he will, however, be restricted in future relationships with Arts Council clients.
Upstaging itself
It's unusual for a company - especially in the theatre - to upstage itself, but the Opera House decision to celebrate the retirement of the arts editor of the Irish Examiner at its season launch last week meant that Declan Hassett held the spotlight for longer than might have been intended, writes Mary Leland.
Cork Opera House manager, Gerry Barnes, presented Hassett with a trip for two to the Drury Lane production of Anything Goes; the hope must be that Hassett finds the time for it, as his first months of retirement are to be spent completing the third volume of his autobiography and preparing for the première in Cork next year of his play Sisters, featuring Anna Manahan and directed by Michael Scott. At the same time Hassett be working on the script of another play with director Michael Twomey; both are to run at the Everyman Palace.
Although the Opera House is keeping quiet about its plans for 2005, it is unrolling several spectacular items for the coming months: Man of La Mancha directed by Bryan Flynn opening on June 23rd; Michael Donnellan's Magic of the Dance in August; Grease at the end of August and Stomp in October, with two Ellen Kent opera productions leavening the mix. In October Shared Experience brings Martin Sherman's adaptation of A Passage to India, and while John Breen is yet again bringing Alone it Stands, he is also directing the Yew Tree production of George Bernard Shaw's Mrs Warren's Profession. The China-Ireland Cultural Exchange has yielded a three-day visit from the Shanghai Dramatic Arts Centre with Chang Hen Ge (in Mandarin with sur-titles),and the year ends with Bryan Flynn directing Alan Shortt's script for the pantomime The Pied Piper.
In the meantime, following the resignation of John O'Flynn as chairman of the board of Opera 2005, Ted Crosbie has taken over the role and the company is now operating - although obviously without any symbolic connotations - from the premises of another board-member, the undertaker Val O'Connor. Executive director Eithne Egan confirmed that the company's inaugural production will be Mozart's The Marriage of Figaro, opening next February. Directed by Michael Hunt, it is substantially funded by the Cork 2005 Capital of Culture organisation. While plans for a full-scale production for this year have had to be postponed due to lack of finance, the company chorus is to present Purcell's Dido and Aeneas directed by chorus master John O'Brien in June.
Lough and listen
It's that time of year when the opera-set in the North don long frocks and tuxedos, pack their hampers with smoked salmon and champers and head for the National Trust's great house on the shores of Strangford Lough, there to wallow in the heady bacchanalian and musical delights of the Castleward Opera season, writes Jane Coyle.
But, for the past three years, just along the road in the town of Downpatrick, a little cultural revolution has been taking place. Its name - Opera Fringe. This imaginative initiative by Down District Council runs parallel to the main event - which this year features a double bill of Verdi's Rigoletto and Britten's Albert Herring. It encompasses a broad canvas of just about anything and everything that can justifiably be encouraged to congregate under the banner of opera.
Artistic adviser Randall Shannon's confidence in his eclectic programme has now reached the point where nobody questions the fact that the festival's unlikely mascot is a Rhode Island Red. Its presence dates from the first Opera Fringe in 2002, when Peter Morgan Barnes staged The Beggar's Opera, complete with horses, hounds and . . . hens.
Morgan Barnes's Peace and Reconciliation: The Opera kicks off proceedings on June 11th. Set to the glorious music of Donizetti, it takes a mischievous look at the way European money is spent in Northern Ireland.
Elsewhere on the programme are an evening with the distinguished and versatile Jonathan Veira, a tribute to Maria Callas, a visit from the extraordinary Tibetan Monks from the Tashi Lhunpo Monastery, screenings of the original versions of Carmen Jones and Calamity Jane, and a one-hour Fast Forward Figaro.
The festival runs until June 26th. Programmes from Down Arts Centre in Downpatrick, with bookings on (048) 4461 5283 or www.operafringe.com
Summer sessions
The Irish World Music Centre is offering tuition scholarships for the Blas Summer School of Irish Traditional Music & Dance at the University of Limerick from June 21st to July 2nd.
Tutors this year include fiddler John Carty, dancer Colin Dunne, singers Seán Keane and Sandra Joyce, flute players Harry Bradley, Johnny McCarthy and Niall Keegan, percussionists Tommy Hayes and Brian Morrissey, and pianist Mícheál Ó Súilleabháin, each of whom will teach and perform at sessions and concerts during the two-week course.
The scholarships cover the costs of all tuition, concerts, céilí and field-trips. For details, contact the Michael McCabe, director of the Blas Summer School of Irish Traditional Music and Dance, Irish World Music Centre, University of Limerick, tel: (061) 213121 or e-mail michael.mccabe@ul.ie
Pilgrims' progress
Fishamble was this week flying the flag for Irish theatre in both the Czech Republic and Romania. The company's recent production of Tadhg Stray Wandered In, by Michael Collins, is this weekend playing as part of the Prague Fringe Festival, while the International Theatre Festival of Sibiu, Romania, is hosting a production of The Medusa by Gavin Kostick which was first produced by Fishamble/RTÉ lyricfm.
The Medusa represents Ireland in a season of work from all over Europe and was broadcast live on national Romanian radio station on Thursday. This is the third year that Fishamble participated in the festival; previous plays representing Ireland were The Nun's Wood by Pat Kinevane and Still by Rosalind Haslett.
Fishamble's next production will be Pilgrims in the Park, a new play by Jim O'Hanlon and set in 1979, during Pope John Paul's visit to Ireland. Its première will take place in the autumn to coincide with the 25th anniversary of the Pope's visit.