Dublin Party Time in Miami
By Skip Sheffield
They are throwing a big Irish pub party through Sunday, Feb.
9 at the Arsht Center
in downtown Miami.
It is well worth the trip.
“Once” is based upon the movie of the same name. The
small-budget Irish musical romance was my favorite movie of 2007. What made it
so special was that the music was written by the two stars, who fell in love
during screening.
Glen Hansard and Marketa Irglova are no longer a couple but
their fairy tale romance lives on in the movie, directed by John Carney, and in
the stage show, directed by John Tiffany with book by Edna Walsh.
You know right away “Once” is a different kind of show,
because the action begins before the show proper. The stage is set up as an
Irish bar populated with singing, dancing musicians. The audience is invited
climb up onstage and mingle with the musicians and even order a drink from a
functioning bar.
In the transition from movie to stage show there were
several changes in the characters known simply as Guy (Stuart Ward) and Girl
(Dani de Waal). Czech-born Marketa Irglova was only 17 when the movie was
filmed. Irishman Glen Hansard was twice her age. The Girl is some years older
than Irglova, closer in age to the Guy. As in the movie she has a daughter, but
in the stage show she is older than the movie’s toddler.
The Guy has a girl who has left him, but she has gone off to
New York, not London.
The Guy expresses his lovelorn vulnerable stage in his first
song, “Leaving.”
British singer-musician Stuart Ward has a beautiful singing
voice and very fine acoustic guitar technique.
Dani de Waal is also London-trained, and like Marketa
Irglova she plays piano while singing in exquisite close harmony with Stuart
Ward the Academy Award-winning theme song “Falling Slowly.”
The wonderful thing about this production is that every
character sings, plays an instrument and performs closely choreographed moves.
The Guy’s Da (father) is played by bewhiskered Raymond Bokhour who plays a mean
mandolin. There are two lady fiddlers (Erica Swindell and Claire Wellin);
multi-instrumentalist Evan Harrington, who plays the hot-headed shop owner
Billy; an accordion-playing mother of the Girl (Donna Garner), a cello and
guitar-playing bank manager (Benjamin Magnuson) and an all-purpose guy named Svec
(Matt DeAngelis) who plays guitar, mandolin, banjo, drums and percussion.
With such a simple plot line, the play seemed padded over
the movie, but if you love playing, singing, dancing and precision interaction,
you should appreciate the eight Tony Award-winning Best Musical “Once’ as much
as I did.
Tickets start at $26. Call 305-949-6722 or visit www.arshtcenter.org.
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