Celtic Woman: From left to right Lisa Kelly, Chloë Agnew, Alex Sharpe, Máiréad Nesbitt, and Lynn Hilary
Celtic Woman, the Irish-music juggernaut starring fiddler Máiréad Nesbitt and vocalists Lisa Kelly, Chloë Agnew, Lynn Hilary and Alex Sharpe, paints a picture of Ireland — or what Americans want Ireland to be. The show visits Seattle's Paramount Theatre May 15-17.
Back in Ireland, the Celtic Tiger has turned into a helpless kitten, as the once-booming Emerald Isle economy slides ever deeper into a debt-ridden recession. But on this side of the Atlantic, the Irish are on the march, poised to complete a velvet-gloved conquest through a deceptively innocuous occupying force known as Celtic Woman.
Featuring fiddler Máiréad Nesbitt and four winsome vocalists usually identified only by their first names, the elaborate production of lushly orchestrated Irish standards and original material by musical director and composer David Downes was first created for a 2004 Dublin concert and broadcast on PBS in March 2005. Since then, Celtic Woman has been all but unstoppable, piling up huge CD and DVD sales (more than 4 million copies), seven U.S. tours and three more PBS specials.
Celtic Woman's latest 73-city triumphal march, "Isle of Hope," opens a three-night run at the Paramount Theatre in Seattle on Friday. The group's new incarnation features fiddler Nesbitt and Lisa Kelly and Chloë Agnew, vocalists at the original 2004 Helix Theatre show in Dublin, and later additions Lynn Hilary and Alex Sharpe. All the Celtic Woman women possess shining countenances and strong, clear voices informed more by Broadway and the conservatory than Irish pub or céilí.
It's a high-gloss aesthetic that flows from the huge success of the Irish song and dance extravaganza "Riverdance," which Downes helped create as music director for the production's U.S. and European touring company.
"What 'Riverdance' did was to aim for and achieve world-class production values, from lighting and direction to visual creativity and music," Downes says. "In creating 'Celtic Woman,' that was very important to me."
Even with 'Riverdance' softening up the American market, the Celtic Woman conquest has taken just about everyone surprise. For Hilary, who joined the show in the summer of 2007, the experience has been almost overwhelming.
"I knew it was a big show, but didn't have any idea how big it was in America," says Hilary. "We've got kids who are part of the performance, so we try not to get too carried away with the whole phenomenon and we all have great fun on tour."
The group's first, self-named CD quickly took up residence on the top spot on the Billboard's World Music chart and settled in for a record-breaking 81 straight weeks. Three more chart-topping recordings followed.
A guest appearance last month on "Dancing With the Stars" drove home Celtic Woman's total U.S. dominance, as the group jumped from ubiquitous PBS pledge-drive fodder to the sanctity of network evening prime time. So how to explain Celtic Woman's ongoing success?
"A lot of Americans have roots in Ireland, and everyone likes to connect back to their roots," Hilary says. The show offers "a sense of Ireland, and what people want Ireland to be."
Celtic Woman offers an anodyne vision of Irish culture — a utopia devoid of history, blood and struggle.
The cruel twist is that after a quarter-century boom transformed the isle, drawing immigrants to a land that for centuries exported able-bodied workers, a new generation is looking for opportunity abroad.
"Talking to taxi drivers to and from airports in Ireland, a lot of them say their children are finding jobs hard to get and they're moving out of Ireland," Hilary says. "Some are going to America, to Canada, or Australia. Like in the past, emigration is happening a lot now."
By Andrew Gilbert
Special to The Seattle Times
Seattle, WA
Sunday, May 10, 2009 at 12:00 AM
