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Denise Foley

News, People

Local Irish-American Actor Injured in Hit and Run

Michael Toner with Marybeth Phillips.

Philadelphia actor Michael Toner, known for his one-man shows and his critically acclaimed work in Irish plays, was seriously injured in a hit-run accident this week in Philadelphia.

The 68-year-old native of Northeast Philadelphia, who is a frequent Ulysses reader during the Rosenbach Museum’s Bloomsday celebration in Philadelphia, had his right leg amputated at Jefferson Hospital after he was found unconscious on the street at 1 AM by a passerby. He may have lain on the street for two hours. Police are still investigating.

He was supposed to perform David Simpson’s Crossing the Threshold Into the House of Bach with the Amaryllis Theater Company this week.

Toner has performed both in Philadelphia and New York over his 40-plus-year career, as well as at the International James Joyce Symposium, the American Shaw Festival, the Edinburgh, Scotland Fringe Festival, and has written a number of one-man shows in which he starred.

“He’s made a successful career out of one-man shows that no one wanted to produce,” says friend and colleague Marybeth Phillips who first encountered Toner when he was performing with the short-lived Irish Players, an offshoot of the Philadelphia Ceili Group to which Phillips belongs.

“I can’t remember what the play was, but it was back in the early ‘80s and when I came out of the theater, I thought, who the hell was that little guy? He stole the show. That was Michael Toner. He was electric. With every move he made and word he said, he stole the show.”

She said she expects that Toner, a Vietnam veteran who once offered to be her son’s “pagan godfather,” will respond to this setback the way he always does—with typical Irish humor.

“I’ve saved every bit of literature from his accident for him to read. I’m sure Mike will say, ‘Jesus Christ, now you give me publicity. Where were you when I needed it for my plays?’” says Phillips.

June 12, 2015 by Denise Foley

Arts, Music, News, People

James Joyce, Set to Music

John Feeley, left, with Joyce’s guitar, and Fran O’Rourke.

Had they consulted a marketing wizard before naming their CD, “JoyceSong: The Irish Songs of James Joyce,” singer Fran O’Rourke and classical guitarist John Feeley might called it “James Joyce’s Greatest Hits: A Soundtrack from the Collected Works of Ireland’s Foremost Writer.”

If you’ve casually read The Dubliners, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Finnigan’s Wake, or Ulysses, you may have missed Joyce’s musical references, though they’re prominent symbols throughout his body of work.

But Dublin’s favorite son was a singer and guitarist, the son of a singer and guitarist, who was leaning toward a musical career before he was captured by the lyricism and harmonies of language. In fact, he once shared a stage with renowned Irish tenor John McCormack. And his wife Nora, the inspiration for many of his female characters, once bitingly remarked, “Jim should have stuck to singing.”

Though writing took primacy over a career on the stage, Joyce remained captive to song—from Wagnerian opera to the Irish traditional music he learned as a boy, what O’Rourke, professor of philosophy at University College, Dublin, calls “the music of the people.”

O’Rourke and Feeley, who is considered Ireland’s leading classical guitarist, will be performing Joyce’s greatest hits on Saturday at 4 PM at the Rosenbach Museum and Library at 2008-2010 Delancey Place in Philadelphia, as part of the Rosebach’s annual “Bloomsday” festivities, marking the fine June day (June 16) Leopold Bloom wandered the streets of Dublin in the 900 pages of Ulysses. The Rosenbach houses one of Joyce’s handwritten copies of the book.

O’Rourke, whose first “artistic connection” with Joyce came when he was 14 and sang a traditional song on Irish television, “a line of which occurs in Finnegan’s Wake,” revisited Joyce as a scholar because of their mutual interest in philosophy. He was delighted—and remains delighted—to also find the music there.

“The story, ‘The Dead,’ from The Dubliners, almost the entire tenor of that story, the ‘mood music’ of that story, comes from the Irish traditional song, ‘The Lass of Aughrim,’” said O’Rourke, whom I met, with Feeley, this week in the lobby of their hotel in Center City. “The story is so sparse, so beautiful, not a word out of place. The atmosphere of the story was inspired by that song.”

It is the recreation of an Irish family party attended by one of the main characters, Gabriel, and his wife who, listening to someone singing the lachrymose song about a lover’s death at the party, finds her mind wandering back to her teenaged sweetheart, Michael Furey, who died of a cold after coming to visit her. When the two return to their hotel after the party, Gabriel faces the truth that he is not his wife’s first—nor greatest—love. You can see and hear Feeley and O’Rourke performing “The Lass of Aughrim,” with Feeley playing Joyce’s own guitar, here.

“Ulysses is composed of 18 episodes and in each episode a different art dominates,” says O’Rourke. “The episode called ‘Sirens’ is the counterpart of the sirens who bewitched Homer’s sailors in ‘The Odyssey,’ [the Greek story of Ulysses’s travels]. The episode takes place in a hotel where people are singing two songs. One is “The Croppy Boy” and the other is “The Last Rose of Summer,” by Thomas Moore. Practically every word is quoted or parodied in that episode.’

Those songs are part of the program the two musicians are bringing to the Rosenbach on Saturday, then to the Irish Embassy in Washington and Solas Nua, a DC nonprofit dedicated to the promotion of Irish arts, next week to honor both Joyce and Irish poet William Butler Yeats, whose 150th birthday is Saturday, June 13. Their tour is sponsored by Culture Ireland (Cultur Eireann), which provides funding for the presentation of Irish arts internationally, and, in Philadelphia, by the Irish Immigration Center.

One treat you can hear on their CD but not in concert is Feeley’s rendition of “Carolan’s Farewell” on Joyce’s guitar, which is now owned by the Irish Tourist Board and housed in the Joyce Tower Museum since 1966. In 2012, O’Rourke helped fund the guitar’s restoration (along, he says, with a “generous donation” from New Yorker poetry editor Paul Muldoon) by UK luthier Gary Southwell.

It went from playable to barely playable, but Feeley was able to coax out the tune. “It was in very bad shape to begin with,” says Feeley. “Gary Southwell dated it to 1830, which means it was an old guitar when Joyce got it. It’s not a top guitar which you can see the way the finger board is worn down. As a guitar, it’s not particularly great, and that’s being generous, but it’s actually a sweet instrument, with a small sound. It also has a small problem. The turning pegs are irregular. They’ve worn down quite a bit so it tunes in installments.”

But, he says, that didn’t diminish the thrill of playing it. “It’s amazing,” says Feeley. “You feel you’re playing a piece of history.”

Because they’re only scheduled to play for an hour on Saturday, you also may miss the highly entertaining banter between the two men. How did they meet, I asked them.

“I had John’s first album,” said O’Rourke.

“At least he had some taste,” Feeley remarked with a glint in his eye.

“That first album was fabulous. Happily one day we met on the street and said hello,” O’Rourke continued. “What was your first album anyway?” he asked, turning to Feeley.

“It was just called ‘John Feeley,’ actually,” said Feeley, returning the gaze. “It came out in 1985. I was two years of age.”

And so, I asked, are you two friends?

“Oh no. No, no,” said Feeley, barely surpressing a laugh.

“Intermittently,” deadpanned O’Rourke. “We have a lot in common.”

“Yes,” said Feeley. “We live in the same country.”

You don’t need to be a Joyce scholar—or even a fan—to enjoy the JoyceSong concert, but a love of Irish traditional music helps. Purists may be thrilled to hear O’Rourke’s and Feeley’s rendition of “Down by the Salley Gardens”—one of Yeats’ compositions– which is historically accurate. That is, it may not be the tune you’ve heard or played—it’s been done by everyone from John McCormack to the Everly Brothers, the Clancys and Black 47. But it’s probably the one Joyce sang in his sweet though thin tenor voice.

You have a second chance to hear John Feeley this weekend. He’ll be playing classical guitar the the Settlement Music School, 416 Queen Street in Philadelphia, at 3 PM Sunday, a concert sponsored by the Philadelphia Classical Guitar Society.

June 12, 2015 by Denise Foley

How to Be Irish in Philly

How To Be Irish in Philly This Week

This is rugby.

Rugby and music—perfect together! Let’s hope so. When college teams are on PPL field in Chester, likely drawing blood, the John Byrne Band and Jamison Celtic Rock will be playing on the sidelines for what looks to be a rugby festival on Saturday.

On Sunday, there will be a beef-and-beer fundraiser at Maggie O’Neill’s in Drexel Hill between 4 and 7 PM to raise money for sending our Mary from Dungloe, Shannon Alexander, to Ireland to compete for the international crown. There will be entertainment, food, drink, raffle baskets and more.

On Thursday, it’s Irish heritage night at the Camden Riversharks, Campbell’s Field, 401 N. Delaware Avenue in Camden. The Sharks will be playing the Long Island Ducks—Sharks Vs. Ducks, doesn’t sound quite fair—and there will Irish food, beer, and dancing, including the wonderful Divine Providence Village Rainbow Irish Dancers, a group of developmentally disabled women who delight audiences everywhere. Use the code Irish when ordering tickets here.

Friday is the kickoff for the annual Montgomery county AOH Irish Festival at St. Michaels Picnic Grove in Mont Clare. It’s three days of music, great food, and fun. Proceeds go to AOH charities.

Paul Moore Band will be playing at Brittinghams, 640 Germantown Pike in Lfayette Hill, on Friday.

Next Saturday, June 6, learn to speak Irish at an immersion day at the Irish Center, 6815 Emlen Street, Philadelphia. There’s also singing, dancing, and general merrymaking, all in Irish. It only costs $50 for the day for everything. For more information, call 610-734-1450. You must register by May 30 (that’s Saturday).

On Sunday, June 7, there’s the always fun Irish Festival at Penn’s Landing, a free event that opens at 1 PM (after an 11:45 AM Mass at the Irish Memorial) and features food, drink, vendors and music provided by Blackthorn, Jamison Celtic Rock, and the Bogside Rogues. The Albert Einstein Medical Center folks will be there to do Tay-Sachs screenings for people of Irish descent. They’re doing a study to determine the incidence of Tay-Sachs, an incurable disease that affects mainly babies, in the Irish community.

May 29, 2015 by Denise Foley

Music, News

Celtic Thunder’s Emmet Cahill Leaves Them Laughing–and Crying

Emmet Cahill at the Irish Center in Philadelphia.

“Did you see Lady Gaga on the Grammies?” singer Emmet Cahill asked the audience at one point on Wednesday night at Philadelphia’s Irish Center. “Oh don’t worry,” hastily added the 24-year-old, who just recently parted ways with the supergroup, Celtic Thunder, to launch a solo career. “I’m not going to sing Lady Gaga.”

He could have. With an exquisitely and classically trained baritone voice, Cahill can pretty much sing anything—even a dry lawyer’s brief set to music—and still bring audiences to their feet and, on occasion, to tears. He could do wonders with “Bad Romance.”

The native of Mullingar, County Cavan, joined Celtic Thunder at the age of 20 and spent three years traveling around the world entertaining audiences filled with “Thunder Heads,” as their die-hard fans call themselves. If you arrived at the Irish Center at 7 PM on Wednesday, you would have been choosing a seat in the ballroom behind eight rows of them. They’d bought “meet and greet tickets” so they spent the hour before chatting and having their pictures taking with Cahill, who is warm, friendly, and funny whether he’s telling stories on stage or chatting with a roomful of strangers.

There seemed to be no rhyme or reason to his eclectic set list, which included fellow (circa early 1900s) Cavan singer John McCormick’s “Macushla;” the sentimental “When Irish Eyes Are Smiling,” and “Danny Boy;” Lionel Bart’s “Where Is Love” from “Oliver,;” and one of the most emotional versions of “A Parting Glass” ever heard.

But there was a theme—a very personal one. These were songs he grew up hearing on vinyl, played by his father Martin, a music teacher. “Where is Love,” the poignant song sung by the lonely Oliver Twist, was the first song he ever learned to sing as a boy soprano.

The Irish tunes, including “I’ll Take You Home, Kathleen,” were “some of the old Irish songs I used to listen to,” he told the audience. “Bing Crosby, Elvis, ad Johnny Cash all sang a version of ‘I’ll Take You Home, Kathleen,”’ he said. “You know it’s a great song when it can jump between genres.”

He sang an Irish folk tune called “Cavan Girl” for his grandmother who, he said, told everyone who asked, ‘So, how is Emmet getting on,’ that they could see for themselves ‘on the Tube,’” meaning YouTube.

Trained in opera and theater, he also brought the skill and emotions of both to “Bring Him Home,” the iconic ballad from “Les Mis,” in which he appeared in 2004 as a boy.

Reminiscing about his time as a child singer, he recalled a gig he did with two of his Celtic Thunder mates at a theater where he’d once performed. There were old cast photos on the wall and when he “found the little fella—I was 11 or 12 at the time—I suddenly realized I had ginormous ears,” he said to laughter. “I went to my mam and said, ‘Did I have giant ears as a child?’ She gave me a look only a mother can give, that is to say, of pity and said, ‘Well, you grew into them.’”

Accompanying Cahill was Peter Sheridan, part of a terrific opening act, with his wife, Erika, known as Monaco & Alameda. Sheridan is from Milltown, also in County Cavan and he and Cahill have an easy, George and Gracie/Stiller and Meara comedy delivery that punctuates the music.

“We go back over 20 years,” Cahill told the crowd who were clearly quickly calculating—Cahill would have been four when they met.

But, he explains, when he first really met Sheridan, as a musical director for Celtic Thunder, their first exchange went something like this:

Cahill: “Where are you from?”

Sheridan: “County Cavan.”

Cahill: “I’m from County Cavan. Who taught you to play the piano?”

Sheridan: “A piano teacher named Martin Cahill.”

Cahill: “I know a man named Martin Cahill who teaches piano. He’s my father. “

“So,” Cahill told the audience, “Peter used to be in my house getting piano lessons when I was running around in diapers.”

“If I was lucky,” retorted Sheridan.

“No need for that,” shot back Cahill.

“That’s what I said,” Sheridan said to a big laugh.

Cahill’s first solo tour will be taking him to Buffalo, Albany, Boston, Connecticut, New York City and Atlanta, Florida, Texas, Oregon, Washington, and LA, before coming to a close in early August. Some Thunder Heads will be seeing him in more than one state—they’re that dedicated.

And, he said, most of the shows end the same way. He says, “It’s that time,” and the audience in unison, cries, “Nooooooo.” But he leaves them not only with “The Parting Glass,” but with a parting gift of sorts. Before the tour, he went into the studio for two days and recorded—virtually nonstop—10 of the songs he does in the show, which is available at the merchandise table, all ready to be purchased and signed.

“That’s my thanks to you all,” said Cahill, who went on to thank the audience at least a dozen more times. And it was all heartfelt.

May 29, 2015 by Denise Foley

How to Be Irish in Philly

How To Be Irish in Philly This Week

Singer Emmet Cahill will be at the Irish Center this week.

The big event of the week is the appearance of singer Emmet Cahill who, at 24, is a three-year veteran of the Irish supergroup Celtic Thunder, at Philadelphia’s Irish Center on Wednesday, one stop on his first solo tour of the US. He promises this will be a concert for all ages—with a little comedy thrown in. He’s actually very funny. We know. We talked to him. Read our interview.

But there’s another big story—the annual Memorial Day Irish Festival on Moday at Canstatter’s Club in the Northeast, featuring Derek Warfield and the Young Wolfetones, the Sean Fleming Band, the Bogside Rogues, and the Fitzpatrick Irish dancers. Expect dance and rebel music, kids activities, great food and drink.

Also on Wednesday, The Script, a band from Dublin, will be playing The Electric Factory in Philadelphia. Frontman Danny O’Donoghue was a coach on The Voice UK Seasons 1 and 2 before leaving the show in order to focus more on the band and their 2014 tour.

On Friday, Irish country singer T.R. Dallas will appear at the Knights of Columbus Hall in Newtown Square. Wear your dancing shoes.

Looking ahead, the annual AOH Notre Dame Div.1 Irish Festival starts on June 5 and runs for three days. On June 6, there’s a full immersion course in Irish language at the Irish Center. You can learn to say more than “erin go bragh” and “slainte.” Then on June 7, it’s the free Irish Festival on Penn’s Landing, with headliners Blackthorn, Jamison, and the Bogside Rogues, plenty of vendors and food. Consider getting tested for Tay-Sachs while you’re there. Albert Einstein Medical Center is running a study to determine the prevalence of the Tay-Sachs gene among the Irish population. There have been three cases of the inherited disease, which kills babies, in the Philadelphia area, all in Irish-American families.

On May 30 and 31, the Penn Mutual Collegiate Rugby Championships take place at PPL Park in Chester. They’re going the festival route–there will be food trucks, a beer garden, and music, including Jamison Celtic Rock and The John Byrne Band.

Also, look for “Fergie’s Beach,” the pop-up beer garden next to Fergie’s Pub on Sansom Street this summer. Word is there are plans to do away with the parking lot next to the popular watering hole on Sansom Street in Philly and put up a tower (of the apartment not the castle variety). In the summer, Fergie’s owner Fergus Carey turns the lot into an outdoor eating area. We don’t know what the developers are going to call their apartment project. For now, everyone is calling it Fergie’s Tower. Might we also suggest Fawlty Towers?

Check our calendar for details on these events and more.

May 22, 2015 by Denise Foley

News, People, Photo Essays

The Irish Immigration Center Knows How to Have Fun

Siobhan Lyons, dressed for success

A few years after their mother died, Siobhan Lyons and her four siblings decided to honor her every year by celebrating her favorite poem. It’s called “Warning” by Jenny Joseph, and it starts, “When I am an old woman I shall wear purple with a red hat that doesn’t go and doesn’t suit me.”

So every year, the siblings don red hats, wear purple, and text photos to one another in their far-flung locales. “It’s a much better way to remember her than to be mopey,” says Lyons, executive director of the Irish Immigration Center of Greater Philadelphia.

Lyons is usually somewhere in the Philadelphia area with a group of seniors having lunch. Her sister is in Australia, two of her brothers are in Singapore, and one brother is in London.

“Now it’s gotten to be a competition,” said Lyons, wearing her red hat and purple dress at her senior’s Red Hat luncheon at Maggie’s on the Waterfront, part of the center’s outreach to Irish seniors in Northeast Philadelphia. The event was sponsored by Philadelphia City Councilman Bobby Henon and attended by 120 seniors, most of whom were dressed in the red-purple theme.

Lyon’s job gives her an edge in the family competition. “The first year we did it–2010–everyone showed up at the regular Wednesday Immigration Center lunch in a red hat and they did a story on it in the Irish Edition. It was hard to beat that!”

You can see photos below from Red Hat Day as well as from the Immigration Center annual picnic on Sunday, held at the Bon Air Fire Company in Havertown, where the firefighters delighted the children who attended by squirting them with the fire hose.

[flickr_set id=”72157652796252429″]

[flickr_set id=”72157652946182466″]

May 22, 2015 by Denise Foley

Music, News, People

These Kids Are More Than Alright

Haley and Dylan Richardson

When Haley Richardson was five, her mother Donna took her to a concert by Irish fiddler Kevin Burke. At the merch table were local New Jersey fiddler/harper Kathy DeAngelo and her husband, multi-instrumentalist Dennis Gormley, who founded the Next Generation musical group that nurtures local youngsters interested in Irish traditional music.

De Angelo would eventually become Haley’s fiddle teacher and Gormley would teach Haley’s older brother, Dylan, the guitar, but they didn’t know one another at the time. And boy, did DeAngelo ever not know Haley. When the five-year-old told her mother she wanted one of Burke’s “How to Play the Celtic Fiddle” DVDs, Donna Richardson recalled DeAngelo saying, ‘”Oh no, honey, those are for the big people.” Richardson laughs. “I said, ‘well, we’ll take them anyway.’”

It was the beginning of something huge. Haley used the DVD to teach herself Irish-style fiddling as her brother switched from regular guitar playing to the DADGAD tuning of Irish traditional music. They eventually became part of DeAngelo and Gormley’s Next Generation group.

Even if the New Jersey-based Richardson siblings, who just released their first album (he’s 17, she’s 12) Heart on a String, hadn’t become Irish music phenoms, they are living proof that those hours listening to Baby Einstein Mozart CDs aren’t wasted.

Haley graduated from listening to Mozart to playing him on classical violin when she was three. By 2013, at the age of 11, she was all-Ireland champion in 2013 in both under 12 solo fiddle and under 12 fiddle slow airs. She has represented the US in the All-Ireland competition (known as the Fleadh Cheoil) for the past six years. A few weeks ago, she qualified to go again this year. And she’s shared the stage with a variety of major players, including Altan, Dervish, the Chieftains, Paddy Keenan, the Tee-Totallers, Pride of New York, and the John Whelan Band.

Dylan is a multi-instrumentalist (guitar, banjo, Irish bouzouki and mandolin, largely self-taught on most of them) who, though he’s not competitive, has qualified for the All-Irelands in guitar accompaniment.

I met with them this week before the start of the Monday session at Sligo Pub in Media where they regularly play alongside fiddler Paraic Keane (and, occasionally, Paraic’s friends from The Chieftains for whom his father, Sean, is the long-time fiddler, and his uncle, James Keane, a renowned box player).

The CD is something the Richardson siblings have wanted to do for a long time. It was something that one of Haley’s mentors, accordion player John Whelan, has been wanting to do for a long time too. Whelan, himself a multi-All-Ireland winner from London, put out his first CD when he was 14.

The only thing stopping the Richardsons was Haley’s size. Or, more specifically, the size of her fiddle. “I’ve always had smaller violin sizes and they don’t sound as good on a recording,” says Haley. “I’m now using a full size fiddle so we thought it was time.”

Haley created a list of sets (“That’s all her,” Dylan concedes), many of them pieces that she learned from her teacher, Brian Conway of New York, one of the leading Irish fiddlers in the US who was taught the ornate “Sligo style” he teaches Haley from some of the legends of traditional fiddling, including Martin Wynne, Andy McGann, and Martin Mulvihill. She filled in with tunes from two of her favorite composers, Philadelphia’s Ed Reavy and Liz Carroll of Chicago. And she and Dylan wrote two pieces, “The Comet,” and “Into the Frying Pan.” Brian Conway and John Whelan can both be heard on several tracks. Whelan did the recording.

The CD has been critically acclaimed. Typical of the reviews: this one from Paul Keating, columnist for The Irish Voice: “If you weren’t aware that Haley Richardson was still a young child of 12, the maturity of her fiddle playing would give nothing away. In fact, her superb grasp of the essence of Irish music and its vast canon of beautiful melodies has already produced great wonderment at her skills and comfort both in performance and competition. I am in total awe of what she has achieved already at the highest levels at the Fleadh and on many festival and concert stages and look forward to watching her develop further into the ranks of the greatest fiddlers in Irish-American history. Her promise knows no bounds.”

The two will be giving a mini CD-release concert this Saturday at the Irish American Association of North West Jersey at 352 Richard Mine Road, Rockaway, starting at 7:30 PM.

How did a couple of kids who aren’t all that Irish get turned on to Irish music? For Dylan, it was “the liveliness” of the tunes that attracted him. For Haley? “Well, I was really young when I first heard it, but I think it was that it’s different from classical music. In Irish music there are things you can add yourself, your own twists and variations to it. You’re really free to do whatever you want.”

She’s chosen to follow the Sligo fiddle tradition with its lively bounces and rolls which, when done well, sounds almost like it’s improvised. But she still takes lessons in classical violin. “It just kind of helps with the technical stuff,” she says. “I don’t think I would have know as much about Irish music if I didn’t have a classical foundation.”

Both Haley and Dylan are home-schooled by Donna, who is a physical therapist for early intervention. Their dad, Stewart, is a retired corrections officer. Donna started homeschooling when her oldest son. Newt, was struggling in school—not because he was having a hard time learning, but was too far ahead of his classmates. “And they wondered why he was acting out,” she says dryly.

When her two youngest got hooked on music, it turned out to be a great move. “Who knew music was going to take over our lives?” she laughs. Some days she’s on the road for a couple of hours, shuttling them from lessons to sessions to concerts. But they’ve had many opportunities other kids haven’t had.

Both Haley and Dylan worked with author Kathryn Ross on an audiobook recording, Mother Chicken’s Eggs. Haley played fiddle and Dylan actually produced the recording. Now a high school junior, Dylan has his sights set on becoming a sound engineer, so he’ll already have a project on his resume when he applies to college.

Haley thinks she may have found her calling at studio2stage, an Irish music and dance show production program at Keane University in Union, NJ, where they accepted her for the band that plays for the world class Irish dancers who attend even though she doesn’t yet make the age 15 cutoff. “It was a lot of work, they had 12-hour days of rehearsals,” says Donna.

“I was not expecting to like it but I did. I think that’s what I’d like to do,” says Haley.

Given her incredible rise in the field of Irish trad music, it might happen sooner rather than later. And this time, no one is likely to tell her it’s only “for the big people.”

May 22, 2015 by Denise Foley

How to Be Irish in Philly

How To Be Irish in Philly This Week

John Byrne

Get a preview of the John Byrne Band’s new CD, due out in September, at the Tin Angel in Philadelphia on Saturday night. There are still a few tickets available but it’s close to a sellout.

On Sunday, the Delco Gaels youth Gaelic sports league is holding a series of mini games at Cardinal O’Hara High School in Springfield starting at 10 AM. The Irish Immigration Center is having a picnic starting at 2 PM at the Bon Air Fire Company in Havertown. Bring the kids—lots to do, and since it’s a picnic, lots of great food and drink.

At 5 PM on Sunday, the Donegal Association of Philadelphia is sponsoring a fundraiser to help restore St. Columba’s Church in Glenswilly, County Donegal, near Letterkenny. Former association president Mary Crossan, whose parish church it was, told us that the 1841 building is on the National Heritage list but needs thousands of dollars worth of repairs. Singer Charlie Zahm and musician Vince Gallagher will be among the performers; food is being provided by Paddy Rooney’s in Upper Darby, and there will be a Chinese auction. Cost is $20; children are free.

On Monday, RUNA is appearing at Hockessin Memorial Hall in Hockessin, Delaware.

Also on Monday, AOH Div. 39 is sponsoring a free lecture on the 1916 Easter Rising, one of the events leading up to the eventual independence of Ireland from British rule, by Dr. Ruan O’Donnell, senior lecturer in history at the University of Limerick.

On Tuesday through Thursday, the Inis Nua Theatre Company is presenting David Grieg’s two-person play, The Letter of Last Resort, at Fergie’s Pub on Sansom Street in Philadelphia. Tickets cost $15 and includes a beer, soft drink, and a choice of meat or veggie pie. The theater company, which presents contemporary plays from Ireland and the UK, recently lost its lease at the Off Broad Street Theater and will be re-homed The Drake Theater, 1512 Spruce Street, along with several other theater companies in the Philadelphia area.

On Wednesday, the Claddagh Fund, founded by Dropkick Murphy’s front man Ken Casey, is holding its second Celebrity Rock N Bowl at 30 Strikes in Stratford, NJ. The organization raises money for underfunded nonprofits serving children, veterans, and recovering substance abusers. Among the celebs you can share a lane with: Ian Laperrier and RJ Umberger of the Philadelphia Flyers; Hollis Thomas and Sean Landeta, both Eagles’ alumni; Connor Barwin of the Eagles, and Conor Casey of the Philadelphia Union, plus a host of sports broadcasters. There are still some team spots available. A group of four costs $500.

Coming up: Celtic Thunder’s Emmet Cahill will be performing at the Irish Center on May 27. This is the 24-year-old’s first solo tour after leaving the super group after three years. Buy tickets at Cahill’s Ticketleap site.

Details of these and other Irish events are on our calendar.

May 15, 2015 by Denise Foley

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