Powered by Google
Home
Listings
Editors' Picks
News
Music
Movies
Food
Life
Arts + Books
Rec Room
Moonsigns
- - - - - - - - - - - -
Personals
Adult Personals
Classifieds
Adult Classifieds
- - - - - - - - - - - -
stuff@night
FNX Radio
Band Guide
MassWeb Printing
- - - - - - - - - - - -
About Us
Contact Us
Advertise With Us
Work For Us
Newsletter
RSS Feeds
- - - - - - - - - - - -
Webmaster
Archives



sponsored links
- - - - - - - - - - - - -
PassionShop.com
Sex Toys - Adult  DVDs - Sexy  Lingerie


   
  E-Mail This Article to a Friend

Irish tenor?
Billy Meleady turns music man
BY LIZA WEISSTUCH

Billy Meleady has played a hard-bitten coal miner lugging a pick, a drunkard wielding a slash hook, a gravedigger toting a shovel, and a lowlife ladies’ man dragging a serious debt. As he steps into his next role, that of a retired pub owner in A Man of No Importance, a co-production of Súgán Theatre Company and SpeakEasy Stage, the 2003 Elliot Norton Award winner will carry something else: a tune.

The show is based on a 1994 film that starred Albert Finney — but apart from beginning with an Eartha Kitt rendition of the Cole Porter nugget "Let’s Do It," which is intermittently reprised, the movie is a far cry from a musical. The 1964-set story centers on Alfie Byrne, a bus conductor in Dublin who reads passages of great literature to passengers as routinely as he punches their tickets. He gets grief from his working-class companions for his artistic inclinations, but that doesn’t discourage him from staging Oscar Wilde’s Salome. Neither do the fundamental objections to the incendiary playwright expressed by those who run the church Alfie is using as a theater. A Man of No Importance was adapted by Stephen Flaherty (music), Lynn Ahrens (lyrics), and Terrence McNally (book), the same trio that created the Tony-winning Ragtime. When the show premiered at Lincoln Center, in 2002, it won the Outer Critics Circle Award for Best Off Broadway Musical. But despite the creative team’s glowing credentials and the Off Broadway honor, many who know the film may find it perplexing to envision Man with a score.

Meleady, who was born in England but soon after moved to Dublin, where he grew up in the 1970s, did. "My reaction was, that’s a play? That’s a musical? It really did catch me off-guard, but I was excited to learn that. I’ve always wanted to do a musical, and the fact that it’s Dublin makes it an absolute breeze. I couldn’t have asked for any more than this: not only to have an opportunity to do a musical, but the fact that it’s [set] right at my doorstep. It’s all very, very comfortable."

You might even say the play feels like home. After all, the No. 3 bus on which Alfie works is the same one Meleady rode into town when he was growing up, so Phoenix Park, Parliament, and other landmarks mentioned in the script trigger vivid images in his mind. Perhaps that familiarity has offset the newness of being part of a full-blown musical production.

"My neighborhood was very working-class, and at the pubs Robbie [the bus driver Meleady plays] goes into, basically everybody knows everybody. They’re drinking pints, throwing darts, sing-songs are going on. That’s all typical of a Dublin pub, everybody loves to sing. McNally obviously did his research. The lines that go with the pub scenes are very typical of pubs in Dublin: everyone insists you sing the songs. Even if you can’t sing, it doesn’t matter, you have to participate."

Meleady does sing, but he doesn’t read music, which made the audition he did over the phone from Dublin a wee bit challenging. (He sang accompanied by a cast recording.) But his fondness for warbling actually set in motion his acting career. Before getting involved with Súgán, in 1994, he was playing the bodhrán (an Irish goatskin hand drum) and singing in "sessions" of traditional Irish music in Boston pubs. A musician pal’s suggestion that he "try and do a bit of theater" resulted in his launching a company that performed pub theater, a common occurrence in Ireland. So that too felt like home.

A Man of No Importance is presented by SpeakEasy Stage Company and Súgán Theatre Company October 3 through November 9 at the Boston Center for the Arts, 539 Tremont Street in the south End. Tickets are $15 to $35; call (617) 426-2787.


Issue Date: September 26 - October 2, 2003
Back to the Editor's Picks table of contents
  E-Mail This Article to a Friend
 









about the phoenix |  advertising info |  Webmaster |  work for us
Copyright © 2005 Phoenix Media/Communications Group