Finian’s Rainbow (Irish Rep)
Opening Night: November 6, 2016
Closing: December 18, 2016
Theater: Irish Repertory Theatre
Irish Rep’s homecoming season begins with our most popular — and in this volatile election season, especially timely — musical, Finian’s Rainbow. Our most loved musical returns to the Irish Rep stage this fall, twelve years after it was first revived to great acclaim. Tony-nominee Melissa Errico will reprise her celebrated performance as “Sharon” as we start our homecoming season in true Irish style! The groundbreaking 1947 musical follows an Irishman who steals a feisty leprechaun’s pot of gold and escapes with his daughter, Sharon, to Missitucky, a mythical region, part of the Jim Crow South. The daughter and the sprite each find romance with others, but also encounter bigotry, economic disparity and cultural injustice.
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November 6, 2016
Though Og the leprechaun doesn’t look a day over 25, no one in the audience at the Irish Repertory Theater gasps when he confesses he’s 459 years old. But there might be some murmurs of incredulity should the sweet colleen he’s been duetting with step forward to declare she’s a 46-year-old mother of three who first played this part on this stage in 2004. I’m referring to the sterling-voiced Broadway actress Melissa Errico, who stars in the big-hearted, small-scale production of “Finian’s Rainbow” that opened on Sunday night in an adaptation by its director, Charlotte Moore. (Og is portrayed, quite enchantingly, by Mark Evans, who, by the way, is 31.) Normally, I wouldn’t be so ungallant as to dwell on a performer’s age. But since Ms. Errico recently wrote an essay for The New York Times in which she wondered if she’d passed her sell-by date as an ingénue, it is she who has placed that particular elephant in the room. Happily, the elephant is invisible.
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