A puzzling success

REVIEWS: In a week that has seen the graceful demise of two ground-breaking, long-running and, on paper, absurd West End perennials, in Andrew Lloyd Webber's Cats and Starlight Express, Riverdance makes its latest triumphant return - and shows no sign of losing whatever it is that has made it so successful.

Riverdance

Odyssey Arena, Belfast

This is not churlishness, nor snobbery, for the genius of Bill Whelan, Moya Doherty and, indeed, Michael Flatley in finding the formula cannot be denied, but what makes the show so resilient is hard to identify.

Bumblebees, it is said, flout physics to fly; so Riverdance soars. Bar the original Eurovision routine (which seems curiously less multiclimactic, indeed shorter, than one remembers), there is no independently memorable music here, no Send In The Clowns.

Nor are there any compelling characters to perform such stuff, or with whom an audience can build any empathy as the narrative progresses.

And speaking of narrative . . .

This is an ensemble piece, of course, inherently bigger than any individual and, unlike its coat-tailing imitators, seemingly impregnable. But with nothing to engage the mind, it wanders. Can I be alone in forming this view?

The leads, Breandan de Gallaí and, on this occasion, Sinéad McCaffrey (deputising with honours for an injured Joanne Doyle), were, of course, tap perfect, but the obvious high points - Michael Samuels's Robesonesque vocal set piece, Yolanda Gonzalez Sobrado's flamenco interlude and the incredible New York tap-dancing showdown - are non-Irish routines in a show that is essentially, and exquisitely, an audiovisual tourism brochure for the island.

Honed to perfection, Robert Ballagh's set designs and Rupert Murray's lighting design are the new unsung heroes, while guitarist Alvert Niland plays a blinder, fiddler Máirín Fahy matches pretty well the swagger of predecessor Eileen Ivers and percussionist Noel Eccles excels as ever. It is what it is. - Colin Harper

Wendy Dwyer & Owen Lynch

Bank of Ireland Arts Centre, Dublin

Wednesday's lunchtime concert was, to use a sporting cliché, an event of two halves. Both young singers were heard to better advantage in the earlier opera excerpts than in the operetta pieces that followed. Wendy Dwyer's slightly hard-edged lyric soprano was well suited to Musetta's slow waltz from La Bohème and added a feisty dimension to Zerlina's reaction to Don Giovanni's advances in Là Ci Darem La Mano. In the more exuberant waltz from Gounod's Romeo Et Juliette, she had pitching problems in the runs, although her bravura finish was fully in tune. Indeed, all of her high-note climaxes were effective.

Owen Lynch is a warm-toned baritone with good stage presence, a distinctive vocal personality and admirable dynamic control. His throwaway opening to Figaro's Non Più Andrai graduated, after an unfortunate memory lapse, into something considerably darker and more punchy, and he injected a palpable sense of grief into Frank's outpouring of shame and despair in Puccini's Edgar.

What was missing from the operetta items was vocal charisma. Dwyer's forthright delivery of pieces from Kismet and The Merry Widow lacked charm, and Lynch's downward transpositions of Lehár's tenor music made the characters sound more like benign middle-aged gentlemen than romantically eager young suitors. The best thing in this section was the soprano's singing of On My Lips, the sexually charged confession of the sleazy heroine in Lehár's Giuditta.

The most consistently pleasing aspect of the concert was the clear articulation and strong rhythmic pointing of Deborah Kelleher's piano accompaniments. - John Allen

Jimmy Eat World

Temple Bar Music Centre, Dublin

Rock warfare, American style: charge in with all guns blazing, take no prisoners and make sure everyone knows who's number one.

Jimmy Eat World, however, are taking a more modest approach; they may have an omnivorous name, but this band from Mesa, Arizona, are just taking a nibble at Europe, starting with a small show in Dublin.

They had originally been scheduled to support Blink-182 at the Point, but when that band pulled out of its European tour, Jimmy Eat World chose to carry on and try to win some new fans to its cause.

Led by singer Jim Adkins, Jimmy Eat World trade in a mature brand of punk pop, eschewing the teenage-dirtbag ditties of their contemporaries and avoiding the nu-metal abyss that has swallowed Limp Bizkit whole.

Their current, self-titled album isn't short on hooks and tunes, coming across like a more reflective version of Weezer or a less frenetic Foo Fighters.

"Thank you for coming out to see us tonight," the ever-polite Adkins tells the capacity crowd at the Music Centre, sounding somewhat bemused that so many Irish people knew his band even existed.

When the audience proceeded to mosh and crowd-surf to Salt Sweat Sugar, however, Adkins was in no doubt that he'd found a new fan base. Some of the crowd even knew older songs such as No Sensitivity.

The real crowd-pleasers, though, were tunes like The Middle, If You Don't, Don't, Sweetness and The Authority Song, all from the current album.

Sometimes tightly coiled, sometimes loosely wound, only occasionally explosive, Jimmy Eat World are certainly hungry enough, and they're willing to work hard at it, but they probably need to chomp down a little firmer if they want to swallow the competition. - Kevin Courtney