Russell Crowe’s Indoor Garden Party
Gaiety Theatre, Dublin
★★★☆☆
The clue is in the title of the show. There’s a party atmosphere from the start, where actor Russell Crowe plays two parts: the sometimes interminably long story-telling host, and the MC who quickly introduces guests and walks to the back of the room for a breather or a snifter or both. The gig subtitle of “Featuring his band, The Gentlemen Barbers & Lorraine O’Reilly” also tells a tale. Crowe might be the name that persuades people to buy the tickets to this capacity show, but the musicians are no mere session players (several of them have played with Crowe for decades), and Co Cavan native O’Reilly is a star in the making. All this said, it’s difficult enough to determine how many people are in attendance to see Russell Crowe, the Academy Award-winning actor or to hear Russell Crowe, the singer fronting a well-seasoned rock’n’roll’n’blues’n’soul band. It is also difficult to know how many people in the audience are aware of his lengthy background in music – he was an aspiring singer some years before he was noticed for his acting from the early 1990s onwards.
“Welcome to the Taylor Swift alternative concert,” he says as he stands behind the mic, centre stage, flanked by five musicians, co-vocalist O’Reilly, and backed by three female singers. Everybody is dressed in black, suited and booted, a clear signal that Crowe isn’t prepared to part the audience from their money without giving extra added value. That value turns out to be more than a two-hour set of not just original songs and cover versions but also (sometimes) lengthy anecdotes that charm the proverbial birds from the trees.
Some stories are amusing (Italian director Bernardo Bertolucci ghosting him because the Italian football team lost a game). Some are downright odd (you’d need the patience of a saint to sit through a story about being bitten by a tarantula). Some are touching (a letter he received from Johnny Cash). Some are poignant (he tells of an Australian “bush” house he owns, which has one room containing all the “sparkly stuff” that he occasionally admits validates his worth as an actor). Some alone are worth the price of admission (the “special connection” he has with Rome, and how when, following the death of his father, he and his mother visited the Vatican only to hear with no small surprise the Swiss Guard Band strike up a version of Danny Boy, the song that had been played at his father’s funeral service).
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The stories are told without pretension, with Crowe swearing like a docker, clearly endearing himself to the audience. He is personable and sincere in his delivery, too, especially when he gets serious and/or sage-like. Neither can you fault the musicians, even if the original material rarely ventures beyond the rigours of what you’d hear from a highly experienced pub band. There are occasions, also, when you think the “garden party” element of the gig is a stretch too far – one of the special guests is Crowe’s eldest son, Charlie, who sings without great sense of conviction.
Not to worry. The gig ended with a trio of songs that had the audience up and at ‘em: a Pogues-like knees-up tune, Testify, a barnstormer of a soul/rock song, and a surprisingly strapping version of Simon and Garfunkel’s Hazy Shade of Winter. Crowe then sang a rapturously received rendition of Romeo and Juliet by Dire Straits and bucked the curfew with Cash’s Folsom Prison Blues.
Were we entertained? Some mediocre songs and a patchwork approach to performing notwithstanding, we most certainly were.
