REVIEWS

TONY CLAYTON-LEAreviews Beyoncé at the 02, Dublin while MICHAEL DERVANreviews the Loughcrew Garden Opera, Oldcastle

Beyoncé

O2

BEYONCÉ GISELLE Knowles has been a performer from about the age of 10, first with Destiny’s Child (a name inspired from a chapter in the Book of Isaiah) and then as solo act.

As a solo star she became the first African-American female artist to win ASCAP’s annual Songwriter of the Year Award.

From these facts we can glean some interesting aspects about this immensely successful singer: she has moral and religious fibre, she’s fiercely proud of her roots and she has ambition and talent to burn. Add in a strong, if not invincible sense of her worth as a woman, and you’ve got a package that knocks the competition out of its standing.

The opening night of her residency in the O2 (not forgetting two nights in Belfast’s Odyssey, the second of which is tonight) was a display of everything that’s good about arena shows.

Avoiding any notions of subtlety, the concert instead adopted the very similar tropes of the type of residency show at Las Vegas hotels (indeed, anyone who attended Tina Turner’s show at the same venue two months ago would have experienced a notable sense of déjà vu).

That said, this was extravagant if slightly over-thought (and definitely overly segmented) pop/ musical theatre entertainment, designed in part by “creative adviser” Thierry Mugler.

Featuring a nine-piece all- female backing band, plus three backing singers, The Mamas, and a quartet of abs-fab male dancers, it is a measure of Beyoncé’s presence that none of the smoke and mirrors ever once threatened to diminish just exactly who was the star of the show.

There's little doubt that Beyoncé is on top of her game.­ She began the show with an entrance in silhouette and dry ice, and banged straight into Crazy in Love. From this point on, the audience didn't budge in their devotion.

Beyoncé isn't all froth and nonsense; several important points were made (albeit broadly) throughout the two-hour show: her stance on female empowerment via a filter of Alanis Morissette's You Oughta Know(a censored version – Beyoncé knows her audience) – into her own If I Were a Boyand certain socio-political ideologies via a video backdrop of civil rights marches and Barack Obama's inauguration evening as she sang Etta James's At Last. TONY CLAYTON-LEA

• Beyoncé performs at Dublin's O2 on Wednesday and Thursday next, but both shows are sold out.

Loughcrew Garden Opera, Loughcrew Gardens, Oldcastle

Puccini — La Bohème

WHAT’S THE difference between Tesco and summer opera in Ireland? Well, at a time when Tesco has started sourcing directly from British distributors, summer opera in Ireland is turning away from British suppliers and embracing opera that’s actually home-produced.

Loughcrew Garden Opera, celebrating its 10th season this year, presented its first home- generated production, Puccini's La Bohème,for two performances last weekend.

The production, in a round tent with seating for about 400, was directed in lively style and designed by Niall Morris of Celtic Tenors fame.

The five-player ensemble (flute, clarinet, violin, cello and piano), which took some time to warm up and settle in, was conducted by David Brophy.

There were problems with the in-the-round presentation which are probably insurmountable. The audience was seated below stage level, so sightlines were an issue (especially in the cafe scene of Act II), while the lighting was at times blinding when no character was positioned to block a bright light.

But the expected problems of audibility were absent, at least from my privileged seat in the front row. The young and enthusiastic team of Bohemians – José Pazos (Rodolfo), Simon Morgan (Marcello), Brendan Collins (Schaunard) and John Molloy (Colline) – were as boisterous as the limited stage area allowed and the blending of voices in the high jinks of Act I worked with close-harmony effect, no matter which direction any of the individual singers was pointed.

This sense of vocal ensemble was the strength on which the production was founded. Pazos showed signs of stress in his big solo arias and Michelle Sheridan’s Mimì, while straight and true, was rather monochrome.

The scarlet-dressed (and sometimes partially undressed) Musetta of Claudia Boyle, presented as an even more outrageous than usual tease, was altogether more spirited.

One of the strangest features of the evening was Niall Morris’s decision to have the singers “lapse into English” from the Italian of the actual opera to suggest a “secret, encrypted Bohemian language”.

The effect, of course, was exactly the opposite, with the audience responding avidly to humorous banter in which they could suddenly understand every word.

In the end, this was a performance that amounted to more than the sum of its parts. The sense of vocal over-projection, which mars so many small-scale productions, was largely absent and the rapport between singers and listeners seemed unusually high. MICHAEL DERVAN