Eden Court Theatre, Inverness, Saturday 16 August 2003

CELTICFUSION took the title of their Celtic Rock Musical entirely literally in this colourful, high-energy mish-mash of dance and musical styles. Liam Harney and his director, Kevin Patterson, threw everything but the kitchen sink into the action – Irish step dance, ballet, tap, Broadway musicals, contemporary urban dance, theatrical set pieces, and even a feature purely for the band.

If it did not produce much in the way of stylistic coherence, it was an enjoyable enough show, with some excellent dancing from Harney (a contender for Michael Flatley’s throne, but without his charisma at this point in his development) and his team of young dancers, and a powerful music score written by Ivan Drever, and performed on stage by an eight-piece band led by the Inverness-based songwriter and guitarist.

The combination of ersatz Irish with brash American energy worked well in the first half, a series of short and varied dance pieces. Harney strutted his stuff early in a virtuoso solo, and sequences like ‘Subway’ (with a wonderful percussion battle between Harney and drummer Nicki Carano), ‘Cloggin’’ or the all-girl ‘105’ all worked very well.

They were less convincing when they moved into the over-sentimental and more theatrically themed ‘Emigration’ sequence, which fell flat. The second half of the show was given over to an extended theatrical piece based on the legend of Tir na Nog. It was not entirely convincing overall either, but was lifted by some powerful set-pieces within the sequence.

It was doubtless the involvement of Ivan Drever (the company had used some of Wolfstone’s recorded music in a previous production, and commissioned Ivan for this one) which brought this show all the way from California to Inverness. This run is both its European premiere and its only UK performances.

CelticFusion runs until Friday 22 August 2003 at the Eden Court Theatre, Inverness

© George MacKay, 2003