By Ernest Kearney — This tribute to Patrick, Tom and Liam Clancy and their musical confederate, for their most productive years Tommy Makem, is long overdue. Known collectively as the Clancy Brothers and Tommy Makem the influence of this quartet reverberated throughout the musical scene of yesterday and continues to echo today.
Arriving in time for the American folk music revival, during the early 1960’s, the group had tremendous impact on such performers as Bob Dylan and Pete Seeger. And with their popularity they opened the path to every Irish band that followed from Christy Moore to U-2.
As written by Thomas G. MacNamara, who also directs, Tommy & the Brothers is a musical review of the group beginning with the arrival in New York in 1951 of the two older brothers, Paddy (Sean Faye Cullen) and Tom (Danny Oberbeck), where they were soon appearing on and off Broadway while residing in Greenwich Village during its glory days. A few years afterward the youngest of the Clancy brothers, Liam (Dalton Maltz,) and his friend Tommy Makem (Joel Reed Mankey) joined the two older Clancy’s and the rest, as they say, was history.
Toe tapping history at that.
As produced by MacNamara and Ken O’Malley who open the show as the “American Narrator” and “Irish Narrator” respectively, Tommy and the Brothers is a full to the bursting review of the group’s musical chronicle that is guaranteed to warm the “cockles and mussels, alive, alive O” of the hearts of every Clancy fan from horizon to horizon.
It is certainly to the credit of MacNamara and O’Malley, who served double duty as the show’s musical director, that they have managed to find—or perhaps clone for all I know—a quartet of singers who not only can perform up to the band’s measure but also bear striking resemblances to the four.
For those unaware of the music of the Clancy Brothers and Tommy Makem this show will be a revelation, for older fans this show will be a resurrection.
I am aware that O’Malley and MacNamara plan a multi-city tour of this production, and I’ll be willing to bet, that in whichever cities they play, the used record stores in those towns will be seeing a significant depletion of the Clancy Brothers and Tommy Makem vinyl.
A solid, shiny GOLD MEDAL.
Tommy and the Brothers
Played During
Hollyywood Fringe Festival 2022
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