Get Your Irish Up - St. Patrick’s Day on Saturday expected to bring in lots of green

Irish entertainment offerings are a plenty this St. Patrick's Day

Visit our St. Patrick's Day section for more news, recipes, history and "craic"

It’s a brave choice to carve out a space for poetry in a culture that much prefers prose, but the directors of the Irish Rep have made a career of defying conventions.

The unmistakable Irish notes in Durcan’s work (an impulse toward delight and an arresting melancholy) give this whole production both a lightness and seriousness of purpose. Half the pleasure of this show is realizing that it’s happening at all.

Upstairs on the Rep’s main stage, the mighty Eugene O’Neill has lost none of his power to divide critics, the public and the characters he created.

Beyond the Horizon is his Pulitzer Prize winning debut play, and it evinces every major preoccupation that marked his astonishing career -- the traps of memory, the inability to live in the moment, the gulf that can open between one’s dreams and oneself. It’s a heavy and at times lugubrious play and it makes for riveting viewing as perhaps the most provocative show in town at the moment. We recommend it without reservation.  Visit www.irishrep.org for more.

It wouldn’t be a celebration of Ireland and our national saint without music. This week there’s so many options to choose from you’ll have your work cut out.

First up is a very special performance from two members of the Irish super group Celtic Thunder.  Ryan Kelly and Neil Byrne will step out in the acknowledged home of the Irish in Yonkers, Rory Dolan’s bar and restaurant on McLean Avenue.

“I’ll be performing music off my album In Time,” Kelly says of the candlelight performance. “Neil will share songs from the Pale Blue Jak album Faces. We’ll do some Celtic Thunder tunes, and we’ll even have a few surprises for you! Afterwards we’ll take time out to chat and sign autographs as well,” he promises.

The talented pair will perform an acoustic candlelight set on Sunday, March 18, with the show starting at 7 p.m. For more information visit www.rorydolans.com

Singer and songwriter Liam O’Maonlai of the Hot House Flowers has been a star for three decades, and he’s in town this week for a series of engagements through March 19.

A master pianist and a musician’s musician, he also plays guitar, harp, tin whistle, bodhran, didgeridoo, and banjo and has recorded with some of the world’s most noted bands and musicians.

This week O’Maonlai will play St. Stephen’s Green on Jersey Shore on the March 16 and the Scratcher in New York City on March 18. For more details visit the Hot House Flowers website at hothouseflowers.com.

The Irish Arts Center has been at the forefront of innovative new ways to celebrate St. Patrick’s Day that don’t involve booze and green leprechaun hats for years now.

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Nster.com