‘Riverdance’: Irish Culture on the Hoof

On stage at the Pantages Theatre, the “Riverdance” chorus is singing an Irish-immigrant prayer for freedom--”How they hunger for liberty, feel their hatred of poverty”--every note pure, every word strangely uninflected, as if the voices are computer simulations detailing a bank balance. Soon afterward, we’ll see flamenco soloist Maria Pages, who does just about everything here except bother to dance from the heart. And, a little later, there’ll be duets revealing the fatal lack of chemistry between the virtuosic stars of the production, Jean Butler and Colin Dunne.

Nearly two years after “Riverdance--The Show” developed from a seven-minute television showpiece into a full-scale commercial phenomenon in Dublin, London and New York, this compendium of Irish music and dance has arrived in Los Angeles for a sold-out 21-day engagement. Hyper-intimidating in attack but hollow at the core, it often proves downright painful because of the deafening, disembodied stadium-style sound processing that obliterates the dancers’ step-rhythms and swamps the very few moments of human feeling allowed--a tender farewell duet by Katie McMahon and Morgan Crowley, for instance.

Although it finds room for tap, flamenco and even Russian-style folk stunts, the show focuses on Irish culture from prehistory through the diaspora and beyond, reshaped by Bill Whelan’s decently crafted but scarcely eloquent fusion score and the bardic double-talk of Theo Dorgan (“I was the land and the land was me”). Robert Ballagh’s unit set uses picturesque slabs to create triangular portals on both sides of a central staircase, with large slide-screens providing environmental specifics and plenty of moonscapes behind the dancing.

Seated in an alcove on the left of the auditorium, the orchestra has been so monstrously over-amplified that it’s easy to ignore how fine the playing is, just as it’s tempting to undervalue the excellence of the corps dancers simply because they’re relentlessly flung in the teeth of the audience in hard-sell unison routines so utterly soulless that they might have been culled from some fascism-on-the-march documentary of the 1930s. The prevalent idiom is Irish step-dancing (sometimes percussive in heels, elsewhere buoyant in soft slippers), but only the long-limbed Butler is allowed to show us its grace, wit and charm at human scale, free of the clenched aggression imposed on her colleagues.

Dunne’s best dancing comes in fabulously intricate solos and, especially, exciting cross-generic playoffs with the powerful, acrobatic tapper Tarik Winston (“Trading Taps”) and the gutsy flamenco diva Pages (“Heartbeat of the World”). In these moments, “Riverdance” suddenly becomes lit from within, from relationships between techniques, from dancer intelligence and inspiration, from opportunities to take proven prowess into, literally, new worlds.

Pages finds other such moments in a joyous duet with violinist Eileen Ivers and there are even passages here and there when the orchestra falls silent, the unaccompanied footwork pounds its way to glory and “Riverdance” justifies its own hype--most notably in the galvanic “Thunderstorm” section for Pat Roddy and 10 other men, choreographed by Michael Flatley, the original male star of the show. Moreover, bass-baritone Ivan Thomas, bagpiper Brian O’Brien, tap dance kid Daniel B. Wooten Jr. and others periodically enrich the evening.

Get it while you can. Director John McColgan leaves nothing to chance and for every distinctive artist performing at human scale, he’ll send faceless horde upon faceless horde stomping down that damn staircase all the way to the footlights, with the orchestra volume pumped up high enough to crack the Blarney Stone. The result is an event that constantly strains for epic stature, inflicts technological overkill on 80 performers more than capable of carrying 2 1/2 hours unplugged--and ends up turning Irish culture into processed cheese.

* “Riverdance” runs through Dec. 1: Tues.-Fri., 8 p.m.; Sat., 2 and 8 p.m.; Sun., 2 and 7 p.m. Pantages Theatre, 6233 Hollywood Blvd. (213) 365-3555. Tickets: $46-$66. All performances sold out.