A pleasant evening on the plains

    It could not have been a more beautiful evening on the Kansas prairie. We attended the concert by Celtic guitarist, Jerry Barlow, at the 5.4.7 Arts Center in Greensburg Saturday evening.
    A standing-room-only crowd enjoyed every minute of Barlow's polished and entertaining performance.
    I have to confess I have a little problem with a whole evening of Celtic music, particularly when it's primarily instrumental and there are no pounding batallions of flying feet and rigid arms. Those fiddle tunes all sound the same after a few bars, at least to me.
    Mr. Barlow, however, brings a broader musical perspective to his interpretation of all things Celtic. His experience as a professional songwriter in Nashville for 18 years widens his focus. He admitted that his Celtic purist friends chide him for including a Van Morrison tune, but the arrangement was excellent and he jokingly refered to the song's emergence during the drug-laden '60s by calling it his version of "acid Celtic."
    Barlow brings a charming wit to his introductions of each tune, something he undoubtedly honed while working in the show "Country Music, USA" at Opryland.

    Barlow's program included lots of ballads, which were haunting and expansive. And, of course, the jigs and marches that give Celtic music the power drive. You could look down any row of listeners and see fingers patting, toes tapping, and heads nodding. We just couldn't help ourselves.
    The revelation of the evening for me was the up-close experience of watching an accomplished instrumentalist play the guitar with a technique I've never seen before: finger-style guitar.
    The style of playing developed in the '60s when guitarists started experimenting with Celtic tunes usually played on pipes, fiddles, or drums. The style seems to rely on amplification -- some of the music is played entirely on the fret board with no picking or strumming. The notes, which can come fast and furiously, seem to be produced by tapping the string against the frets. There's an element of harp playing as well, as the strings are plucked by both hands at the same time.
    It was fascinating to watch and even more fascinating to listen to. In the hands of an accomplished and intelligently sensitive artist like Barlow, the guitar can produce an incredible range of tonal variety, sounding like a plaintive flute or whole sections of an orchestra.
    As an audience member, there's this thing that happens when all the elements of a performance come together. It's a kind of wave of positive energy that sweeps the performance to a higher level because everything is perfectly conceived and executed.
    I remember this feeling being almost overwhelming at a performance by the Royal Shakespeare Company in New York in the 1980s. The show was "Nickolas Nickleby," an adaptation of a sprawling Dickens novel. It was a huge cast on a complicated theatrical set, playing nearly 200 characters. The story was so massive that it lasted a total of nine hours. You had to get tickets either for a matinee/evening combination or on two consecutive evenings. I went for the matinee/evening.
 

    The tickets were expensive, even considering the scope of the production. All the little cafes in the theater district had signs in their windows promising to get you fed and out the door within the alloted one hour dinner break. People were encouraged to bring snacks and bottled water, and this was long before that was common.
    It's the only show I've ever seen that started with a standing ovation. That is, when the cast assembled for the start of the second part, the audience seemed to be saying "We can't wait to see the rest of the show, and we hope you have the energy to get through it."
    Still, with all those resources so generously on display, the magic of the evening came down to one actor. Roger Rees, who had just spent the better part of nine hours acting his heart out, stepped to the edge of the stage to narrate the conclusion. The staging was perfect, the music was perfect, the whole cast slowly appeared behind him, the story was powerful, and there was a palpable sense of a few hundred of us having shared a unique experience.
    There's that wave of "perfectness."
    I often felt that wave during rehearsals at the Depot, when an actor connected with the moment in a perfect way -- realizing for the first time what the scene was really about, or nailing the timing of a comic bit.
    I have also felt that wave during a particular performance, when the cast was all on the same wavelength or a singer found the right interpretation of a phrase. That's what I like about playing for gifted singers -- I am experiencing their performance as it happens, just like the audience.
    You might not think that an evening of Celtic instrumental music would be a likely candidate for the wave. You would be wrong. Clearly, the combination of well-chosen music expertly performed, with an entertaining patter and the Kansas prairie out the wall of windows -- that's an art form at its best.
    And the tickets were only $3.
    We should stop saying there's nothing to do around here.