JAZZ
Jason Moran's Fats Waller Dance Party
National Concert Hall, Earlsfort tce, 8pm, €32.50/€25/€20, nch.ie
Seen from a certain point of view, jazz was hijacked in the second half of the 20th century by the bourgeois intelligentsia and its role as a good time music was usurped by rock’n’roll. With his Fats Waller Dance Party, brilliant US pianist Jason Moran is stealing it back. Moran has been one of the most consistently interesting and original musicians of the contemporary US scene, always fresh and experimental, but with one eye on the rear-view mirror and the roots of the music.
THEATRE
The Taming of the Shrew
Iveagh Gardens. Ends Aug 16 7pm (Sat/Sun 3pm) Adm free thenewtheatre.com
There was once a popular English folk ballad called A Merry Jest of a Shrewd and Curst Wife Lapped in Morel's Skin for Her Good Behaviour. It is the tale of a "curst" headstrong woman who is beaten bloody by her new husband then wrapped in the salted skin of a dead horse, named Morel. Inspired by the ballad, Shakespeare's early comedy never depicts anything as brutal, but violence against women always seems to be waiting in the wings. Its early encounters between the raffish but money-grubbing Petruchio and the fiery Katherina are equal in wit and almost sexual in intensity. But, after a humiliating wedding, he will starve her, deprive her of sleep and persuade her that the moon shines in the daytime. Is it all a "Merry Jest" or plainly mental abuse? Many productions have tried to comment, correct or compensate, and now Fortune's Fool stage their "Not a Traditional" version outdoors in Dublin's Iveagh Gardens, with a spin of added sex-changes for a "post- Marriage Referendum, post- Gender Self-Designation Dublin". Happily, there's no taming some people.
