Imagine Moulin Rouge, meets Romeo & Juliet, but with the National Anthem played at the end…
Copper Face Jacks The Musical isn’t a musical about Copper Face Jacks.
Despite the title, the setting, and the plot, it is actually a musical about Ireland as a whole, and how when the love is strong enough, any problem can be overcome, including the “racial divide” and the skin colour and language barriers between a man from Dublin and a lady from Kerry…
Against a backdrop of Harcourt Street, and with the OST of the nightclub in question – everything from Bon Jovi’s ‘Living On A Prayer’ to Moloko’s ‘Bring It Back’ – blaring from the speakers, we meet Noleen (Roseanna Purcell), up from “Ireland’s toe” to make a name for herself in VHI HQ.
Drawn in by the Pied Piper lure of Mark McCabe’s ‘Maniac 2000’, Noleen bumps into car-clamper extraordinaire, Dublin GAA team star and Conor McGregor doppelganger Gino (Love/Hate’s Johnny Ward), and it is love at first spilled drink.
However, Gino is famously racist, fully endorsing that all culchies should be put on trains and sent back to where they come from before they take all of our jobs, and his Dublin friends (almost all of whom are Gardaí) are none too happy with their county’s biggest scorer falling with a lass from the team they’ll be facing in the All-Ireland final.
Meanwhile, Noleen’s fiance Mossy (who steals pretty much the entire show) finds out that she has fallen for a fella from the big schmoke, so he arrives to warn her that this “West English fucker” is probably just looking to get the ride and leave her with nothing but a baby and memories of their night together… a problem that becomes all too real when it turns out Gino may in fact have a few bambinos around the city already.
Clip via mcd productions
Yep, this is universal common denominator comedy when it comes to the pokes at the “races” within Ireland; everyone from Dublin is violent, sex-mad and speaks like a sped-up moped, and everyone from the county talks in lyrical poetic descriptions and has never heard of ‘the female orgasm’.
Building from these basic blocks though, show creator Paul Howard (the guy who gave us Ross O’Carroll Kelly) is able to layer on some very funny musical numbers, as well as some incredibly funny one-liners.
The entire cast is also 100% game to be making fun of every aspect of this country of ours, while also delivering a kind of love that will really only make sense to someone from here. Almost every single joke won’t make a drop of sense to anyone from abroad, but that is most likely the point: this is a comedy about the Irish, by the Irish, for the Irish.
Not everything works perfectly; there’s a huge subplot involving one of the countryside Garda wanting to come out as gay that is funny, and played brilliantly, but doesn’t really go anywhere. And there were more than a few issues where the music was playing so loudly that the dialogue was completely lost on the audience.
These are only minor quibbles against the onslaught of comedy in the musical as a whole, which legitimately had the entire Olympia up and on its feet dancing and cheering by the end.
Highly recommended.
Copper Face Jacks: The Musical runs from the Sunday 12 August. Tickets available from Ticketmaster.ie.
LISTEN: You Must Be Jokin’ with Aideen McQueen – Faith healers, Coolock craic and Gigging as Gaeilge
