COVER STORY
Sojourning online, Brian O’Donovan and Celtic performers at your home for Christmas RICHARD DUCKET T
highlight,” O’Donovan said. Cathy Jordan will be opening the show with a song from Sligo Cathedral in the West of Ireland. Singers Mairi Campbell, Siobhan Miller and Hannah Rarity will participate from Edinburgh, Scotland, while singer Eilis Kennedy connects from her her family pub in Dingle, County Kerry. O’Donovan’s daughter Aoife, who was in
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WORCESTERMAGAZINE.COM
D E C E M B E R 10 - 16, 2020
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or the past 17 years radio personality Brian O’Donovan, the Irish-born host of Boston radio station WGBH’s popular “A Celtic Sojourn,” has gathered some of the best Celtic singers, musicians and dancers for a touring holiday show called “WGBH presents A Christmas Celtic Sojourn with Brian O’Donovan.” The show has been coming to The Hanover Theatre and Conservatory for the Performing Arts since 2008 and always to enthusiastic audiences. This year, everything was going to be different if anything was going to happen at all. O’Donovan also has a touring “St. Patrick’s Day Celtic Sojourn” show, and its March 12 date at The Hanover Theatre was canceled because of the suddenly present pandemic. “Worcester was our first cancellation,” O’Donovan said of the March tour. Only one show would be performed, at Shalin Liu Performance Center in Rockport. “We got that in. That was essentially the night the world shut down,” O’Donovan said. Looking ahead, “We thought that that was it. We knew as the summer dragged on we knew it would not be something we could commit as a live event,” he said of “A Christmas Celtic Sojourn.” And yet, O’Donovan and his musician and dancer friends felt a strong pull of “Let’s do something. Let’s not not do anything,” he said. With the connections he has made from his radio show, O’Donovan has quite an ensemble of Celtic performers for his Sojourn tours. Scottish harpist and pianist Maeve Gilchrist, assistant music director of “A Christmas Celtic Sojourn,” said, “The month simply would not be the same without the gathering of these people and the playing of this music. Early on we were just staying in touch. We all knew that we wanted to
Kavanagh’s magical memory poem “A Christmas Childhood”), storytelling and reminiscences, with O’Donovan, as usual, the genial host. Each venue where the touring show would normally be presented has a dedicated date for when the performance will be broadcast online, and O’Donovan will give a livestreamed introduction
Children dance during last year’s “Celtic Sojourn.”
Scottish harpist and pianist Maeve Gilchrist, assistant music director of “A Christmas Celtic Sojourn,” will perform in this year’s online event. SUBMITTED PHOTOS
do something. There’s been so many bleak months this year.” And so as O’Donovan put it, “We decided we are are going to try to bring some light into peoples’ homes.” The title of this year’s tour is “WGBH Presents A Christmas Celtic Sojourn ONLINE with Brian O’Donovan.” The “ONLINE,” of course, is new. The show will consist of prerecorded segments that were in
the process of being put together when O’Donovan spoke during a recent telephone interview. A “bubble band” ensemble, including Gilchrist, went into quarantine at the Shalin Liu Performance Center in Rockport to record music interweaved with performances by other musicians, singers and dancers, who joined in remotely from locations such as Ireland and Scotland. “It’s a shorter show (than in-person) but everything’s a
the show twice in the early years and is a well recognized singer-songwriter who won a Grammy this past year with her band, I’m With Her, will sing an arrangement of “I Wonder As I Wander” recorded with her husband, cellist and conductor Eric Jacobsen. Longtime “Celtic Sojourn” dancer Cara Butler will join in from Canada and several other dancers will also be featured. Besides Gilchrist, instrumentalists include musical director and multi-instrumentalist Seamus Egan, Jenna Moynihan ( fiddle), Owen Marshall (bouzouki, harmonium), Maura Shawn Scanlin ( fiddle, vocals), Conor Hearn (guitar, vocals) and Chico Huff (bass). The performance also includes poetry (O’Donovan can be counted on to read Irish poet Patrick
and talk about that particular theater. For The Hanover Theatre, showtime is 7:30 p.m. Dec. 16. “I will be talking about Worcester, our history in Worcester, our wonderful tradition in Worcester, and the challenges for The Hanover Theatre of keeping the lights on,” O’Donovan said. Other venues and dates are The VETS, Providence, at 7:30 p.m. Dec. 15; Zeiterion Theatre in New Bedford at 7:30 p.m. Dec. 17; Shalin Liu Performance Center in Rockport at 7:30 p.m. Dec. 18; Cutler Majestic Theatre in Boston at 7:30 p.m. Dec. 19; and GBH Studios in Boston at 4 p.m. Dec. 20. “Like our regular shows, we created a live show that we take from theater to theater,” O’Donovan said. “We asked what can we do to
