A Man Of No Importance

Musical, Play (2002)
by Terrence McNally
Based on the film A Man of No Importance (1994)
Music by Stephen Flaherty
Lyrics by Lynn Ahrens
Directed by Paul Daigneault
Speakeasy Stage Company
Boston Center for the Arts
South End, Boston
February 21 – March 22, 2025

Music Direction: Paul S. Katz; Choreography: Ilyse Robbins; Orchestrations: Bruce Coughlin; Scenic Design: Jenna McFarland Lord; Lighting Design: Karen Perlow; Sound Design: Gage Baker

With Wyatt Anton (Breton Beret), Aimee Doherty (Lily Byrne), Kerry A. Dowling (Ms. Grace), Jennifer Ellis (Mrs. Patrick), Roman Green (Peter), Meagan Lewis-Michelson (Miss Crowe), Joe LaRocca (Sully O’Hara/Reeds), Will McGarrahan (Ernie Lally/Oscar Wilde), Billy Meleady (Baldy), Dave Rabinow (Father Kenny), Rebekah Rae Robles (Adele), Keith Robinson (Robbie Fay), Eddie Shields (Alfie Byrne), Sam Minahk (Carney), Kathy St. George (Mrs. Curtin/Kitty)

Eddie Shields as Alfie in 'A Man of No Importance' — Eddie Shields as Alfie
in “A Man of No Importance”
Photo: Nile Scott Studios
Courtesy of Speakeasy Stage Company

A superb account of a bus conductor in Dublin who raises up a production of Oscar Wilde’s Salome and a lot of intense emotion along the way.

Alfie Byrne (Eddie Shields) is a bus conductor in 1960s Dublin and he loves theater. He also takes significant inspiration from Oscar Wilde (Will McGarrahan), the great Irish playwright, and seeks to mount an amateur production of Wilde’s Salome with various people whom he encounters in his busman’s life. Though the play is intense in all kinds of ways, things go along pretty well, until they don’t. Personal issues – like Alfie’s sister Lily’s (Aimee Doherty) expectation that he meet a woman and get married – come up, though it turns out that Alfie has his affections directed elsewhere. But Art with a capital A rules and somehow, despite the complications, it prevails.

Oscar Wilde wrote the original version of Salome in French in 1891.

This play with music – rather than a musical per se – works fabulously well, and this is a terrific production overall. The songs are seamless and integrated into the narrative with subtlety and ingeniousness. In more conventionally constructed musicals, narrative stops and explodes into song in more starkly contrasted ways. Here the effect is mesmerizingly integrated; the music emanates osmotically from the action and dialogue and then seems to dissolve back into it equally smoothly.

This effect is amplified considerably by the orchestra being right onstage in costume, with some of the cast seeming to play, or actually playing, along. The music is expertly done and very tight, as is everything else in this production. One notes with some wonder the universally impressive singing and the powerful and creative choreography. With much of the large cast onstage most of the time, this is quite a feat, and it comes off powerfully.

Salome by Irish playwright Oscar Wilde takes its subject from the New Testament story about the daughter of Herod Antipas, first century ruler of Galilee, whose daughter, Salome, performed a dance for which she was granted a wish. In response, and in fidelity to her mother, Herodias, who took on serious resentment towards John the Baptist who had condemned some of the near-incestuous marriages in which she had participated, Salome requested that John the Baptist be beheaded. Her wish was fulfilled.

One cannot say enough good things about Eddie Shields’ powerful and mesmerizing performance in the title role. Shields seems to bring to every role he inhabits a persuasive and condensed intensity that radiates from within, as though he is crying quietly through every line. The reverberating sorrow of his character, aligned with its embracing sense of hope, is a magical fusion. Shields carries it off with the power of a small emotional reactor – he simmers, boils, then quiets to a steady state of durable survivability. Just watching his character endure through the almost two compelling hours of this show is enough to give one catharsis pills for the entire week. It’s a workout, welcome and wonderful.

Rehearsals in London for the premiere of Salome featured Sarah Bernhardt in the title role, but the production was abandoned because the Lord Chamberlain refused the play a license because it depicted Biblical characters, apparently an offense.

As Lily, Alfie’s sister, Aimee Doherty does it spot on, serious, heartbroken, durable, a down to earth romantic waging her way in the workaday world. And the list goes on, with an array of actors who rise to the occasion at every turn. Will McGarrahan, in a variety of roles including that of Oscar Wilde, and Jennifer Ellis in the role of Mrs. Patrick, a wife and mother whose heart seeks light from an unexpected portal.

The singing throughout is expert and wonderful, with perhaps the biggest surprise coming from Shields, not distinctively known as a musical theater actor, but one whose voice is strong, lyrical and heartbreakingly touching. Others in the cast – Doherty, Ellis, McGarrahan and the great powerhouse Kathy St. George (in the roles of Mrs. Curtin and Kitty) are all seasoned musical theater stars and one certainly has come to expect top vocal accounts from them. But Shields weaves his way into this choral gift-basket and rises fully into it.

The staging is also superb, with endless comings and goings and a Noises Off (the 1982 play by Michael Frayn which has become an emblem of directorial challenges) complexity that might give some directors pause, but clearly the magnificent guidance of Speakeasy artistic director Paul Daigneault has made it all look easy. It glides and shimmers and like a fabulous puzzle all seems to fit together.

Eddie Shields as Alfie with the Cast of 'A Man of No Importance' — Eddie Shields as Alfie
with the Cast of “A Man of No Importance”
Photo: Nile Scott Studios
Courtesy of Speakeasy Stage Company

Irish accents, by the way, are almost all perfect. One or two of the actors don’t quite carry it off, but it is amazing how many of them do, and do it so well. Drop them on a street in Ireland and I don’t think they’d be found out.

Eddie Shields as Alfie, Rebekah Rae Robles as Adele in 'A Man of No Importance' — Eddie Shields as Alfie
Rebekah Rae Robles as Adele
in “A Man of No Importance”
Photo: Nile Scott Studios
Courtesy of Speakeasy Stage Company

The theme of sexuality and sexual preference is wrapped here in a testament to love, and its conveyance is both heartrending and beautiful. For those who want a little review of these dimensions or who don’t mind prior revelations, a summary of some of the highlights is below.

Oscar Wilde was married and had two sons but, as a result of a homosexual affair with poet Lord Alfred Douglas, he was put on trial for homosexuality in England in 1895.

This is Daigneault’s last effort as director while artistic director of the Speakeasy Stage, a position from which he is stepping down at the end of the season. Clearly, this show about mounting a show, and a moving tribute to the power of its effects on a community of ordinary souls, is a love letter from Daigneault to the wonderful Speakeasy Stage (which he founded in 1992) and to theater in general. Indeed, this production is a moving tribute to theater, and a wonderful swan-song of sorts, though one hopes that Daigneault will continue to direct despite his departure from other duties. This show, among many other virtues, is a testament to his magnificent career in theater.

Extra info: contains spoilers

Alfie is a closeted gay man and he is in love with Robbie (Keith Robinson), the bus driver of the bus on which he serves. In the midst of trying to mount the production of Salome, he tells his sister that he has seen a beautiful woman on the bus and she takes it and runs with it, hoping that Eddie will ask her out and get married finally. She, of course, doesn’t know he’s gay and has endless hopes to the contrary. Meanwhile, Lily is linked up with Carney (Sam Minahk) a stiff-necked guy who won’t tolerate homosexuality at all. Eddie is approached by a seeming gay seducer, Breton Beret (Wyatt Anton), whom he resists until it becomes clear that Robbie is heterosexual; Eddie finds Robbie consorting with Mrs. Patrick (Jennifer Ellis) whom Robbie loves but who is married and the mother of three. So, Eddie is crushed that he’ll never have Robbie as a lover and then accepts Breton Beret’s advances, but Beret has entrapped Alfie and brutalizes and steals from him. It turns out that the lovely young woman, Adele (Rebekah Rae Robles) – Alfie’s Salome – who surmises that Alfie’s sister, Lily (Aimee Doherty), is trying to get her lined up with Alfie, is pregnant by a lover who does not love her. Then, because of the revelation that Eddie is homosexual, the production of Salome is kicked out of the church where they are rehearsing and everything seems to fall apart. But then, in the end, it comes together, with all of the cast members returning, including some stalwart unexpected returners, and the sense of artistic community and the devotion to mutual artistic purpose is restored.

– BADMan (aka Charles Munitz)

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