DANCERS & DRAGONS
20-year vet happy to (River)dance through life
Padraic Moyles’ life has been wrapped up in the phenomenon that is “Riverdance.”
As a youngster, he saw the original tour play Radio City Music Hall in New York.
“The first number wasn’t even over yet and I said, ‘I have to do this. I have to be in this show,’” he recalls.
A native of Dublin, Moyles has spent 20 years working on “Riverdance,” as a lead dancer and dance captain for most of that time, and for the past two years as associate director. The 20th-anniversary tour of the Irish dance show stops at the Dr. Phillips Center for the Performing Arts in Orlando this weekend.
The math doesn’t appear to add up because the 20th-anniversary tour started in 2015 — but its success has kept it on the road ever since.
“The general mindset and the culture of the company is every night is opening night,” Moyles says. “Every night is an opportunity to improve. Our main focus is to keep the passion alive.”
The first full-fledged “Riverdance” show debuted in Dublin in 1995, though Europeans had a sneak preview the year before, when a 7-minute number caught the world’s eye during the popular televised “Eurovision” pop-song contest.
For Moyles, the impact of “Riverdance” went beyond the professional.
“I’m one of over 60 couples to have met my partner in the show,” he says. He and Niamh O’Connor, who’s now a professional stylist and designer, have two children — that’s two of the more than 90 babies born through “Riverdance” romances.
There’s a reason the passion seen onstage turns
Orlando Fringe Festival favorite TJ Dawe has a bloodthirsty streak.
Turns out the writer-performer of such introspective plays as “The Slipknot” and “Burn Job” is a big fan of HBO’s sex-and-violence smorgasbord, “Game of Thrones.”
The Vancouver-based artist, 43, gets excited talking about the character Theon, a hotheaded lord who betrays his friends and endures horrific torture: “He’s pretty villainous, then he looks like he’s lost his mind, like he’s going to die, then he comes back and has a big moment in the Season 7 finale.”
Dawe pauses for breath, then adds emphatically: “See, everybody has an important part to play.”
Dawe’s latest gig finds him directing a new touring show, “Musical Thrones: A Parody of Ice and Fire.” It opens at downtown Orlando’s Dr. Phillips Center for the Performing Arts tonight for a sold-out four-day run.
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