Don’t expect the 12th-century Norman invasion in “The Irish . . . and How They Got That Way”: The focus of Frank McCourt’s play is much narrower. A better title would be “The Irish-Americans . . . and How They Got That Way.”
This 1997 piece surveys the roughly 165 years the Irish have spent in the United States through anecdotes, recollections, news items and lots of songs. “We are the music makers,” says one of the four cast members (Gary Troy) at the top of the show — and at the end, too, in case we didn’t get it after 27 numbers.
Director Charlotte Moore and actors Terry Donnelly and Ciaran Sheehan return from the original production, and overall “The Irish” is served as well as can be by this staging. But it’s hard to shake the feeling we’re watching an educational presentation.
Things get going with the famine of the mid-1840s, when Ireland was devastated by a potato blight and its denizens left for the New World en masse. It’s followed by the fight for integration in their adopted home and the creation of a new identity.
“The Irish” is really about the making of Americans as it tracks the familiar arc of immigration: from abject poverty at home to abject poverty here, and then up the social ladder they go. After starting as servants, the Irish helped build America’s roads and canals, then made laws and kept the peace when they became politicians and cops.
Along the way, they contributed to the American songbook, from “Dixie” to “Yankee Doodle Dandy.” Throughout the show, the music expresses a sentimental nostalgia through catch-in-your-throat numbers that make you reflexively tear up.
But then, that’s par for the course: Immigrants tend to appreciate the most exaggerated traits of their old and new countries because they find them comforting. Unsurprisingly, the show concludes with U2’s “I Still Haven’t Found What I’m Looking For.”
It’s the perfect anthem for those who ponder what they’ve gained — and lost.
elisabeth.vincentelli
@nypost.com