What the Folk?

Happy St. Patrick's Day to everyone but Riverdance.

No matter where you go, in every city on every continent, you cannot escape the folklore show. Local people dress in costumes no one wears anymore, sing songs nobody likes, and do dances no one’s danced in a hundred years. Tourists get dragged to these shows, while locals avoid them like the plague. It’s like sitting through a school play that your kid’s NOT in.

On one Alpine tour, we saw six folklore shows and they always played the same number: Edelweiss. I used to love this song; now, I don’t want to hear it again in my next ten lifetimes. Mind you, “Edelweiss” is not even a German folk song. It was created by two Jews in New York in 1959. (Coincidentally, I was also created by two Jews in New York in 1959.) “Edelweiss” debuted in “The Sound of Music”, a heartwarming musical about a sailor who bangs a nun. It was a Tony-winning play, an Oscar-winning movie, and became the worst folklore show I ever saw. This was in Salzburg, Austria, the breath-takingly gorgeous town whose Nazis chased the Von Trapps out of Europe. Unlike the film, the Von Trapps didn’t ‘climb every mountain’ to flee the country; they just hopped on a train and got the hell out.

Salzburg mounts a folklore show called “The New Sound of Music”, which seemed to be the old Sound of Music, but with a cast that included a Filipino man and what appeared to be a Hungarian stripper. During the show, I heard a tourist ask, “Are they the real Von Trapps?”

The only good part of this Thai folklore show was the sign.

In Peru, we were subjected to a two-hour folklore show. This consisted of an elderly man, dressed as an Amazon tribesman, cavorting wildly. He was backed by a two-piece band: snare drum and whistle. Two hours of banging and tooting.

Then the dancing girls came in: eight women in skimpy tribal garb, shaking like go-go girls. Now the weird part, and folks we haven’t got to the weird part yet, is that they performed this entire show in the dark. There were lamps all over the dining room, but this troupe avoided the light like they were barn owls. This presented a problem: in the dark I couldn’t tell how old the dancing girls were. If they were 25 and I ogled them, I was a lech. If they were twelve, I was going to jail.

African dancers with the same hairdo as my wife.

Then there’s the folklore show that broke loose of its regional chains and rampaged through the world like Godzilla. I’m speaking of Riverdance, a tribute to Irish tap dancing that has been disappointing fans for thirty years. If you’ve seen ten minutes of this on TV, you’ve seen it all. They have one basic routine: tap, tap, cross your ankles, tap, tap, high kick, repeat, repeat, repeat for three decades. Everyone keeps their arms plastered to their sides, because, why try hard? Occasionally, they change costumes to convince us we’re seeing different routines. This fools no one.

Still the sound of thirty dancers tapping in unison produces the kind of deafening staccato you can’t fake. Except they do — it’s all prerecorded, distorted, and blasted at ear-splitting volume. And it’s accompanied by wailing Irish bagpipes which make the evening feel like a policeman’s funeral.

Near the end, the action suddenly cuts to Brooklyn, where three African Americans tap and breakdance. It feels vaguely racist, and spotlights how lily-white the other 33 cast members are. Still, it’s everyone’s favorite part of Riverdance because there’s no riverdancing.

If you Google the show, the top question that comes up is, “Does Riverdance have a story?” Thirty million people in 49 countries have seen this thing, and not one knows what’s going on. You get no help from the narration which introduces every dance number. It’s New Age blather capped with Irish blarney. Here are three examples where they go from ‘duh’ to ‘huh?’:

“The thorns scourge me. I have no peace by night or day. Suibne, Suibne, Sirthecháin, Sirthecháin, Suibne!”

“When I’m miles and miles apart from you I’m beside you when I think of you, A Stóirín a Grá.”

“Lady Moon hides her charms by day from her lover Brother Sun. Snorom Rof levird.”

I made up the last one, and you couldn’t tell. Read the Irish backwards.

This overproduced slab of noisy nothing has made Michael Flatley a billionaire. But this Michael flatly hated it. You can skip Riverdance. There — I just saved you a hundred bucks.

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