Ciarán Olohan on travelling around Australia as an Irish musician
Some people after visiting Australia simply can’t stop themselves from coming back time and time again.
So it is for Irish performer Ciarán Olohan, who tells Streets of Your Town podcast how he is bringing his World of Musicals in Concert show back to Australia for the fourth time.
“We’ve been very lucky to be coming back to Australia now over the last number of years,” Ciarán says. “We first brought the show down here in 2017, then we returned in ’21 and ’22 and now we’re back again. So this is my fourth time in Australia with the show.
“And to be honest, I love touring here. I love working here.
“The live performance theatre scene in Australia is so vibrant. The standard and quality is so good everywhere you go. So it’s lovely to be part of that and to be touring around this amazing country and seeing every corner of it. It’s wonderful.”
And he’s not just taking The World of Musicals in Concert on the well worn route to the capital cities. Ciarán and his crew have performed the best songs of Broadway and West End on stages across the globe, and now to some of Australia’s most off the beaten track locations as well.
When I suggest to Ciarán that we may have to make him an honorary Australian for doing “the big lap” around Australia, he’s quite taken aback.
“To be honest, a lap around of Australia is very different to doing a lap of Ireland because I think we could make it around Ireland in about six hours,” he laughs.
“It’s great to perform in the bigger cities in Australia, but it’s just as lovely performing in the regional areas of Australia. And as you say, sometimes a lot of these places wouldn't get the variety of shows that will come through bigger places.
“We meet audiences after the show. We go out and we kind of say goodnight and thanks for coming and get to chat to audiences. And especially in places in regional Australia, everyone’s really lovely, very supportive, very welcoming, very chatty. So it just adds to the whole experience of the whole night.”
Ciarán tells Streets of Your Town how music has always been a part of his life from his childhood in County Wicklow to today with a career taking him around the world to the US, Canada, Germany, Norway, Spain and China.
“I’ve had lots of opportunity to work all over the world, which I’m very grateful for. I did come from a very musical background. My grandmother was an opera singer, my grandfather was an actor and a comedian. My mother is a classical singer. My father’s a folk musician. So I’ve really been lucky to grow up with so many facets of so many genres in music.”
He’s appreciating more each visit the strong bond and cultural ties between Australia and Ireland that are expressed through song.
“I know Ireland being such a small country, it always baffles me that no matter where you go in the world, you’ll always find someone who goes, ‘oh, my grandmother was Irish’, or ‘I lived in Ireland for a time’.
“And for such a vast, a vast, wonderful country that has so much more to us than a tiny island like Ireland, it’s amazing to see the rich Irish heritage here.
“Think of a song like the Wild Rover about an Irish immigrant going over to Australia in the gold rush and being one of the only Irish people to come back with actual money in his pockets.
“And even most recently, just as ANZAC Day was coming up, myself and my brother were in the show. We kind of did something a little different and we performed The Band Played Waltzing Matilda in the show, and we’ve always loved that song. We’ve always loved the story of it, the history of it, and it’s something that I really do feel links to Irish music and Australian music.
“When it integrates into another culture and you see something unique blossoming from that integration…looking at legends like Slim Dusty and stuff like that over here with his music, his stories, his songs, and you can kind of see maybe a little bit of Irish storytelling coming in there, but in a very Australian way. So yeah, it’s magic. It’s kind of magic to watch.”