Immigrant Songs

Immigrant Songs
A fine kettle of all nations, steaming like relations

by Don Allred

April 28th, 2006 4:08 PM Issue 18

Mick Moloney
McNally’s Row of Flats
Compass

Mick Moloney enters McNally's Row of Flats with a tip o' the top hat to
politician-landlord Timothy McNally, "beloved" of his tenants. Then

hurrah for them all, fresh off the boat: "And it's Ireland and Italy, Jerusalem
and Germany, Chinese and Africans (originally ‘Negars'), and a paradise for
rats. All jumbled up together, in the snow and rainy weather." A familiar
NY sight in 1882, as described by Ned Harrigan, then at the peak of his fam

e as innovative playwright, songwriter, actor, director, and designer. Harrigan keeps
stepping briskly, past "hungry cats, lyin' on the benches, dyin' there by
inches, from the open ventilation," not just for irony's sake:

 he's doing his best to keep up. 

 On Harrigan's scripted street maps

---way back in the archives at best, traced by scholars---

quick-change artists trade ethnic and class gibes and japes: something to offend everyone---so 

get ready to take a joke as well as the next fellow, Mr. Alderman Landlord SAH!

Third-generation, scrupulously secular Irish American Harrigan's  

tirelessly telescopic observations, in the selective service of handy clamor 

(and sweet, discreet changes of pace), 

can seem further filtered via veteran performer-Professor Moloney's 

tunefully alert, down-to-earth clarity, far from the big stage.

But these songs, unmistakably parading periodically unfurled thoughts and
feelings of figures rolling through them, have plenty of potential still.
Mick Moloney plays CUNY Graduate Center and Bowery Poetry Club May 6.