BOY
Creative team:
Writer & Performer - Sean Kennedy
Music Director - Tom Kehoe
Stage & Lighting Designer - Hanna Bowe
Stage Manager - Caoimhe Whelan
Tech team:
John Brennan
Sue Crawford
Roisin Kavanagh
Musicians:
Clarinet - Chris Moriarty-Pearson
Violin - David Thornton
Cello - Edel O'Donnell
Show: 'BOY' by Sean Kennedy
Venue: Smock Alley Black Box
Run: September 2015
Role: Stage and Lighting Designer
"The songs act as emotional vents. When I started to learn to control my voice and focus my singing, I started listening to these songs. All of a sudden these memories and emotions started bubbling up. I felt like I was crying about things and releasing that. It was crystallizing these things in my past that could be released. These arias resonated with different moments in my life.
Feeling love is what keeps us going. It’s nourishment for our souls like food in the belly! Am I right?! And as my Granddad often said “an empty sack won’t stand”. When I sing, I leave this world. It feels like crying but it’s different. It’s like floating away but it’s rooted somewhere. And when I’m pulled back down, I’m torn from that other place and thrown into smashed cups and fists."
Sean Kennedy takes the audience by the hand and gently guides them through his
memories, in form of a storytelling performance in which he himself is the narrator.
Standing alone in a cold bare space, surrounded only my metal shelving units towering over him, we start the performance in one of his early childhood memories. Working his way forward in time, he explores the subjects of domestic violence, abandonment and what effect this had and still has not only on him but on all of his family. The storytelling is interspersed with beautiful arias and songs, chosen specifically to accompany the individual chapters of his life. After taking them to the darkest of places and confronting the audience with these serious subjects, he drops them back off where they started together in the here and now of the theatre. However, Sean Kennedy manages send the audience back into the real world on a hopeful note of love and happiness.
August 29, 2015
The Independant - Stage... Fringe benefits: shows not to miss at festival
A barista by day, a singer by night, Sean Kennedy is a beautiful boy, and a classical tenor to wit. Boy is his Fringe debut. "I tell a story about domestic violence, abandonment and loss. I sing some opera arias, they act as an emotional vent, they work as a release valve," says the boy. "It's about a selection of things that happened in my life and how I came through them. When I sing, it's like soaring through another world. It can feel like crying".
September 18, 2015
The Reviews Hub - TIGER DUBLIN FRINGE: Boy – Smock Alley Theatre, Dublin
The Black Box at Smock Alley is utilised in a perfunctory way (set/lighting by Hanna Bowe), with musicians to stage right and both upstage and stage left being walled with industrial style steel shelving. On these shelves are artefacts of life, which Kennedy uses to illustrate his tale and which reflect his experiences. His sister’s pink dressing gown. His mother’s coat. The coffee cups and percolator. Indeed, the harshness of the steel shelves oddly complements the tenderness of the story, which is a juxtaposition that is used repeatedly throughout the performance.
December 27, 2015
The Independant - 10 lessons we learned from the stage this year
This approach comes naturally to a generation raised on social media. In his anguished show Boy, tenor Sean Kennedy told a first-person tale of domestic abuse through speech and arias in an effective and beautiful musical production.
May 28, 2023
SHEmazing! - The one everyone's already talking about
When I sing, I leave this world. It feels like crying but it’s different.' So says classically-trained tenor Sean Kennedy, who is bringing his story to life through a mix of song and performance in his one-man show, boy. Using songs as 'emotional vents' to help him tell the audience his tumultuous story, Sean's show is set to be one of the stand outs of this year's Fringe. And with that in mind, you had better try and hunt down a ticket fast because they're already like gold dust.