With reporting by Chris La Pelusa
SUN CITY – Fun, fun, fun, and more fun! That’s what the yearly St. Patrick’s Day Celtic Club plays are.
Celtic Club members (left to right) Jack Neven, George Lipkie, and Tim Leonardo prepare for a dress rehearsal of Clarisse and the Colonel, the club’s upcoming St. Patty’s Day original production.
Sheila Gillis, who plays Bridie in this year’s play, “Clarisse and the Colonel,” and is Special Director of Publicity with the club says that is what the Celtic Club is all about: “The basis of the club is to have fun, to bring people together, just have a good time, for everyone to be friendly with one another and to feel welcome, just a good-time kind of a friendly club.”
Regina Gately of N.15 is the writer/director of “Clarisse and the Colonel” and has written the last four Celtic Club plays. This year’s play is “about my grandmother,” she says. “I’m an old lady in a nursing home, and I’m remembering my grandmother on St. Patrick’s Day and all the fun I used to have with her. And my one wish, if I could go back in time, would be spend a day with her at her business location in Denver, Colorado, that she owned with the Colonel.”
Though “Clarisse and the Colonel” is purely a work of fiction, developed from Gately’s own creativity, Gately says with a laugh, “None of it’s true. I wish it were. It’d be interesting.”
The play is the story about Clarisse, the Colonel, and the “four gals from Ireland” who dreamt that they could come to the United States but did not have the money or the means to do so.
“But one finds a way to make their dreams come true….” says Gately. “She sees an ad in the newspaper, and she writes the Colonel, my grandmother’s partner, and she thinks she’s going to work as a singer, dancer, entertainer, at a place called the Parlor House in Denver, Colorado, but what she doesn’t know is that the Parlor House is a brothel.”
With this unexpected, comical twist, Gately has set the stage for a night of fun. “The audience has to guess how I end the play,” she says. “It’s interactive. They write it down on a slip of paper and submit it, and then the winning table gets a prize.”
Presented by: The Celtic Club
When: St. Patrick’s Day, Thursday, March 17
Where: Drendel Ballroom
Tickets: $37 for dinner and show
The play is open to anyone and is only on St. Patrick’s Day. The evening will begin with dinner and a cash bar, and then the audience gets to have a lot of fun.
“I try to involve the audience,” Gately says. “We’ll talk to the audience; we’ll go off-stage and make comments to get them involved, and then we always have a song or two that we ask them to sing with us.”
Betty King, President of the Celtic Club since June and playing the role of Mistress of Ceremonies in the play, says, “It’s [the play] not real professional, just fun. This year we have music and dancing…. [It’s] Probably the best show we’ve had.”
The cost of tickets and dinner is $37.00, and the club has enjoyed sold-out performances in the past eight years.
“If you want to have a lot of fun and a few laughs,” says Gately, “and a pleasant evening with good company—crazy Irish men—come!”
