Hoover sets stage for Irish music, dance ‘extravaganza’

The National Dance Company of Ireland has performed its Rhythm of the Dance show for more than 7 million people in 36 countries since the show debuted in 1998, and in March it’s coming to Hoover.

The Hoover Library Theatre will host the troupe on March 1-2. It’s a show that features traditional Irish music and dance and often is compared to Riverdance.

The two-hour show relives the journey of the Irish Celts through history and combines traditional Irish music with a modern-day multimedia stage show that has many costume changes. The show includes a live band, about 22 dancers and three tenor singers, according to its website.

Matina Johnson, the fine arts director at the Hoover Public Library said it’s one of the largest productions the Hoover Library Theatre has ever had and probably ever will do. “It’s going to be an extravaganza,” Johnson said.

The 250-seat Hoover Library Theater certainly is much smaller than many of the venues where Rhythm of the Dance has been performed over the years. In the early 2000s, the troupe performed to an audience of 10,000 people in Bangalore National Park in India in a benefit concert for Mother Teresa’s orphanage there.

The troupe sold out the Palais des Congres in Paris in 2003, put on a show for 5,000 people in the Acropolis in Athens, Greece, in 2004 and put on daily concerts for a week in the Kremlin Palace Theatre in Moscow in 2005.

The Rhythm of the Dance show sold out the Great Hall of the People in Tiananmen Square in Beijing and in 2011 was featured in a PBS special that was recorded both on stage in Amsterdam and on the location of some of Ireland’s most scenic areas.

Both performances in Hoover are sold out, but the Library Theatre does maintain waiting lists for any returned tickets.