Last Sunday, around 700 folks turned out for a matinee billed as Mick Moloney’s Irish American Music and Dance Festival, which for many of us looked an awful lot like the Green Fields of America tours he organized and ran for over 20 years. 

In a show co-hosted with the Irish American Cultural Institute at the Community Theatre in Morristown, New Jersey, we saw the Green Fields veterans Mick Moloney and Robbie O’Connell, who were joined by Billy McComiskey on accordion, Ivan Goff on pipes, flute and whistle and Dana Lyn on fiddle as well as dancers from the Donny Golden School of Dance.

Moloney and O’Connell are true professionals whose approach to entertaining audiences — particularly new audiences who might not have seen them over the years outside the hardcore traditional scene — is to be as fresh and informative as possible while delivering old chestnuts like “The Winning Side” and “Green Grows the Laurel.”

Both were in great form with Moloney’s history lessons all added value in setting up their songs. For example, one of the more charming aspects of the concert was the delivery of a personalized Christmas Card from an audience member with the request for “Miss Fogarty’s Christmas Cake” one of Moloney’s old-time staples. 

Few artists could more masterfully — and credibly — then detail how he got the humorous song from Eileen McNulty in nearby Hoboken and proceed into the lore about the vaudeville days of the McNulty family. 

O’Connell’s solo effort beginning the second half of John McCutcheon’s poignant Christmas anti-war song “Christmas in the Trenches,” based on a World War I true story, and his own achingly beautiful song “Islander’s Lament,” inspired by the loneliness of the Blasket Islands. Their harmonies and stagecraft were spot on and based on their mutual admiration for their skills.

McComiskey, Goff and Lyn proved to be formidable stage mates as well with an impressive and expressive delivery of the jigs, reels, hornpipes and slow airs from their repertoire. Goff’s rendering of the slow air “Port na bPucai” (Song of the Fairies) on the uilleann pipes was particularly noteworthy. 

This trio stood out when playing for the dancers, in particular McComiskey, who studied dance himself, by providing crisp clear tempos that complimented the fine stepdancing this night. Dancers Joe Dwyer, Joe Saleski, Melanie Deegan and Ciara Greene gave a riveting display for the jigs, reels and hornpipes that we have come to expect from students of Donny Golden, an old Green Fields pioneer now center stage with the Chieftains in America. 

Dwyer’s “Three Sea Captains” and Saleski’s “Downfall of Paris” were enhanced by McComiskey’s playing (a Brooklyn neighbor of Golden’s) while Deegan and Greene’s slip jigs were flawless and graceful under the uplifting music of Lyn, Goff and McComiskey.

The audience was well entertained and appreciative throughout the show though oddly at the end seemed in a rush to depart and a well-deserved encore was not happening. Perhaps it is a good thing to leave them wanting more for another time.