WEST End star, Aoife Mulholland packed the Town Hall Theatre for four nights running with her first show, Sway – not bad for a young Salthill woman who used to sing jazz on Tuesday nights in the Cellar Bar.

She has played in the West End, in the Royal Albert Hall and performed on live television for weeks on end during her stint on the BBC reality TV series, How do you solve a problem like Maria? but apparently it’s still hard to perform on your own home turf.

Yet, Aoife was anxious to do this as soon as she could and there’s no doubt that she might make this an annual or a biannual event to keep her Galway fans abreast of her expanding musical career.

Running from Thursday to Sunday, it was quite a stylized show which revolved around her musical life from performing with the Performing Arts School Galway to taking off to London to do a Masters in Acting Musical Theatre in the Central School of Speech and Drama, to finally getting to play two leads in two West End hit musicals.

So the songs were sung chronologically, starting off with a personal favourite Caledonia, which is probably far removed from the West End musical scene to going through a few songs from Annie Get
Your Gun, the last show she performed in with the Galway Musical Society before she left for London.

It was lovely to hear her story, though it is still in its infancy, and even better to hear and see her perform numbers from Chicago, The Sound of Music and Chess. In fact, the duets with Morgan Crawford, an award winning performer who has performed on five continents, from the show, Chicago, were brilliant as Morgan has actually played the lawyer’s role in a former West End production.

Aoife was also accompanied by...