2022 MAC Award Winner Rian Keating Returns to Don't Tell Mama with IN THIS TRAVELING HEART

Long regarded by the New York City cabaret community as one its most gifted storytellers, the 2022 MAC Award winner Rian Keating will bring back his childhood musical memoir, In This Traveling Heart, for three December performances at Don't Tell Mama to benefit the Golden Door Scholarship Fund.

In This Traveling Heart focuses on Keating's formative years as an "accidental immigrant" and its aftermath when at the age of nine Rian's father, with no plan in place moved his wife and four children to a poverty-stricken Ireland at the height of the Troubles.

Keating recounts his experience as a deaf and lonely nine year old "Yankee boy" in a foreign country dominated by religion and war where there are few helpers or guides with pathos and humor. The return to a small New Hampshire town in which a devoutly Catholic twelve year-old Rian, speaking with a brogue and fascinated by the Queens of England who got their heads chopped off, will only bring further complications.

How will the discount record bin at a nearby F.W. Woolworth's ameliorate young Rian's despair? What will Stephen Sondheim do the letter young Rian sends him?

Weaving together stories with songs by Noel Brazil, Leonard Cohen, Phil Coulter, Jones and Schmidt, Cole Porter, Rodgers and Hammerstein, among others, Keating " navigates the journey into unhappiness and back out again in ways substantive and eloquent." (Stephen Mosher, Broadway World).

Tanya Moberly directs with Jeff Cubeta at the piano.

The Golden Door Scholarship Fund was founded by Rian Keating in 2004 to help enable undocumented immigrant students in the New York City public school system to pursue the dream of an American College education. Primarily funded through cabaret performances and private donations, over $75,000.00 has been awarded to college-bound high school graduates.