At New York Theatre Workshop, 'Once,' falling slowly into a musical

NEW YORK -  Anyone who caught the Irish guy Glen Hansard and the Czech girl Marketa Irglova playing their gorgeous song "Falling Slowly" on the Academy Awards telecast has a sense of both the strength and fragility of "Once," the haunting, 2006 independent movie drawn from their unlikely story of love on the streets of Dublin. Even at the epicenter of bejeweled commercial hype, this pair seemed curiously untouched, remarkably ordinary and wholly able to sing of the pain and necessity of falling down quietly, but also being able to help someone to get back up.

Chris Jones

December 13, 2011