Billion-Dollar Blarney?

Whelan, who had worked with the Irish rock band U2, had made a career of modernizing traditional Irish music. He credits Ireland's sympathetic tax code for artists, which kept U2 in its homeland, where the band built world-class recording studios and fed the music scene's confidence. But Irish dance lacked a similar contemporary perspective.

"Dance didn't really connect with that music," said Whelan. " 'Riverdance' brought the two together. I always considered that one of its most important achievements."

Before "Riverdance," Irish dancing had been largely confined to competitions, with women wearing tight curls and dressed in heavily patterned frocks. In this country, the children of Irish expats took it up with special gusto. The stars of the Eurovision interval were two Irish American world champions, Jean Butler and Michael Flatley, who went on to choreograph and star in "Riverdance."

Whelan says it was his idea to add a soundtrack of the footwork when the show became a full-length production. "The reason for it is simply this: If somebody knows how to technologically deliver a dance troupe of 30 people, perfectly miked and moving around with a big orchestra, I'd be interested to see how they do it.

"Believe me, it was not fishy," he continued. "It was not an attempt to fool an audience; it was an attempt to bring the intricacy of the dance right to the audience, and I think it worked. Every single dancer has recorded every single tap you hear. . . . It is simply to help out."

Individual tap dancers, in the brief segment in which a half-dozen Irish American dancers and African American hoofers square off, do wear mikes on their feet and are not part of the soundtrack.

Eileen Carson Schatz, founder of the Annapolis-based Footworks Percussive Dance Ensemble, performed in that live-tap section in 1996 in London. "The loudness was one of ['Riverdance's'] innovations, to bring acoustic music and traditional percussive dance to the level of a rock show," she said. "But there are many people in traditional music that have reservations about that because it's not live."

The dance soundtrack was controversial even within the show because there were "people who believed that you were losing some of the live art's specialness and ambiance and feeling," Carson Schatz said. She also noted that the syncing wasn't seamless: "Occasionally you'd feel like you were going crazy because a dancer would be dancing her heart out and the sounds wouldn't be completely matched."

But McColgan counters, "If we hadn't done this, Irish dance would be doing what it always did, with dancers competing in ringlet curls with heavy makeup and stiff embroidered dresses, very austere, and to a certain extent with no personality and no expression."

That's a difficult point to argue.

"You can never now separate Irish dance from 'Riverdance,' " said Eileen Ivers, the famed virtuoso of the electric fiddle, who performed for several years in the show.

In the decades before "Riverdance," Irish dance had become stodgy and decidedly uncool. "It was a bit hand-knitted in its whole aspect," said Angela Bourke, a professor of Irish language and literature at the University College Dublin. It was taught to Irish children in previous generations as a form of cultural pride, with mothers spending their Friday nights curling their daughters' hair and sewing the costumes, Bourke said. But most young students tended to give it up eventually.