Celtic Woman Tour History

This is quite a project: a history of every single public Celtic Woman concert and DVD recording.

First, some acknowledgement. I borrowed data from the old cw-ct.com website, which had some extensive records of past Celtic Woman shows. I tried to fill in some of the gaps. I also standardized the order of names in the lineup so that I could do fancy stuff like counting the number of shows each performer and lineup was in (check out the "Counts" tab in the spreadsheet).

It's been a real challenge filling in some of the early tour dates. Also, some of the venue names have changed over the years, getting updated in some sources, but not in others. Furthermore, some places that actually listed those old tour dates aren't completely accurate (some shows were added, removed, or moved after those old lists were created).

Here's what I have so far (spreadsheet attached).

It's a work in progress and could definitely use some more eyes and researchers to fix mistakes and fill in the remaining gaps.

Please avoid circulating the spreadsheet unless you know someone that's willing to help improve the accuracy of this thing. I'd rather not have different versions of this work in progress scattered all over the place.

Added a few missing dates from the early tours, Ancient Land, and a few others.

Updated version is now attached to the head of the thread as:
Celtic Woman Tour History v3 - Work In Progress.xlsx

I'm sure there's plenty of other things to fix. It might help figure out how many shows I'm missing if we know which shows were actually #500, #1000, #1500...

Looks like show #500 was Saturday May 22, 2010, potentially (during the SftH tour):
https://archive.sltrib.com/story.php?ref=/themix/ci_15144402

If that's true, I'm missing at least 12 shows prior to that.

Made a few minor corrections in the show counts and notes. Also added Muirgen to the performers list.

Added some shows that were missing from the Voices of Angels tour.

Made a lot of additions / corrections to the 10th Anniversary Tour. Celtic Woman kindly posted how many shows they had performed so far in 2015 several times along the way. That was helpful in figuring out when I had shows missing from the spreadsheet.

Added some missing shows from SftH (still missing some) and I think I have all the shows from Emerald now.

I started doing some double-header hunting. There were quite a few double-show days for which only one show was listed/counted, so I added the second shows in double-headers I found so far.

Things got a little out of whack after the Destiny recording though. Their counts for the number of touring shows in 2015 was about 7 less than the number of shows I had listed (excluding the Destiny recording) for that time period. Either there were 7 shows that got cancelled on the UK tour, Australia tour, or the last leg of the US tour before the Symphony tour, or their own counts might have been wrong. I'm not sure which.

Help Needed

I had another go at the Celtic Woman tour history, but it's looking like there's too much missing information. There's not much more I can do with public records or Internet archives to which I have access.

If anyone can spot shows I'm missing that actually happened (rather than ones that got posted but later got rescheduled or cancelled), please point them out and I'll research it further. The early tours (2005-2008), I'm definitely missing shows, especially from 2005 and spring 2006. If anyone has a record of those shows that's more complete than the one I have, please share. Even if it's from 2005/2006 tour program, it's probably more complete than what I have. The 2007-2008 tour programs probably won't be as helpful since they were probably printed before the tour and shows (doubleheaders) were likely added after they were printed.

Otherwise, I'll probably have to ask Celtic Woman if they'd share their tour records in order to complete this project.

Early Tours

I'm missing a bunch of shows from the 2005 and 2006 tours. The old forum lists some of the shows from the original tours, but not the shows I'm missing. The Wayback Machine (web.archive.org) crawled the Celtic Woman site a bunch of times back then, but for whatever reason, it hasn't retained any useful info about the tours (just a bunch of broken images and links). I pieced together what I could from Wikis, archived cw-ct.com site, venue sites, partial tour listings from old sites, and old forums, but there are definitely many shows missing, especially from spring 2006.

A New Journey tours

I think it's likely there are shows missing from this tour. I think I have most or all of the dates they performed, but I suspect there were more double-header shows than I was able to find.

Isle of Hope

This tour is probably close to accurate. The show count with my spreadsheet lines up with the number of shows they posted they performed on the tour.

Songs from the Heart

I think I'm only missing 1 show (probably a double-header) from the 2010 Songs from the Heart tour.

I think my list from the 2011 spring tour is pretty close to accurate. My show count matches the one they posted.

Believe

I Believe (pun intended) I'm missing some double-headers from this tour. I found very few of them, so either there weren't many on this tour or they've been elusive.

Missing 80+ shows

On March 13, 2015, Celtic Woman posted that their Cleveland show was their 968th show in the US (https://www.facebook.com/photo?fbid=10153154525497838&set=a.10151938885432838). At this date in the spreadsheet, my count suggests I'm missing 81 shows by that point in their history (practically a full tour, most likely from the 2005-2008 tours).

World Tour 2013

I think my spring tour list is close to accurate. My show count matches the show count Celtic Woman posted they performed on the tour.

Emerald Tour

My show count matches Celtic Woman's for the spring tour, so my list is close to accurate.

10th Anniversary Tour

I don't know what's going on here. My count matches theirs up to the Destiny DVD recordings. After that, I somehow have 7 more shows listed than they say they actually performed. I'm not sure if some of the shows got cancelled, if CW wasn't counting some of the shows for some reason, or if one of our counts is just wrong.

Destiny Onwards

I think the shows I have listed for Destiny onwards are close to accurate. My counts for these tours all line up with the times they posted the number of shows they had performed.

Rescheduled and Cancelled Shows

Shows sometimes got cancelled or rescheduled after they were originally posted. I took that into account, removing cancelled shows and adjusting for concerts that were rescheduled. As a result, there are plenty of lists posted online in various forums, sites, and archives that don't match up exactly with the spreadsheet because those lists were posted before the tour schedules changed.

Have you tried getting in touch with any of the performers? They might know.

Updated up to the end of the Celtic Woman: Postcards from Ireland tour in Ireland.

They announced that last show was their 90th show of the tour, but I only counted 89. I think they may have miscounted or maybe accidentally counted the show in Ontario, Canada that got cancelled.

If you can see a show on the Postcards tour that I missed (that wasn't rescheduled / cancelled), let me know which one it is.

Updated to the end of the 2022 Christmas Symphony tour.

Hey CWazyTom, Congratulations on your beautiful work; I'm not sure why I didn't discover it sooner... oh my. Thank you very much for your dedication and anything you can count on us to do to help you.

Suggestion: I saw that in your spreadsheet you put the January 2014 Australia Tour as part of Emerald, but in fact these shows were part of the same production as the 2013 tour, and it ended up without a name, just as "Celtic Woman Live in Concert."

Source: https://thewest.com.au/entertainment/arts-reviews/review-celtic-woman-ng-ya-364716

Interesting. I was able to find very little about the tour name for that short, rescheduled Australia tour.

Aside from articles calling it the Australia Tour, I found this article that called it "Celtic Woman World Tour 2014"
https://hushhushbiz.com/celtic-women-world-tour-announced-for-january-2014/

I changed the tour name and numbering for the Australia tour to Celtic Woman Tour 2014 for now to separate it from the Emerald tour.

I also did a little bit of data cleanup and normalization:
- Converted the dates to actual dates. They should still look the same, but now the underlying values are actual dates instead of just text. and corrected a few resulting dates that weren't typed correctly.
- Broke the City column into two separate columns: City and State/Province. This makes the data more normalized, easier to filter, and helped identify a few typos.

An interesting fact is that the production of the Believe tour lasted for three years, from 2012–2014. In practice, it wasn't quite like that because the setlist changed drastically in 2013, and the name of the tour also changed, but the production and set design were almost the same.

One thing I'll have to go back and review at some point is the DVD recordings.

Most of the DVD recordings had more than one filming, but some of those filming were dress rehearsals (maybe a private audience, but no fan audience).

Those overlap with a kind of a gray area in terms of what a show is or isn't.

Here are my initial thoughts on this...

Are Shows:
- Shows that had a public audience that paid for tickets (ie. in a theatre, arena, etc)
- Shows that had a fan audience in attendance (paid or unpaid, may include an invited audience, including DVD recordings)

Not Shows:
- Private performances which a regular fan could not attend (ie. White House)
- Dress rehearsals (including filmings for DVD recordings) that may or may not include family members and friends, but does not include regular fans.
- Performance at an event (ie. a live performance at a televised or non-televised skating competition, Christmas tree lighting, etc). They may perform one or more songs, but not really enough songs to qualify as a show.
- Guest-performances in another show (ie. they perform a song or two at a High Kings concert)

Any other thoughts on that?

I would agree with the way you listed everything as to whether to count it as a show or not.

I think I've reached the limit on what I can piece together on my own, so I reached out to CW today to see if they'd be willing to rectify the discrepancies in my list. We'll see what happens.

Spreadsheet has been updated to the end of the spring 20th Anniversary tour.