#1
Posted: 10/20/06 at 9:08am
LOTS OF SPOILERS BELOW (I can't discuss the show without going into important plot details.)
I attended one of the first previews of The Pirate Queen, and fifteen days later came back to see what changes had been made.
It's an amazing experience to watch a great musical. The songs, dancing, drama and stagecraft blend together into an exhilarating combination. It's mesmerizing, and I feel like a silly grin has been pasted to my face. There are two 10 minute segments of Pirate Queen that do this for me. The first is in Act I, as the energetic Irish dancing of the wedding segues into Hadley Frasier's outstanding performance of "I'll Be There". The second magical segment is in Act 2, where the christening's dance is interrupted by Marcus Chait's Donal singing the truly creepy "Let A Father Stand By His Son" before British soldiers storm in. Unfortunately in both cases the show then rapidly derails, and we're left with little more than a sense of what a spectacular musical this could have been.
The cast continues to delight. Pirate Queen has made a lifelong Stephanie J. Block and Hadley Frasier fan of me. I look forward to seeing them in the future, undoubtably with better material to work with. The rest of the cast is solid, attractive and energetic, and the choral singing is as strong as I've ever heard in a show. The other design elements (sets, lighting, orchestrations etc.) are all superb. The show's pacing has been improved, and scenes now move quickly from one to another. I noticed no technical glitches. A big chunk of the funeral scene at the end of Act I is now gone. Someone has taken note of the complaints about intelligibility. Linda Balgord's Queen Elizabeth now over enunciates every syllable, and I believe some of her keys are lower. Many of the embarrassingly bad lyrics have been reworked. There are no longer the ridiculous outbursts of too many words squeezed into too few beats. One of Stephanie's solo numbers "Because I Am a Wife" has been transformed into "The Woman That I Was". Unfortunately these new lyrics don't fit smoothly into the old melody, and the audience is still subjected to lines like "Where has it been writ my life should come to sh*t." This is one of several numbers that should be scrapped. There seems to be more spoken dialogue now, and these breaks from the through sung score provide much needed exposition and`are welcome.
The scenes with Queen Elizabeth are fun in a campy sort of way and succeed in moving the story along. I do wish someone would tell the English Lords to stop hamming it up. They look silly enough in those red velvet robes and friar's hats without all the mugging.
There are a few ballads that demonstrate Claude Michel Schonberg's gift for creating sweet melodies. These include "All I Am" (Grace's prelude to "Sail To The Stars"), "If I Said I Loved You" and "Each In Time". These are pretty, but are not in the same league as the classic ballads from Les Mis and Miss Saigon. It is fun watching Stephanie and Hadley together on stage singing "If I Said I Loved You". This is one of several examples of these incredibly talented performers making a second rate song seem much better than it really is.
The rest of the show is like watching one of those old Saturday Night Live "Bad Theater" sketches. The songs sound like some sort of weird 1960s Euro Muzak. This is the sort of bland, unmemorable fluff "Martin Guerre" was chock full of. There's nothing remotely Celtic sounding about the vocal numbers, no matter how often the tin whistle and Irish fiddle chime in. The book makes little sense, especially at the end, and the characterizations make me long for the sophistication and nuance of a Disney cartoon. Smiling good natured pirates, a cheerful benevolent father and a perpetually scowling English villain. All that's missing is a singing tea kettle.
Although the lyrics have benefitted from some fine tuning this is still a weak libretto. One quibble: WOMEN DO NOT HAVE BALLS! We keep hearing that the British are going to crush Grania's "balls". Is this supposed to be clever? I think of many things when I see Stephanie up there performing, but I most certainly do not think of male genitalia. Just imagine a song about Hilary Clinton, Margaret Thatcher or any other powerful contemporary woman describing its subject as having "balls". Like so much of the book this is just silly and vulgar.
Once the christening scene is over the story lapses into incoherency. Grace is imprisoned after years of pursuit. Queen Elizabeth is then so moved by Tiernan's devotion that she agrees to a prisoner swap. (Huh?) Grace goes home and we're then subjected to "On the Sea of Life", yet another monotonous ballad. Why not just have the ushers hand out sleeping pills and blankets? The show desperately needs some energy at this point, not another long syrupy ballad. Grace sails back to England, at which point Lord Bingham says something along the lines of "At last, the Irish sow on English soil"! Um, excuse me sir, you guys just released her 10 minutes ago!
Grace and Elizabeth then have a talk and settle something. We're given no information as to what it is they settle (other than Tiernan's release), or why the Queen of England would feel motivated to negotiate with her long time nemesis, who apparently has nothing whatsoever to bargain with. No, these two women just go behind a screen, and the Lords and Ladies sing little phrases like "the children" and "as men do" while the shadows move and elevator music plays. Queen Elizabeth turns out to be an old softy, and in two hours these ladies settle everything, which I suppose explains the 400 years of peace and love between England and Ireland that followed these events. I can't find the words to describe how mediocre this scene is. It would be better writing if Grace's silhouette just poured a bucket of water on Queen Elizabeth and melted her.
The show ends with Grace and Tiernan reprising the generic Act I ballad "Here On This Night". If a musical is going to finish up by reprising a ballad, it had better be something a lot more compelling than this. At least there is some more of that splendid Irish dancing during the bows.
For those all too brief moments when this show works it is clear that Grace O'Malley's story could be turned into a truly great musical, and a big hit. The score and book are so fundamentally flawed that I strongly doubt that rewrites and fixes from the same creative team who brought us this mess will fix it anytime soon. This show needs a lot more than rewriting some lines and trimming a few scenes to avoid being a monumental flop on Broadway.
This all reminds me of "Elaborate Lives, The Legend of Aida", a show Disney mounted in Atlanta in 1998. The Elaborate Lives score was basically the same set of songs that was later used for the Chicago and Broadway productions of Aida. The staging of Elaborate Lives was built around a mechanical pyramid that automatically moved around the stage and changed into different sets. The pyramid was said to be a technological marvel, and it cost millions. It also malfunctioned constantly, at which point the show became a concert performance because there were literally no sets. The pyramid broke on press night and it broke on opening night. Disney had a great story and a strong, useable score but a totally worthless set, book and staging. At the time the buzz was that the show didn't work but had a lot of "potential". (Does that sound familiar?) Rather than bravely bringing the thing to certain disaster on Broadway that year, Disney wisely shelved it, and fired everyone but the music department and some of the cast. When Aida came to Chicago a year later with a new director, book and scenic design Disney was able to fashion a show that while not brilliant ran for several years and spawned numerous tours and overseas companies. I think that The Pirate Queen is in a similar bind as Elaborate Lives was. PQ has a great story, cast and outstanding design elements joined to a book and a large chunk of score that are of no more use than that pyramid was.
There is a hit musical ready to be born here, but this will require the producers to have the "balls" to go back to the drawing board and find a book writer and either an additional song writer or an entirely new composer who can do justice to this promising material. (I've heard that there are some talented writers in Ireland.) The alternative is to run PQ a few months on Broadway, lose countless millions of dollars and have people posting on boards like this in a few years "What ever happened to that Pirate Queen show?"
I attended one of the first previews of The Pirate Queen, and fifteen days later came back to see what changes had been made.
It's an amazing experience to watch a great musical. The songs, dancing, drama and stagecraft blend together into an exhilarating combination. It's mesmerizing, and I feel like a silly grin has been pasted to my face. There are two 10 minute segments of Pirate Queen that do this for me. The first is in Act I, as the energetic Irish dancing of the wedding segues into Hadley Frasier's outstanding performance of "I'll Be There". The second magical segment is in Act 2, where the christening's dance is interrupted by Marcus Chait's Donal singing the truly creepy "Let A Father Stand By His Son" before British soldiers storm in. Unfortunately in both cases the show then rapidly derails, and we're left with little more than a sense of what a spectacular musical this could have been.
The cast continues to delight. Pirate Queen has made a lifelong Stephanie J. Block and Hadley Frasier fan of me. I look forward to seeing them in the future, undoubtably with better material to work with. The rest of the cast is solid, attractive and energetic, and the choral singing is as strong as I've ever heard in a show. The other design elements (sets, lighting, orchestrations etc.) are all superb. The show's pacing has been improved, and scenes now move quickly from one to another. I noticed no technical glitches. A big chunk of the funeral scene at the end of Act I is now gone. Someone has taken note of the complaints about intelligibility. Linda Balgord's Queen Elizabeth now over enunciates every syllable, and I believe some of her keys are lower. Many of the embarrassingly bad lyrics have been reworked. There are no longer the ridiculous outbursts of too many words squeezed into too few beats. One of Stephanie's solo numbers "Because I Am a Wife" has been transformed into "The Woman That I Was". Unfortunately these new lyrics don't fit smoothly into the old melody, and the audience is still subjected to lines like "Where has it been writ my life should come to sh*t." This is one of several numbers that should be scrapped. There seems to be more spoken dialogue now, and these breaks from the through sung score provide much needed exposition and`are welcome.
The scenes with Queen Elizabeth are fun in a campy sort of way and succeed in moving the story along. I do wish someone would tell the English Lords to stop hamming it up. They look silly enough in those red velvet robes and friar's hats without all the mugging.
There are a few ballads that demonstrate Claude Michel Schonberg's gift for creating sweet melodies. These include "All I Am" (Grace's prelude to "Sail To The Stars"), "If I Said I Loved You" and "Each In Time". These are pretty, but are not in the same league as the classic ballads from Les Mis and Miss Saigon. It is fun watching Stephanie and Hadley together on stage singing "If I Said I Loved You". This is one of several examples of these incredibly talented performers making a second rate song seem much better than it really is.
The rest of the show is like watching one of those old Saturday Night Live "Bad Theater" sketches. The songs sound like some sort of weird 1960s Euro Muzak. This is the sort of bland, unmemorable fluff "Martin Guerre" was chock full of. There's nothing remotely Celtic sounding about the vocal numbers, no matter how often the tin whistle and Irish fiddle chime in. The book makes little sense, especially at the end, and the characterizations make me long for the sophistication and nuance of a Disney cartoon. Smiling good natured pirates, a cheerful benevolent father and a perpetually scowling English villain. All that's missing is a singing tea kettle.
Although the lyrics have benefitted from some fine tuning this is still a weak libretto. One quibble: WOMEN DO NOT HAVE BALLS! We keep hearing that the British are going to crush Grania's "balls". Is this supposed to be clever? I think of many things when I see Stephanie up there performing, but I most certainly do not think of male genitalia. Just imagine a song about Hilary Clinton, Margaret Thatcher or any other powerful contemporary woman describing its subject as having "balls". Like so much of the book this is just silly and vulgar.
Once the christening scene is over the story lapses into incoherency. Grace is imprisoned after years of pursuit. Queen Elizabeth is then so moved by Tiernan's devotion that she agrees to a prisoner swap. (Huh?) Grace goes home and we're then subjected to "On the Sea of Life", yet another monotonous ballad. Why not just have the ushers hand out sleeping pills and blankets? The show desperately needs some energy at this point, not another long syrupy ballad. Grace sails back to England, at which point Lord Bingham says something along the lines of "At last, the Irish sow on English soil"! Um, excuse me sir, you guys just released her 10 minutes ago!
Grace and Elizabeth then have a talk and settle something. We're given no information as to what it is they settle (other than Tiernan's release), or why the Queen of England would feel motivated to negotiate with her long time nemesis, who apparently has nothing whatsoever to bargain with. No, these two women just go behind a screen, and the Lords and Ladies sing little phrases like "the children" and "as men do" while the shadows move and elevator music plays. Queen Elizabeth turns out to be an old softy, and in two hours these ladies settle everything, which I suppose explains the 400 years of peace and love between England and Ireland that followed these events. I can't find the words to describe how mediocre this scene is. It would be better writing if Grace's silhouette just poured a bucket of water on Queen Elizabeth and melted her.
The show ends with Grace and Tiernan reprising the generic Act I ballad "Here On This Night". If a musical is going to finish up by reprising a ballad, it had better be something a lot more compelling than this. At least there is some more of that splendid Irish dancing during the bows.
For those all too brief moments when this show works it is clear that Grace O'Malley's story could be turned into a truly great musical, and a big hit. The score and book are so fundamentally flawed that I strongly doubt that rewrites and fixes from the same creative team who brought us this mess will fix it anytime soon. This show needs a lot more than rewriting some lines and trimming a few scenes to avoid being a monumental flop on Broadway.
This all reminds me of "Elaborate Lives, The Legend of Aida", a show Disney mounted in Atlanta in 1998. The Elaborate Lives score was basically the same set of songs that was later used for the Chicago and Broadway productions of Aida. The staging of Elaborate Lives was built around a mechanical pyramid that automatically moved around the stage and changed into different sets. The pyramid was said to be a technological marvel, and it cost millions. It also malfunctioned constantly, at which point the show became a concert performance because there were literally no sets. The pyramid broke on press night and it broke on opening night. Disney had a great story and a strong, useable score but a totally worthless set, book and staging. At the time the buzz was that the show didn't work but had a lot of "potential". (Does that sound familiar?) Rather than bravely bringing the thing to certain disaster on Broadway that year, Disney wisely shelved it, and fired everyone but the music department and some of the cast. When Aida came to Chicago a year later with a new director, book and scenic design Disney was able to fashion a show that while not brilliant ran for several years and spawned numerous tours and overseas companies. I think that The Pirate Queen is in a similar bind as Elaborate Lives was. PQ has a great story, cast and outstanding design elements joined to a book and a large chunk of score that are of no more use than that pyramid was.
There is a hit musical ready to be born here, but this will require the producers to have the "balls" to go back to the drawing board and find a book writer and either an additional song writer or an entirely new composer who can do justice to this promising material. (I've heard that there are some talented writers in Ireland.) The alternative is to run PQ a few months on Broadway, lose countless millions of dollars and have people posting on boards like this in a few years "What ever happened to that Pirate Queen show?"
"I have got to have some professional music!" - Big Edie
