The latest in NYT about the Pirate Queen:

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/04/22/theater/22robe.html

April 22, 2007
Theater

A Royal Behemoth Stumbles to Broadway

By CAMPBELL ROBERTSON

FOUR days before “The Pirate Queen” opened on Broadway, Alain Boublil and Claude-Michel Schönberg, the incredibly successful songwriting team, and John McColgan and Moya Doherty, the incredibly successful producing team, were sitting in a room at the Hilton Theater talking about Chicago.

It was there, during those “dark days,” as Ms. Doherty said, that they discovered that their $16 million baby was going to need a serious course correction.

“A big show like this is like a big cruise boat with thousands of people on board,” Mr. Schönberg said in a heavy French accent. “You don’t go right, left, right like a very little boat.”

“You remember,” he added, “when they saw the iceberg, they tried to turn, but because of the inertia of the boat it was too late.”

Ms. Doherty jumped in with her Irish accent: “And you know what they say about the ship that was built in Belfast by Harland & Wolff: There was nothing wrong with it when it left Belfast.”

There was a sprinkling of laughter in the room as the implication of this metaphor set in. Then Mr. McColgan said dryly: “O.K., don’t mention the Titanic.”

It’s too early to tell whether “The Pirate Queen,” which opened on Broadway to a barrage of dismissive reviews on April 5 at the Hilton, will sink or steam ahead despite the nasty reception by New York critics. (The show’s weekly gross, production officials quickly point out, grew even after the reviews.) But the metaphor is still a tempting one, if only for what the show promised.

In a Broadway landscape currently filled with plays and boutique musicals “The Pirate Queen” is a behemoth: large scale, ambitious and one of the most expensive shows of the season, if not the most expensive. It has involved some of Broadway’s top talent, both the artists with it from the start and those brought in during an all-hands-on-deck overhaul after its disappointing debut in Chicago. And in interviews before and after the Broadway debut the producers and creative team said “The Pirate Queen” is the show they had envisioned from the start, even if getting it to that point was a struggle.

So how did a show of this size and scope, and with this pedigree, end up running headlong into some of the worst reviews of the season?

Well, there was nothing wrong with it, so to speak, when it left Belfast.

After producing “Riverdance,” which went from being a seven-minute interval act for a televised song contest in 1994 to grossing $1 billion worldwide, Mr. McColgan and Ms. Doherty, an affable married couple, began toying with the idea of a musical based on the life of Grace O’Malley, a legendary Irish clan leader who faced down Queen Elizabeth I.

It had all the elements — bad guys, swordfights, love affairs and a strong heroine — and it was a show that would be filled with Irish music and dancing, a kind of production they had done before, rather fruitfully.

True, they had never produced a book musical, but they were no mere Wall Street dabblers; she is an owner of one of Ireland’s largest independent television stations and sits on the board of the Dublin Theater Festival; he has directed a production for the esteemed Abbey Theater in Dublin and directed the full stage version of “Riverdance,” which played on Broadway.

About five years ago they sent a letter of introduction to their favorite musical songwriting team: Mr. Boublil and Mr. Schönberg, the creators of the mega-mega-hits “Les Misérables” and “Miss Saigon.” This was their kind of show, a big, pop-operatic, large-gestured, leather-breeches kind of show, a genre that put down serious roots on Broadway in the 1980s and early ’90s but, while a couple of those shows are still running, has not been heard of much since.

Mr. Boublil (who had been working on a novel) and Mr. Schönberg (who had, “as usual,” been revising their 1996 disappointment, “Martin Guerre”) had never written a show on a topic that was given to them, and they were only vaguely aware of “Riverdance.” So they asked for six months to decide. By the end of that period they had a draft of the first act.

Given the scale of this show Ms. Doherty and Mr. McColgan had initially considered performing it in a giant mobile tent, then thought about opening in Dublin, then London, and finally settled on Broadway, with a Chicago tryout.

As the songwriters continued to work, the producers began assembling a serious Broadway team. Eugene Lee joined early as set designer, and after Mr. McColgan decided not to direct the show himself, Mr. Lee recommended the Tony Award-winning director Frank Galati, with whom he had worked on “Ragtime.”

Most of 2006 was filled with the usual auditions, rehearsals, rewriting, set building and costume making. For a few people involved with the production there was even a trip to western Ireland.

On Oct. 2, after a long period of tech rehearsal, the actors finally took the stage of the 2,344-seat Cadillac Palace Theater in Chicago for the last dress rehearsal. Suddenly there it was, fully realized onstage with its 42-member cast and extravagant sets and costumes. And? “The question I asked myself,” Ms. Doherty said, “was, ‘Where did the power of that music go?’ I knew it was there, but we had lost touch with it.”

Something was off, everybody agreed. Nobody expected perfection at that point, but this wasn’t the musical they had been working on.

“You’re in a rehearsal room, right in there with the hearts and souls of the actors; you see the whites of their eyes,” Ms. Doherty said. “Then it goes up on the stage to do technical rehearsal, and there’s a period of three weeks for a show like this, and you lose touch entirely. The show vanishes for a while, it disappears, and it re-emerges one day before your audience is coming in. And then,” she said, making a face of pained disappointment, “you go, ‘Oh.’ ”

Later, audience members would clarify some of the shortcomings in the story, overheard in the lobby asking what was happening in a particular scene or why the main character had done this or that. Critics would echo their concerns, with The Chicago Tribune calling it “far from ship-shape,” though several reviews said it was salvageable with a substantial reworking.

Richard Maltby Jr. had worked with Mr. Boublil and Mr. Schönberg on “Miss Saigon” and came to opening night in Chicago, not, he insisted, at an invitation to be a show doctor, but as a curious acquaintance who happened to be in town. Minutes into the musical, he said, he recognized the disease and had his diagnosis.

“With most shows it’s very hard to define what the problem is,” Mr. Maltby said in an interview. “In this case it was like I was reading an X-ray.”

At the loud, crowded opening-night party at Union Station in Chicago Mr. Boublil asked Mr. Maltby what he thought. If it’s opening night in New York, the adage goes, you lie your head off; out of town you stick to cold truth. Mr. Maltby began, but realized the analysis was too involved to discuss at a party. The next day he faxed an 11-page memo to Mr. Boublil at his hotel.

“Seems like old times, writing another one of these,” Mr. Maltby’s memo began. He went on to give a rundown of the problems with the show’s storytelling: too much explaining and not enough action; not enough historical context; the dramatic tension that should be present in this or that scene isn’t there. “I for some reason feel a personal stake in having this show be a success,” Mr. Maltby wrote in his conclusion, “partly because I’m fond of you and Claude-Michel, but it’s even more because I think that you have a really great musical here, potentially, if it can just be unlocked and released.”

A letter like that is all but an invitation to be brought on to the creative team, which is exactly what happened, after the usual salary negotiations. But while everyone had decided that the storytelling was unclear, it wasn’t the only problem. The staging was also flawed.

Whose fault was that? Hard to say. But the day after the disappointing Chicago opening Mr. Galati asked the producers to bring in Graciela Daniele to rework the musical staging. When Mr. Galati directed “Ragtime,” he had worked closely with Ms. Daniele, and had wanted to work with her when he joined “The Pirate Queen” in the first place, but Mark Dendy was already the show’s lead choreographer.

If Ms. Daniele were to take charge — as was the plan — the team would need to make room, and though much of his choreography remains, Mr. Dendy left two weeks after the Chicago opening.

All of this cost money of course in additional creative fees, rehearsal fees and union fees. “There was no way around that,” Mr. McColgan said. But it could have been worse; the well-reviewed cast stayed, and there were no huge changes to the set.

Everyone went to work. After the Chicago run ended in November, Mr. Maltby holed up at Mr. Boublil’s mansion in London, where they worked on the score. One song was added. Another song was dropped. The beginning was completely changed. The Irish dancing segments were expanded. (The producers had initially insisted on keeping the Irish dancing to a minimum, to put off the perception that this was “Riverdance II.”)

Changes to the production continued during the long, sleepless weeks of rehearsals and previews in New York. Even tweaks have a way of adding up; $20,000 was spent to make a burning funeral pyre look more convincing. Acoustic alterations were made to the stage so the Irish dancing sounded just right.

“That was one gigantic and expensive adjustment, and it took weeks,” Mr. Galati said in a telephone interview from Chicago after the Broadway opening.

As always when a show is being heavily reworked, predictions of doom were making the rounds in Broadway circles. The whispering picked up when Stephanie J. Block, the pirate queen herself, whose robust voice carries much of the show, came down with a bad case of the flu, forcing her to miss several previews and even leave the show a quarter of the way through a critics’ night.

But in the days leading up to the opening, several members of the production said there was a sense that perhaps the creative team had finally gotten it right. This show was going to run.

Then the critics weighed in.

“ ‘Pirate’ Should Walk the Plank,” blared the headline in The Journal News of Westchester. Ben Brantley, writing in The New York Times, said the show often looked like “the aimless milling of a crowd on a carnival midway.” In the end much of the criticism was aimed not at the story, but at the score. Clive Barnes, in The New York Post, called it “repetitive and self-congratulatory,” with “banal lyrics.”

Mr. McColgan and Ms. Doherty, in a phone interview after the opening, said they thought the reviews were aimed more at the genre than at the show itself, coming from, Mr. McColgan said, “a consensus that the big musical that the people identified with the ’80s was no longer fashionable.”

But Chris Jones, the critic for The Tribune who had been negative but encouraging in his review of the show in Chicago, saw it again in New York and said big problems remained. The story was much clearer, he said in his Broadway review, but the show had “acquired a frenetic — at times even panicked — sensibility that was not in evidence in Chicago.”

“That’s what happens when actors, directors and choreographers start to worry that their ship is going down,” he added.

A critical broadside like that does not necessarily sink a show. “Jekyll & Hyde” was widely slammed when it opened on Broadway in 1997 but ended up running for more than three and half years there (though it didn’t recoup its initial investment and played in a much smaller theater). But that’s a very rare instance.

The producers of “The Pirate Queen” said they had no plans to close, confident that marketing and word-of-mouth would keep the show afloat. They are even talking about international tours. Advance sales, a production source said, are in the $7 million to $10 million range, a nice amount, though the critically panned “Dance of the Vampires” had similar numbers — in a similar-size theater — and closed within two months.

Ticket sales reported for “The Pirate Queen” the first week after the reviews were up about 8 percent from the week before, even as most other Broadway shows saw declines.

The producers have in place an aggressive and wide-ranging (and, it appears, costly) marketing campaign, with television and radio commercials and a fancy Web site (thepiratequeen.com). Even a project of this size — especially a project of this size — has to have a Plan B in case it has to move forward without the critics.

“We know that when you come into town with something large and with the pedigree that this show has, you’re setting yourself up to be knocked,” Ms. Doherty said. “We’re pragmatists.”