the Dalaverse

So, the lengthiest bit of What I Did On My Spring Break, as yet forthcoming. erinya's recent post about female anti-heroes reminded me that I really do have a review of this written up in my head, and I've already gone over it several times aloud. So here you are.

When Ness and I were looking for tickets to a Broadway show -- any Broadway show, really -- I saw that The Pirate Queen, based on the life of Irish pirate/chieftan Grace O'Malley (or Grania, if you prefer -- the show itself uses both variations), was just starting while we were there. We wanted tickets as cheap as possible, and on the discount TKTS website they didn't have TPQ listed, so I set my sights on Spamalot. However, when we got to the booth to actually buy our tickets, TPQ was indeed being offered for about half-price, and I squeed mightily. I actually had a book called The Pirate Queen in my bag at that very moment (it's my Barbara Sjoholm, not just about Grace but about the author's search for stories of women and the sea, and I highly recommend it). I was totally psyched to see this show for all of the obvious reasons.

First, the things I loved unequivocably. Stephanie J. Block is utterly perfect in the title role. I was familiar with her only as one of the Elphabas who wasn't Idina Menzel, and now I think I would've preferred to see Block in Wicked. She has an amazing voice, and did a great job at bringing Grace O'Malley to strong, vibrant life. Most of the rest of the cast is equally capable, particularly Hadley Fraser as her lover Tiernan (he has a beautiful solo in the first act). The part could be weak in the hands of a lesser performer, but Fraser rocks it out. Marcus Chait plays her arranged husband Donal with total Legolas hair and an overly dramatic singing voice that suits his character -- I hated him just as much as I was supposed to.

All the technical stuff is incredibly impressive. The sets are simple but effective, changing from ship to castle to palace with ease (there are masts and rope ladders at either side of the stage that remain for the whole show, but only used during the shipboard scenes). The costumes are gorgeous, though I would've put Grace in fewer dresses and more breeches (this feeds into a later point). And oh, the DANCING! It's produced by the creators of Riverdance, and it shows. YMMV, but personally I adore Irish dance and music, and this show uses both to great effect. The ensemble numbers, particularly the wedding and christening scenes, are amazing, and overall the score is beautiful. Seriously, I can't praise the choreography and stuntwork enough.

I had a great time watching the show for all of these reasons. However, during the intermission, a couple of hometown kids next to us started detailing the show's flaws, and though I was too shy to chime in, I agreed with nearly all of them. Maybe I should cut the rest of this -- it goes on a bit, and contains more specific spoilers for the show...

Firstly, it suffers from the Les Mis problem, which is understandable since it was written by the same people: too much damn singing. Look, I love musicals to death, and I can mostly ignore this when I'm actually watching a production. But when I'm listening to the recordings at home, I notice what I define as too much damn music. If you can listen to a cast recording, never see the show, and manage to not miss a single plot point, that is too much damn music. For god's sake, people, would it kill you to throw us a line of straight, spoken dialogue here and there? Maybe even a paragraph. Rent suffers from this problem as well, somewhat less noticeably because it's so high-energy, but even so you'll notice that the film version changes a lot of sung lines into spoken ones. I feel like the all-music, all-the-time format serves historical epics particularly badly; like Les Mis, TPQ has moments that are simply sublime, but the constant barrage of singing becomes overwhelming and makes the whole show seem preposterous at times. I'm not sure how much of this is personal taste, but my Broadway-loving Uncle Howard and Vanessa both agreed with me. (The NY kids complained about the lyrics too much, though; they're mostly not great, but Wicked has some wretched lyrics as well, and nobody ever complains about that -- maybe because it actually has DIALOGUE too...)

This would also allow for more development of the supporting characters/ensemble cast. Yeah, I love to see them dancing, but it might be nice to actually be able to differentiate between Elizabeth's (real, historical) cabinet members, or her giggly handmaidens, or the various Irishmen and women under Grace's command. There's one older woman in particular who sings beautifully in Gaelic, more than once -- without any indication of who she is or what she means to the characters. These are the nuances lost without some dialogue, and TPQ is actually worse than Les Mis in this regard.

Point number two: the Elizabeth I character doesn't work, and neither does Linda Balgord's performance. The role itself is overwritten and the parallel between the two women hammered home so hard it made me roll my eyes (especially their inexcusably horrible duet when Grace is in prison, which also leads into my final point). It would be much more effective for Elizabeth to remain offscreen for most of the show, perhaps making her appearance through written correspondence to her Irish vassal Bingham. In fact, there's already a perfect entrance for her -- she's seen on a balconey eavesdropping while Tiernan pleads with Bingham for Grace's life. I mean, you have one of the most famous women in history in your story, whose profile and costumes will be instantly recognizable -- she could just be backlit on that balconey, behind a curtain, and every single person in the theater would know just who she was.

Instead we get to hear a rather emo Elizabeth ponder her place as a woman in a man's role throughout both acts before she finally meets with Grace near the end (and that's a really well-done scene, btw). Even under these circumstances, the role might be tolerable with a better, subtler actress. Balgord hams it up way too much in the first act. Perhaps more distressing, her voice -- ::shudders:: It does that trilling high soprano thing, which I always find annoying but seems particularly ill-suited to Elizabeth I. It just does not fit with the popular image of Elizabeth (think of the actresses who've portrayed her -- Helen Mirren, Bette Davis, Judi Dench, even Cate Blanchett!) and was extremely jarring to me. A couple of her high notes actually made me wince. I don't want Queen Elizabeth to make me wince!

And lastly, they fail to do full justice to the real personage of Grace O'Malley. I have no quibble with the invented love triangle between Grace, Donal, and Tiernan -- that's to be expected. And there is a lot of strong Grace to be found -- she saves her father from a fatal blow, leads both men and women in battle, takes up the mantle of clan chieftan, faces down Elizabeth (and they use the awesome popular story that Grace held off an attacking ship one day after giving birth -- Block is extra-stupendous in that scene). But. But. Starting with the birth of that son at the start of the second act, it's like they backpeddle on the promising start (and ACTUAL HISTORY) entirely, over-emphasizing Grace as a woman through traditional female attributes of wife/lover and mother. I could've done without the sugary-sweet lullaby to her new baby (which is clearly a doll and gets tossed around like one). Now, there is nothing WRONG with Grace O'Malley having children -- in fact, she had several. But there is very much a tone of restoring the natural balance, a sigh of relief -- it's easier to accept this unwomanly creature after she does what a woman ought to do, in addition to what she ought not to.

I could smack everybody responsible for the aforementioned duet with Elizabeth (I think it's called "Woman to Woman"). There are not enough synonyms for "awful" to describe this number. Grace O'Malley AND Elizabeth I singing about how a woman isn't a real woman until she's known the love of a man? No, I'm not fucking making that up, the lyrics are actually almost exactly those words. Even the actresses seemed to realize what a complete crock that message is, especially in context. I was really worried that the rest of the show was going to go dramatically downhill from there. There aren't any offenses nearly as egregious afterward, thankfully, although maybe there could be less emphasis on Grace being returned to Tiernan and her young son, and more about her return to being her own person with her pirate fleet.

The guy sitting next to us really summed it up: "This could be so much better than it is. I want it to be so much better than it is." It tries, it really does, but those three negative points bog it down. What's worse, they're problems with the script that can't easily be fixed, not like a crappy song here and a transition that doesn't work there. At this point, I'm iffy as to whether it'll manage to become a big success, which is a shame because it really has so much potential, both as a concept and with its own organic elements. Sigh. I had a great time and I'm not sorry I saw it, but my hopes that I caught a Tony Award-winning show destined for a long run (about a. one of the most fascinating women in English history and b. PIRATES) are not so high.

By the way? I much prefer parallels between Elizabeth and Grace O'Malley than between Elizabeth and Anne Bonny/Mary Read, Caribbean setting or not. Grania had multiple husbands and children, and lived to harry English shipping well into old age.

Forgot to say how much I despised the ending of last week's GA. It made me want to break up with the show. I haven't yet, but our relationship is very up in the air.