The Pirate Queen, despite its obvious flaws, was given a purely cosmetic repair before being packed off to Broadway, the harshest theatre climate of all, writes Belinda McKeon
Since late last week, the official website of The Pirate Queen has been in countdown mode. Over it all - over the banner ads for cut-price tickets, the flashing links to backstage interviews and cast photographs, the show's logo of a blue-hued Grace O'Malley throwing a defiant backward glance - a digital timer now ticks down, in days, hours and minutes, the time remaining until the last Broadway performance of the ill-fated musical produced by Riverdance creators John McColgan and Moya Doherty. Hurry, its blinking digits seem to urge, and get your tickets while you have a chance, because all too soon, the good ship Pirate will sail away from 42nd Street and on, no doubt, to bigger and brighter things.
Except, in the world of musical theatre, things don't get bigger and brighter than Broadway. And, no matter how positively McColgan and Doherty might spin their show's demise - concentrating, in a statement last week, on praise for their cast (justifiable) and on their optimism about the show's future on a European stage (much less so) - there's really no way of sugar-coating its closure. The final curtain will fall on Sunday, less than three months after opening night, at a cost of almost €20 million, and if that looks like an enormous sum, it should. The Pirate Queen, based on a Morgan Llywelyn novel about Grace O'Malley, has not just lost more money than any other musical of the season, but has eclipsed even the most infamous financial flop in recent Broadway history, 2002's Dance of the Vampires. For McColgan and Doherty, a husband-and-wife team, who are believed to have pumped a significant amount of their own money into the production before and during its New York run in an attempt to staunch its manifold artistic problems, the experience has been a rude awakening to the realities of producing a show for Broadway.
Riverdance was one thing - and it did enjoy a successful run there - but a big-budget musical capable of impressing the New York critics, filling a 1,500-seater venue, and recouping, let alone returning on, its investors' money: that, as the pair have learned the hard way, is another matter.
It's true that the critics were merciless. But bad reviews did not close this show; rather, it was scuppered by the poor decisions and the profound flaws seized upon by those reviews.
CERTAINLY, THE ROAD to Broadway was paved, for McColgan and Doherty, with good intentions - a new, purpose-built musical, potentially a provider of sweet relief from the current Broadway trend of shows based on films or television programmes, and an innovative marketing campaign, including a daily video blog by which fans could keep in touch with the cast and the action backstage. They had, too, the semblance of good ideas: they found a historical story that looked like it would make for a gripping piece of theatre; they recruited the biggest names in musical production; they wove in the Riverdance factor; and they went for the sensible option of a pre-Broadway trial, a two-month Chicago run.
In theory, all the parts were in place. But in actuality, the parts worked against each other, creating a sprawling contraption that seemed to have no firm idea of what it wanted to be. The story - that of a female chieftain hungry for power in 16th-century Ireland - turned out not to suit the musical form, dragging with it a cumbersome backdrop of gender and colonial politics that sat uneasily with the show's sporadic lunges at high-spirited fun. The biggest names - Alain Boublil and Claude-Michel Schönberg, the team behind Les Misérables and Miss Saigon - turned out not to be the best names for a show made of Irish material; the book fumbled with the historical and cultural feel of the story, while the score staggered under the pressure to weave in the necessary airs of Irishry, and turned out to sound merely bloated and bland: certain death for any Broadway musical.
The Riverdance factor turned out to be puzzlingly underplayed; the dance sequences, choreographed by Riverdance's Carol Leavy Joyce, were the most popular scenes with audiences, but were sprinkled surprisingly sparsely through the show.
The Chicago "try-out", meanwhile, turned out to be no such thing. The purpose of a try-out is to deliver to a creative team whatever short, sharp shocks are needed; negative reviews and limp audience reaction are hardly pleasant for the producers and writers of a new production, but experienced at a safe distance from Broadway, they can be a godsend, pointing a strident finger at the very elements of the production likely to earn it a drubbing in Manhattan. What Chicago should have made clear to the Pirate Queen team was that their production was far from ready for Broadway - that it needed, for example, a total rewrite; that it needed to be workshopped at length, from scratch; that it needed, perhaps, to be toured to smaller theatres around the US, taking smaller risks and building a name, with the producers constantly reassessing, whether it had yet arrived at the peak condition necessary for Broadway survival. Chicago, in other words, called for the show to be closed, the booking at the Hilton Theatre in New York cancelled, and for the whole team to return to the drawing board.
Instead, haphazard measures were administered, with a third writer, Richard Maltby jnr, drafted to perform emergency surgery on the show. He made some changes, but apparently had the bulk of his ideas rejected by Boublil and Schönberg, who were loath to see him tinker with their creation. Yet even tinkering, even had the writers - or their egos - permitted it, would not have been enough to render The Pirate Queen seaworthy; a whole new book was needed, and a whole new score, arguably from a whole new composer. This was the point at which the production could possibly have been salvaged. Instead, it was given a purely cosmetic repair and packed off to the harshest theatre climate of all.
Why is Broadway so tough? Why is it that, as McColgan himself pointed out last week, the vast majority (almost 85 per cent) of Broadway shows fail to make any money for their investors? Productions have become more and more extravagant, and audience expectations have climbed to dizzy heights; costs, as a result, have doubled over the last five years, to an average of some €16 million, with producers turning to commercial endorsement and, regularly, to product placement as a way of financing shows. There are no economies of scale; every single Broadway performance costs its producers an average of €80,000. Without endorsement, or without the backing of a major movie company - something enjoyed by successful musicals such as Legally Blonde and Wicked - or without a large team of producers to divide potential shortfalls, even the most spectacular production on Broadway can become as vulnerable as an amateur song-and-dance show transported there from a parish hall. In its last weeks, despite a massive marketing campaign and slashed ticket prices, The Pirate Queen has struggled to fill even half the seats at the Hilton.
It has been an ignominious run, but rumours that this failure will cost McColgan and Doherty their fortune, their careers and their reputations are probably exaggerated. Made on the back of Riverdance and enriched by a portfolio of elite property investments in Europe and the US, that fortune is likely vast enough to safely survive the Pirate Queen debacle. As well as their television production company, Tyrone Productions, there is also River Films, the film production arm of that company. There seems little movement on some of the film projects there (including a screenplay based on another Morgan Llywelyn novel, this time about Brian Boru, and a film about Hugh O'Neill, to be written by John Banville), but the couple remain at work on a large number of other projects, and the Riverdance franchise is unlikely ever to lose its value.
MEANWHILE, ALTHOUGH SOME investors may now no longer be returning their calls, it's also the case that the Pirate Queen investment pool was filled largely by friends and close associates of the couple; they are unlikely to have burned too many crucial bridges. McColgan will certainly need backers for his next project, an elaborate- sounding horror magic show in Las Vegas, a collaboration with Wes Craven of A Nightmare on Elm Street fame. The Hollywood connection will help. But McColgan and Doherty are not likely to find existing or new investors lining up to pour money into a European production of the show.
McColgan's reference, last week, to the prospect of such a revival might have enabled him to bow out of the Broadway episode with a glimmer of defiance, but it's possible that this is the best return the idea will ever yield. Sometimes, when a ship goes down, it's best to leave it at the bottom of the sea.