THEATER; A Royal Behemoth Stumbles To Broadway ...with a musical under her dress!
OK I was looking up something else and found this image so arresting I just had to read about it. OK I have a thing for queens, There!
It's from a theater review in The New York Times of The Pirate Queen which just opened on Broadway. I don't care what the critics are saying, this is one bad-ass Elizabeth I and she knows how to wear that bling.
I plucked out some excerpts from the very odd review that accompanies this image, originally published on 22 April 2007, by Campbell Robertson (my apologies, it's actually cogent, if also a bit over-long):
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.”
“O.K., don’t mention the Titanic.”
Well, there was nothing wrong with it, so to speak, when it left Belfast.
... 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 [Riverdance].
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 ... has not been heard of much since.
Given the scale of this show Ms. Doherty and Mr. McColgan had initially considered performing it in a giant mobile tent, ... and finally settled on Broadway, with a Chicago tryout.
Richard Maltby Jr. ... came to opening night in Chicago, not, he insisted, ...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,'' ... ''In this case it was like I was reading an X-ray.''
The next day he faxed an 11-page memo to Mr. Boublil at his hotel.
The producers had initially insisted on keeping the Irish dancing to a minimum, to put off the perception that this was ''Riverdance II.''
Even tweaks have a way of adding up; $20,000 was spent to make a burning funeral pyre look more convincing.
Then the critics weighed in.
'' 'Pirate' Should Walk the Plank,'' blared the headline in The Journal News of Westchester ... the show often looked like ''the aimless milling of a crowd on a carnival midway.'' ...Clive Barnes, in The New York Post, called it ''repetitive and self-congratulatory,'' with ''banal lyrics.''
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.
Stephanie J. Block, center, as Grace O'Malley in "The Pirate Queen."
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