The Pirate Queen
Music by Claude-Michel Schönberg
Lyrics by Alain Boublil, Richard Maltby, Jr and John Dempsy
Book by Alain Boublil, Claude-Michel Schönberg and Richard Maltby, Jr.
Reviewed by
Brad Hathaway |
Issued July 3, 2007
Running time 74:26 over 25 tracks
Packaged with synopsis, lyrics and 17 pictures
Sony Masterworks Broadway 711810
List Price $18.98 |
Click here to buy the CD
 |
This original Broadway cast recording of the most recent Schönberg and
Boublil massive musical may remain on your active listening list longer than
the show it documents remained on Broadway. The quick departure of the show
from Broadway after less than a hundred performances (not counting its 32
previews) was more a reflection of the story-telling failures of the script
and production than of any weakness in the score by the creators of Les
Misérables, Miss Saigon and Martin Guerre. As this recording of
23 of the 33 songs or musical scenes from the show demonstrates, there are
pleasures to be had here, mostly in the felicity of Schönberg's melodic
touch. The lyrics were pretty predictable when being heard for the first
time in the theater and don't really improve with repeated listening. Once
you know them, however, they don't keep you from enjoying either the melodic
lines or the vocal performances, especially those of Stephanie J. Block,
Hardley Fraser and Marcus Chait. |
Storyline: At roughly the time that Queen Elizabeth was watching the
plays of Shakespeare in London, Grace (or Grania) O'Malley was fighting rival
clans and English forces on the seas on the west coast of Ireland. She loved
a young man but was married off to the son of the leader of a rival clan in
an effort to bring unity to the warring Irish people in the face of a common
enemy, the English. She inherited the leadership of a clan that ruled on sea
as well as on land, and she became known as "The Pirate Queen."
Finally, she traveled to England to deal directly with Queen Elizabeth
whose forces under the ruthless Richard Bingham were wreaking havoc over the
land she loved and the people she led.
Schönberg provides some lovely music here, and it
is notable that you only rarely say to yourself "that sounds a lot like
such-and-such from Les Mis or thus-and-so from Miss Saigon."
The style is similar, but the music is sufficiently distinctive to avoid
distracting the audience with memories of earlier triumphs too often. There are a few
moments, however, when similarities seem to bubble up to the surface.
You can't mistake the Les Mis-ness of "Sail to the Stars" or the the
Miss Saigon-ishness in "Here On This Night."
The vocals include the powerful work of big belt
specialist Stephanie J. Block, who fares better on the disc than she did on
stage because the strength of her performance was her vocal power.
Hadley Fraser, as her charming young swashbuckler, sings the standout number
"I'll Be There" with intensity, and Marcus Chait comes across on the disc as
more virile and less despicable as the cad she's forced to marry - check out
"Boys Will Be Boys." Two vocal performances don't quite survive the
transition to disc, however. Jeff McCarthy comes across as stiff as a board
as her father in such numbers as "My Grace." It's not entirely his fault
-- he has to sing such lyrics as "For flouting me, as any sailor
knows, I'd have him keel-hauled through the water / But when I think what
judgment to impose, I only see my daughter." Then Linda Balgord, well
remembered by Potomac Region theater lovers for her stint at Signature
Theatre in The Fix, is forced to adopt a semi-operatic screech to
create some contrast between her Queen Elizabeth and Block's Pirate Queen.
Toward the end of the disc, she is allowed to mellow a bit and does a lovely "She
Who Has All."
The two-keyboard dominated small pit band, which sounded cheap in
the theater, sounds even thinner and less satisfying here. It isn't that the
musicians don't play the orchestrations by their conductor Julian Kelley
well. It is just that there were so few of them that they had difficulty
filling the big Hilton Theatre with sound, and the effort to come up with
orchestrations that sound full or powerful under those constraints resulted
in strained excesses. It is the quieter material that is the most affective,
and the lilting work of Kieran O'Hare on Uilleann Pipes and Kirsten Agresta
on Gaelic Harp that give the entire piece a distinctive feel.
|
