The Toronto Star Review - The Pirate Queen
My local paper's review - Richard Ouzounian who really does love SJB (vis-a-vis his latest by-the-phone interview just LAST Saturday?
April 06, 2007
Richard Ouzounian
Theatre Critic
New York-The good news first.
The Pirate Queen, which opened last night on Broadway at the Hilton Theatre may very well be the most beautiful musical I have ever seen.
Eugene Lee's spare, but magnificently structural set designs provide the perfect scaffolding for Kenneth Posner's endlessly inventive lighting. Add the costumes of Martin Pakledinaz - which embrace royalty and poverty with equal skill - and you have a magical visual team.
There are also some bravura performances taking place in all of that visual splendor. Linda Balgord is a magnificently assured Queen Elizabeth, Hadley Fraser the most charismatic of leading men, Marcus Chait and William Youmans a dastardly pair of villains and Jeff McCarthy is richly empathetic as the ultimate father figure.
Anchoring the whole thing is Stephanie J. Block as the Pirate Queen of the title.
The galvanic Block sings with passion, acts with commitment and radiates an innate warmth that takes the chill off the mega-musical format.
That all sounds pretty good, doesn't it?
But, alas, The Pirate Queen ultimately weighs in as somewhat less than satisfactory.
And the blame, ironically, has to be laid at the feet of the two men who went into the show with the biggest reputations: Alain Boublil and Claude-Michel Schönberg.
The songwriting team behind Les Misèrables and Miss Saigon have certainly proven in the past that they know how to write the kind of music and lyrics that not only drive a story forward, but linger in the mind long after the final curtain has fallen.
This time around, they have equally promising subject matter: the story of Grace O'Malley, the Irish woman whose charisma led her people to form a naval force that made Elizabethan England tremble.
O'Malley's life has the stuff of a fine musical in it, but Boublil and Schönberg have missed the boat, if you'll pardon the expression.
The recitatives that helped link the memorable arias in their earlier shows have now gained the upper hand and you wait in vain for an actual melody to emerge.
In a show that's 90 per cent sung, the lack of a solid score becomes a problem that no amount of staging virtuosity or thespian fireworks can overcome.
Even the Irish step-dancing that appears at sporadic intervals seems more like CPR than integrated choreography. It also serves as a reminder that Moya Doherty and John McColgan, the brains behind Riverdance, are the above-the-title producers here.
So much of The Pirate Queen is full of promise that it makes you lament the fact that its music - the one thing on which a musical must be built - is a major disappointment.
April 06, 2007
Richard Ouzounian
Theatre Critic
New York-The good news first.
The Pirate Queen, which opened last night on Broadway at the Hilton Theatre may very well be the most beautiful musical I have ever seen.
Eugene Lee's spare, but magnificently structural set designs provide the perfect scaffolding for Kenneth Posner's endlessly inventive lighting. Add the costumes of Martin Pakledinaz - which embrace royalty and poverty with equal skill - and you have a magical visual team.
There are also some bravura performances taking place in all of that visual splendor. Linda Balgord is a magnificently assured Queen Elizabeth, Hadley Fraser the most charismatic of leading men, Marcus Chait and William Youmans a dastardly pair of villains and Jeff McCarthy is richly empathetic as the ultimate father figure.
Anchoring the whole thing is Stephanie J. Block as the Pirate Queen of the title.
The galvanic Block sings with passion, acts with commitment and radiates an innate warmth that takes the chill off the mega-musical format.
That all sounds pretty good, doesn't it?
But, alas, The Pirate Queen ultimately weighs in as somewhat less than satisfactory.
And the blame, ironically, has to be laid at the feet of the two men who went into the show with the biggest reputations: Alain Boublil and Claude-Michel Schönberg.
The songwriting team behind Les Misèrables and Miss Saigon have certainly proven in the past that they know how to write the kind of music and lyrics that not only drive a story forward, but linger in the mind long after the final curtain has fallen.
This time around, they have equally promising subject matter: the story of Grace O'Malley, the Irish woman whose charisma led her people to form a naval force that made Elizabethan England tremble.
O'Malley's life has the stuff of a fine musical in it, but Boublil and Schönberg have missed the boat, if you'll pardon the expression.
The recitatives that helped link the memorable arias in their earlier shows have now gained the upper hand and you wait in vain for an actual melody to emerge.
In a show that's 90 per cent sung, the lack of a solid score becomes a problem that no amount of staging virtuosity or thespian fireworks can overcome.
Even the Irish step-dancing that appears at sporadic intervals seems more like CPR than integrated choreography. It also serves as a reminder that Moya Doherty and John McColgan, the brains behind Riverdance, are the above-the-title producers here.
So much of The Pirate Queen is full of promise that it makes you lament the fact that its music - the one thing on which a musical must be built - is a major disappointment.