It’s a fiery struggle set on a simple stage in the latest big-budget musical to hit Broadway
There are many large-scale productions on Broadway, but none quite like The Pirate Queen, an epic adventure that chronicles a unique time in history when two powerful women clashed over the fate of a country. It presents the true-life story of Grace O’Malley, an Irish pirate who defied the attempts of Queen Elizabeth I to subjugate her country and her people. The stage was set, so to speak, for the Pirate Queen to take on the Virgin Queen, and the musical interprets that famous struggle with a lively mixture of action scenes, Irish dance numbers and dramatic showdowns.
In recreating the landscapes and interiors of 16th-century Ireland, scenic designer Eugene Lee — whose credits include Wicked, Saturday Night Live and the original production of Sweeney Todd — visited the west coast of Ireland to see where O’Malley lived. “You can go see her castles,” he remarks. “They’re still around. You can go see where she is supposedly buried. Everyone knows her and knows about her. It’s kind of amazing. There are all kinds of stories about her.”
On his way back to New York, Lee stopped off in London and took the opportunity to visit the re-creation of the Globe Theatre on London’s Bankside, where most of Shakespeare’s plays were staged. “I don’t think anyone really knows what the Elizabethan theatre looked like, but this is the best guess, and it’s painted up like sailing ships of the time,” he recalls. “I was kind of amazed. I am a member of the New York Yacht Club on 44th Street, and we have a model group that is kind of painted in the same colors. I thought that was very interesting.”
For the stage of The Pirate Queen, Lee actually had a mast placed on each side of the stage, and these dressed-up columns acted as an extension of the O’Malley ship for the scenes that required it. But for the designer, the set piece also played into a special element of the stage itself. “Theatre has a huge element of ships related to it because many stagehands have boats of some kind, and all the rigging in a traditional proscenium theatre comes from sailing,” he says. “So there’s this mixture of taking a column, putting some ship’s rigging on it, and a piece of a crow’s nest or spar hanging off it, so there’s an abstraction between the two worlds.”
Despite dressing up the sides and top of the stage, Lee actually opted not to clutter the stage too much, preferring a more streamlined approach that allowed audience members to use their imaginations a bit. It was an interesting change of pace for the man who designed Wicked, one of the most elaborate shows to ever hit Broadway.
“I honestly tried to make it intellectual and simple,” Lee says of The Pirate Queen set. “It wasn’t a gigantic opera set like The Flying Dutchman, where a mast grows from the stage. In a way, it’s a rather simple little set, in the same way the Elizabethan stage of the Globe is rather simple. It’s driven by acting and not by big chunks of scenery. When I went to look at the stage in London, I had my picture taken in this little rowboat put on stage because they were working on The Tempest. It was a simple prop. It was kind of nice, you know?”
Lee used the real-life locations he viewed as fodder for some of his set pieces. “The piece of scenery that moves out into the house and frames it is actually an abstraction of that theatre at Bankside,” he says. “The christening scene with its window came right out of an actual location, and the English court was an abstraction of the Elizabethan stage.”
What is most striking about the show is that its sets are dramatic without being overwhelming. The ship simply consists of a stage-wide railing that slides onstage, rigging that’s lowered from the ceiling, and a trap door for the storage hold. The mast pieces on the edge of the stage enhance their presence. The Queen’s royal court is a simple, two-tiered set augmented by props like large candelabras or a large mirror. One of the countryside scenes consists of a castle in the distance and a color backdrop with subtle video projections for the sky, but nothing more. The set backdrops slide in and out at a fast and furious pace, but the smooth flow of dialogue and focus on certain characters allows them to take on a cinematic flavor that leaves some of the imagery to the imagination of the audience.
The set pieces for The Pirate Queen were built by one of Lee’s favorite shops up in Canada “that did Showboat and Wicked for me. It’s called F&D Scene Changes in Calgary, Alberta. I went there years and years ago when I did Showboat. We’d taken bids from various shops, and the producer called and wanted me to take a little money off of it, so I had them send me all the bids. There was already a lower bid from this shop in Calgary, Alberta. They had just done that Clint Eastwood movie Unforgiven. I called up the film’s production designer Henry Bumstead and asked him what he thought of the shop, and he loved it. I’ve been using them ever since.”
While many of the set pieces — like the castles — were made of metal framing and fi- berglass, where things could be made of wood, they were, including the mast and all the spars. “All the line had to be flame retarded,” reports Lee. “It had to be safe.” There appear to be plenty of flames onstage, from torches to lit candles in the royal court to a burning funeral pyre at the end of Act 1, but with the exception of one torch or so, all of it is illusion. According to Lee, the crew initially tried “a gas-driven flame device in the boat for the funeral at the end of the first act, but I heard that the New York Fire Department wouldn’t approve it in the end.”
A solution was needed. “I came across a Web site for a company with people who used to work at Disney Imagineering,” recalls Lee. “They had a fire effect using low-pressure steam, and it looked pretty good, so I called them up. They sent a unit of theirs. It was a big, clunky thing, and we set it up in a shop outside New York. It’s a lighting effect really. They light up from below, and it looks like fire in an interesting, theatrical way. This unit was three feet high, and we told them we would try to use it if they could re-engineer it so it was eight inches high, and they did. I had never used it before. I like new things like that. It’s getting very hard to use real fire on stage these days. I live in Rhode Island, where we had the great Station fire a few years ago.”
When asked if he is happy with the final results of The Pirate Queen, Lee replies frankly, “Yes and no. I was unhappy that the producers were beaten up so badly by the critics, but in this business, if you let that get to you, you can’t go on. I’m generally happy with it, but I think there were a lot of issues beyond my control. I always wanted ‘pirate’ out of the title. I thought it sends a Johnny Depp signal, and it’s not really about that. It’s about the relationship of a number of people. But I was happy with it. I thought Ken Posner did a nice job on the lighting. We tried a lot of fun things together. It’s always a pleasure. I felt that the costumes were particularly nice. Given all the issues, I thought it was a serious effort with a big cast.”
