Theater News

The Queen Is Dead: The Pirate Queen Will Close on June 17

A scene from The Pirate Queen(© Joan Marcus)
A scene from The Pirate Queen
(© Joan Marcus)

The musical The Pirate Queen will play its final Broadway performance at the Hilton Theatre on June 17. At the time of its closing, the show will have played for 85 performances and 32 previews.

Producers Moya Doherty and John McColgan stated, “We are proud of The Pirate Queen and the talented cast and creative team that has brought this epic musical to Broadway. It is a joy working with Alain Boublil and Claude-Michel Schönberg, who have created a timeless, classic score for a great theatre piece. We are also pleased to report that there is international interest in Pirate Queen productions. Plans for a European English-language production are underway and will be announced in the near future.”

The 42-member cast of The Pirate Queen is led by Stephanie J. Block, Hadley Fraser, Linda Balgord, Marcus Chait, Jeff McCarthy, and William Youmans. In addition to Boublil and Schönberg, the show’s creative team includes Frank Galati (direction), Graciela Daniele (musical staging), John Dempsey (co-author of lyrics), Richard Maltby, Jr. (co-author of book and lyrics), Julian Kelly (orchestrator-vocal arranger-musical supervisor and director), Eugene Lee (set design), Martin Pakledinaz (costume design), Kenneth Posner (lighting design), and Jonathan Deans (sound design).

The original Broadway cast recording of the show will be released by Masterworks Broadway on July 3. That same day, Hal Leonard will release The Pirate Queen songbook.

In his TheaterMania review of the show, David Finkle wrote: “Sometime in the late 16th century, Queen Elizabeth I held a Tudor tete-a-tete with a fiery Irishwoman called Grace O’Malley, who had made her name by doing some unlikely pirating and had become a royal pain in the neck to the virgin monarch struggling for a firm grip on her empire. Now, 400-plus-years later, this top-girls’ encounter has inspired the only enlivening patch in The Pirate Queen, the otherwise bombastically mediocre new musical.”

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The Pirate Queen

Closed: June 17, 2007