Danny Hayward in The Royal Pyrate. Photo: Geve Penaflor
As an evening out, The Royal Pyrate delivers: Strolling through the cobbled streets of Red Hook on a beautiful summer evening to arrive at a pocket park on the waterfront. Picking up tickets on a pier, with pirate T-shirts and shots of rum on offer at the box office–and a dog in a pirate hat joining the fun. Strolling down the gangway to enter the nineteenth-century feeling your seat shift with the currents. Watching the sun set through the open door of the nineteenth century barge that is the Waterfront Museum, followed by a giant cruise ship departing the cruise terminal after dark.
The show itself, while entertaining enough, feels somehow less magical than its surroundings. The real story on which the musical is based–that of the renowned early American pirate Black Sam Bellamy, his sidekick Paulsgrave Williams, and Bellamy’s lover, known as the “Witch of Wellfleet”–is an adventure yarn almost too good to be true, full of politics, romance, intrigue, ethical dilemmas, and fledgling democratic impulses in the criminal underworld. But while creators Chas LiBretto (book) and J Landon Marcus (music and lyrics) give us the high points of the story, they do so in a way that’s both heavy-handed and thinly sketched.
In this version of Bellamy’s tale, he’s a former conscripted sailor in the British navy, now eking out a rough living as a small-time grifter and smuggler alongside his pal Williams in colonial Cape Cod, under the thumb of the Crown and the corrupt local reverend/town VIP (Korie Lee Blossey), with few prospects. Sam (Danny Hayward) is in love with Mary Hallet (Maggie Likcani), a freethinking young woman in the Puritan community, but without funds, he fears Mary’s family won’t let them marry. So when Mary gets pregnant, Sam’s got to come up with a new plan: a treasure map that he stole from an executed pirate’s corpse. Loot a sunken Spanish galleon with his buddy Paulsgrave (Lauren Molina), and he can settle down with Mary and their child to build a new, freer life.
Of course, things don’t work out that way–when do they ever? Instead, they are attacked by the dread pirate Blackbeard (Blossey), then join forces with him, then take over from him, going for bigger and bigger scores and running their pirate ship on increasingly democratic principles. Meanwhile, Mary has the baby alone and ends up on trial for witchcraft after (another) tragedy befalls her and her child.
Trying to turn that much action into what’s essentially a chamber musical, performed in a small space where the musicians outnumber the actors, is no easy feat, to be sure. But in condensing it down to five characters and 100 minutes, LiBretto and Marcus wind up with something that’s both fairly generic and oddly convoluted. Character-building is perfunctory, and with a show mostly comprising two-person scenes and songs on a three-quarter thrust stage, director Emily Abrams has to stage for functionality and visibility more than anything else, which leads to a lot of direct address of the audience. The fight scenes, which add visual interest, fare the best.
The plot gets bogged down in the middle because it’s so hard to tell what exactly the pirates are attacking, and I never really understood why Sam doesn’t go back for Mary once they start raking in the loot. There are undercurrents of politics–ending oligarchy and corrupt taxation and the grasping hands of the church–but they disappear for a big swath of the middle. Blossey relishes chewing the scenery as both villains, and Molina has a grand old time with Paulsgrave’s role as a sort of master of ceremonies (though the cross-gender casting for this is something else that doesn’t quite make sense in context), but neither character is much more than a plot function.
The tunes lean toward sea chantey more than Broadway, and the band members (all of whom double as auxiliary pirates and/or Puritan villagers) are a solid, tuneful ensemble. But the lyrics are simplistic and rote, full of obvious rhymes that make the emotional beats feel pat. And since the show, while not sung-through, relies on the music more than the book to tell its story, the predictability of the lyrics makes even the highly dramatic turns in the plot feel dull.
And while the creators are wise to leaven the story, which does come to a grim end, with humor, the tone is inconsistent, oscillating among winking modern take on pirate lore (as some of the dad-joke riffs on pop song lyrics would indicate), adventure yarn with a Robin-Hood-esque moral, philosophical takedown of crony capitalism, and tragic love story. The Royal Pyrate dabbles in all of the above, but can’t quite find its sea legs in any of them.