By Debbie McGoldrick

THERE’S a big new Irish show preparing to hit our shores this fall, and given the success of its connections you can be sure that all the stops will be pulled out to ensure its success.

The Pirate Queen is the brainchild of the husband/wife duo behind Riverdance, Moya Doherty and John McColgan, and it’s now rehearsing in Dublin in anticipation of an October opening in Chicago.

The show is based on Grace O’Malley, the 16th century Irish pirate. And is there anything hotter right now than a courageous pirate, given the record-shattering success last weekend of Johnny Depp’s Pirates of the Caribbean?

“The ship is about to sail for a foreign port and we are looking forward to the rest of the journey,” McColgan said during an open rehearsal last week.

The show features a cast of 40, and Doherty says it is a uniquely Irish story that can be enjoyed by all audiences. The pirate Grace, also known in history as Granuaile, led a band of pirates from Galway, and then became a chieftain herself.

“We wanted an Irish story that had a resonance, we wanted something that could travel internationally,” Doherty said.

“And I think that what has happened with this Granuaile is that she has become sort of a female iconic role model really, and I think there is great interest in North America in the character of Granuaile because they don’t know anything about her and they are amazed that she actually existed.”

The cast will soon head to the U.S. for final rehearsals, as October is only around the corner. The show is written by the authors of Broadway favorites Les Miserables and Miss Saigon, Alain Boublil and Claude-Michel Schonberg, and directed by another Tony winner, Frank Galati.

After the Chicago run, which is set for October 3-November 26, The Pirate Queen will move to Broadway. (For Chicago ticket information, check the show’s website at www.thepiratequeen.com).

So will U.S. audiences embrace the show the way they did Riverdance? “You can never tell with these things but the quality of the work is very good and we are very pleased with where we are at the moment,” was the reply from Doherty, a woman who certainly knows what she’s talking about.