GYPSY OF THE MONTH: Brian O'Brien of 'The Pirate Queen'

With a name such as his, Brian O'Brien may have been destined to be in The Pirate Queen, a musical celebrating a 16th-century Irish clan leader who stood up to the British. O'Brien's great-grandparents on both sides immigrated from Ireland, and he's the youngest son in a family that includes siblings Seamus, Sean, Kerrin, Shannon and Honora. "One hundred percent Irish heritage," he somewhat superfluously avers.

Yet it wasn't always 100 percent clear that O'Brien was destined for a career in theater. His involvement as a youngster was limited to school plays. In college, he pursued a degree in marketing. During his first professional show, he sustained a devastating ankle injury that kept him from dancing for nearly a year. And he toiled on the non-Equity and regional circuit for seven years before making his Broadway debut.

When O'Brien received the gypsy robe on Pirate Queen's opening night in April, it was almost ten years to the day that he'd been hired for his first Broadway show, Kander and Ebb's Steel Pier. "Ten years earlier—April 5, 1997—I had not gotten my Broadway debut yet," he says. "I was still the guy getting up and going to the auditions and trying. I was working, but I hadn't received that validation that said 'Working at that dinner theater was worth it.' I was at a point in my life where you can do that for so long without feeling like maybe it's not in the cards for me, or I'm not of that caliber."

As he accepted the gypsy robe for Pirate Queen, he was touched remembering the first gypsy robe ceremony he'd attended a decade before, when he was a newbie in a cast (if not a show) destined for acclaim. "Watching JoAnn Hunter receive it for Steel Pier and getting to work with such great dancers as Gregory Mitchell and Casey Nicholaw and Jack Hayes and Andy Blankenbuehler," he recalls. "When I was presented with the robe ten years later, it said to me that I too have been able to make some sort of mark. It's such an honor to now be a part of that."

He's now also a part of Pirate Queen's Riverdancing chorus. Despite his Irish pedigree, O'Brien hadn't done much step dancing before being cast in the show. He also hadn't heard of Grace O'Malley, the musical's real-life titular heroine, until shortly before he auditioned—and when he did learn about her, it had nothing to do with the play. In a conversation unrelated to theater, "I was talking with somebody about their Irish heritage," he says, "and they said, 'I'm descended from this great woman who was a pirate queen, oddly enough,' and I asked what was that about, and they explained that she was on the west coast [of Ireland] and she was the head of a clan and she led seafaring pirates. Then, a couple of weeks later, my agent called [and told me about] this play being based on Grace O'Malley… I thought: Well, there has to be some sort of divine process here that says 'I heard the message.'"

O'Brien is one of three pirates (the shirtless one) hanging from the ship's mast in the early scenes of Act 1. He also dances in all the ensemble numbers. For O'Brien and others in the cast who come from a musical theater background rather than a Riverdance background, adjustments to technique had to be made. "In much Irish step dancing," he explains, "your legs are in a tight cross and your feet are turned out, whereas American tap tends to be more free-form and looser and off to the side. A lot of Irish dancing is up on the balls of your feet, up on your toes and light, whereas American tap tends to be down. Like any choreography, you have to sort of get it in your body. It's a matter of getting used to the rhythms and the shift of weight." And the language, too. While some steps in the two genres are similar, in rehearsals the theater-trained dance captain would "translate" the Irish-dancing terminology used by the choreographer for the ensemble—for example, O'Brien says, "a treble in Irish dancing is a shuffle in tap."

After all the effort and passion put into the show, the unanimously nasty reviews were disheartening. As was the shutout by the Tonys, even in design and performance categories. "It would have been nice if they would have been able to find the good in the piece," says O'Brien. "It's unfortunate that the work of individuals in all fronts was not recognized, as a result of people saying I may not have been fond of the piece as a whole."

The Pirate Queen wasn't judged fairly in another regard, O'Brien believes. "Alain [Boubil] and Claude-Michel [Schönberg] have written some incredible pieces of music, and they're only going to be compared to their own work," he says. "Had they not written anything [previously], I believe people would have looked at their music in a different way. But they were a fairly large target, and people were very anticipatory: 'Let's see you outdo yourselves.' Riverdance, in the same way, is a large target. As much as Riverdance has been embraced by the world, everybody has their own sort of tongue-and-cheek variation, or bad impersonation, of it. So with those two aspects, people came into the piece looking to find fault." He concludes: "It was discouraging to get those reviews, but I work with incredible people, and we're happy and we're sending the audience away happy. They are very entertained." Nonetheless, the show will close after its June 17 performance.

O'Brien's first outing on Broadway was also poorly received, though he was so glad to have gotten his break, he didn't grieve. "Sadly, Steel Pier was short-lived," he says, "but I really couldn't be upset about it because I was like: At least I got invited to the party. I continually thank Susan Stroman in my mind for giving me that break."

Each of his subsequent Broadway shows—Annie Get Your Gun and Beauty and the Beast, both of which he joined as a replacement—has also fulfilled a purpose. Once he'd performed on Broadway, "then you say: I need to have one more, so you can't say the first one was a fluke. That was my opportunity with Annie Get Your Gun. And then you think: Well, 'three's a charm.' And I was given the opportunity to do Beauty and the Beast. And then you start saying: I'd love to do an original company. And then the blessing came," in the form of The Pirate Queen.

Right before O'Brien went into rehearsals for Pirate Queen, he brushed up on his Irish with his first-ever trip to Ireland. He left Beauty and the Beastin time to take a three-week vacation all around Ireland. "I got to see what the west was like—the rugged, high-cliff coast, and the ocean a beautiful blue," he says. "It was great to be there, not only for the show and the historical aspect, but for my own personal heritage." He felt particularly inspired on a beach on the west coast: "To take my shoes off and put my feet in the water and look out across the water… It was moving in the sense that many people who did emigrate to the United States, that was their first step: looking west. And thinking about Grace O'Malley and her family looking out to sea, that's where their journeys would start."

O'Brien's own journey started in Monmouth Beach, N.J., where he grew up. Though the public high school he attended had a good arts program—including field trips to NYC, an hour and a half away, to see Broadway shows—it was mostly an extracurricular activity for him. He enrolled at New Jersey's Seton Hall University and did some community theater during the summers, but graduated in 1987 with a degree in marketing and public relations. "It was the '80s, it was Reaganomics, and everyone was looking at big business, Wall Street, wearing suspenders and power ties, and I sort of bought into that whole thing," O'Brien says.

"But in the back of my mind always lingered the theater bug," he adds. "At that time it did seem just that far removed—still an unattainable goal, like something you had to have committed to very early in your life. I think I just hoped for it to come to me, but then I realized I had to step up and go to it."

He started taking classes at HB Studio and bartending to make ends meet. His dream then was "to be the next Robert De Niro," but it eventually dawned on him that there may be more opportunities for musical performers than dramatic actors. "You say, 'Do I want to wait tables this summer, or do I want to do Hello, Dolly! up in the Catskills?'" O'Brien says, describing his change of heart. "Enough with the struggling actor thing! I was able to say, 'Let me audition and see what it's like, and get out of the city for the summer." Thus, his first professional gig in musical theater was Hello, Dolly! at Forestburgh Playhouse in upstate New York. "And that put me on the loop of doing musical theater."

That 1990 season at Forestburgh, O'Brien says, "was true summer stock. You're living in the barn, there was no air conditioning, and you helped build the sets and costumes. It was an Equity theater, but they had, like, an EMC [Equity Membership Candidate] program, and I was non-Equity. It was just a real sweaty summer, but it was a great experience and I loved every minute of it."

Well, maybe not the minute in midsummer while he was out on the lawn demonstrating a barrel turn for another dancer: "The grass was wet, and I was in the wrong kind of shoes, and I slipped and landed on my ankle." The resulting fracture took him out of one cast (Hello, Dolly!'s) and into another (a cast on his ankle) for the rest of the summer. He spent the fall in physical therapy. By the time he was healed enough to resume auditioning, it was once again summer stock season, and he landed in South Pacific and Cabaret at Candlewood Playhouse in Connecticut for the summer of '91. He subsequently did non-union tours of The Will Rogers Follies and Annie. In the latter, he had his first Irish role—as the brogue-accented Officer Ward, who finds Annie and Sandy alone on the streets. The six-month Annie tour comprised one-offs in cities across the country, followed by two-week runs in Hong Kong and Singapore, with a shorter engagement in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia.

South Pacific became a recurring gig for O'Brien, as he's appeared in productions of it at Paper Mill Playhouse in his home state and North Carolina Theatre in Raleigh. But his most memorable South Pacific took place at New York's City Center in October 2000. O'Brien was one of four male dancers in the "My Favorite Broadway: The Love Songs" concert, hosted by Julie Andrews (and broadcast on PBS). For a segment in which Andrews reminisced about the first musical she ever saw, South Pacific, she came on stage surrounded by the four men dressed as South Pacific sailors. The choreography had them feuding over who got to escort Andrews, but it was O'Brien who was holding her hand as she walked on stage. "That moment was so great, to walk with Julie Andrews," he says. "What an honor." In the concert, he also danced with Bebe Neuwirth to "I'm a Brass Band" and in "Lullaby of Broadway," sung by Tom Wopat.

He'd performed with Wopat earlier that year in Broadway's Annie Get Your Gun. O'Brien joined the revival about a year into its run, in April 2000, when Wopat and Bernadette Peters were still starring, and stayed with it until it closed on Labor Day weekend 2001. Soon after that, O'Brien played a featured role in a production of Lady in the Dark, directed by Ted Sperling and starring Andrea Marcovicci, at Philadelphia's Prince Music Theater. He portrayed the movie star Randy Curtis, one of Marcovicci's suitors, and had a duet with her. Regionally, O'Brien also has performed at Connecticut's Goodspeed Opera House, in The Pajama Game and On the Twentieth Century, and at North Carolina Theatre, in Shenandoah (as eldest son Jacob), Fiddler on the Roof (Fyedka) and West Side Story (Diesel).

In May 2004, O'Brien returned to Broadway in Beauty and the Beast, after six months on its third national tour. He understudied both the Beast and Gaston in addition to playing ensemble roles. Comparing Belle's two leading men, he says, "If you want to just go out and have a good time, the levels you can create with Gaston's villain quality and bravado are a lot of fun. But to go through that process with the Beast, and the magic that Disney has, is great too." O'Brien is proud to have gone on as the Beast for an Actors Fund benefit performance.

One day during his run in Beauty and the Beast, O'Brien received a note from a family who was coming to see the show. Their note said something like "We can't believe we came to one show in New York and you're in it! Would you mind meeting us after the show?" After the performance, he was greeted at the stage door by a young couple with their daughter, all visiting from Ireland. "They're like, 'We're so excited, because we went to school with your brother.' And I'm like, 'You went to school with my brother? Here in the city?' And they said, 'No, no, over in Dublin.'

"They were obviously there to see Brían O'Byrne," O'Brien continues. "I said, 'I assure you, Brían O'Byrne is not playing a dancing knife. However, he is currently starring in a play called Doubt around the corner…'" That wasn't the only time such a mixup has occurred; O'Brien once even got a call congratulating him on his Tony nomination. When he finally met O'Byrne, it was in the theater-district restaurant Angus McIndoe, where O'Brien was dining with his Beauty and the Beast castmate Brynn O'Malley (who's currently playing Amber in Hairspray). They were introduced to O'Byrne, who was also dining there, by a friend. "The conversation went something like: 'Brían, Brian. Brian, Brían. Brían, Brynn. O'Malley, O'Brien, O'Byrne…'"

While O'Brien did not become a dramatic actor like De Niro (or O'Byrne) as he'd originally aspired to, he has scored some nonmusical roles. He's appeared repeatedly in bit parts on two soap operas. "The casting department at As the World Turns saw me as an upscale businessman or party guest, friend of the main characters; the people at All My Children saw me as blue-collar, fireman or cop," he says in describing his TV roles.

Perhaps most importantly, O'Brien has managed to avoid any serious injuries since the ankle fracture he suffered just as he was starting out. "It was a real wake-up call, because it showed me the fragility of this career and [that] you really have to be serious about doing it," he says. He also feels fortunate about the people he's worked with over the years. "Most of my [dance] training has come from observation, being on the job and watching people that I found to be incredible talents," O'Brien says. "I think I got most of my education from working with great choreographers and great dancers."

He also learned that you can nudge destiny along with some wishful thinking. "Put it out there, and it will come to you," O'Brien says about getting the jobs he's wanted. Doesn't that sound like the "if you think it, it will come" credo of the best-selling self-help tome The Secret? "I've read The Secret," he admits, adding: "But I think as actors we live The Secret anyway."

Photos of Brian, from top: in The Pirate Queen; backstage at Steel Pier with Kristin Chenoweth; with Annie Get Your Gun star Bernadette Peters; as the Beast; as himself. [Pirate Queen photo by Joan Marcus]