"In the Company of Pirates" good spot to land

This review appeared in The Flint Journal on July 23, 2007

As if three well-attended "Pirates of the Caribbean" movies weren't evidence enough of pop culture's continuing love of high-seas plunder, now comes "In the Company of Pirates."

Flint Youth Theatre's 50th-anniversary production romanticizes the trade of piracy through the lives of two unlikely practitioners.

Unlikely because Adam Bonny and Mark Reade, two of the toughest pirates along the Atlantic coast in the early 18th century were actually Anne Bonny and Mary Reade, members of what used to be called the fairer sex. William P. Ward, FYT executive artistic director, has taken their documented real-life stories and written them as an action comedy, farcical at times but never less than entertaining.

Holding the story together are a master of ceremonies, the fabled pirate Blackbeard (colorfully played by Ted Valley), and a Greek chorus of sorts comprised of his many "wives" of varying seaports. They provide narration for a show that relays a great deal of its exposition by spoken word rather than action on stage.

Still, this production, which opened Friday night, is hardly static.

Kishe Wallace and Claire Shinkman -- the latter especially spunky -- bring to life Anne and Mary, respectively. Ward (who also designed the production) and director Walter Hill want the viewer to be amused, but also to wonder if the bigger crime of these adventure seekers in their society was in being pirates, or in being women pretending to be men being pirates.

After an ill-fated marriage to a politically unfaithful mate, Anne keeps her secret with Captain John "Calico Jack" Rackham (Ron Bailey) by allowing him to believe he's king of his oceanic castle. Mary has a more complicated romantic life, with two happy relationships (one while she's in pirate garb, one while in petticoats) gone abruptly bad. Ward doesn't dwell on the tragic aspects, stressing the comedy instead, as when Mary uses a pair of, uh, "secret weapons" to get out of trouble.

"If you'd be a novelist, you couldn't write this stuff," boasts Blackbeard, and maybe he's right. In the strange-but-true department, Anne and Mary have it all over Disney's Captain Jack Sparrow and his colleagues in and around Davy Jones' locker.

By Ed Bradley
Assistant Features Editor, The Flint Journal