Three more performances left

Here's a trailer of our opening number!

We have three more performances at Open Eye Figure Theatre:

Friday, 9/23, 7:30pm
Saturday, 9/24, 7:30pm and 10pm.

Come join us!

Th' winds o' September will be blowin' soon!

Ahoy, me mateys! We be sailin' from th' coast o' St. Paul t' th' harbor o' South Minneapolis. Soon 'twill be our time t' walk th' docks thar lookin' fer customers. We wants t' go viral wit' a social approach! So tell yer scallywags about our run at th' Open Eye Figure Theater, September 9th through th' 24th! (For tickets click here me mateys!)

See our new performance schedule o'er t' starb'rd (right) on our tale (blog). (Down below th' picture o' our lusty, busty pirates.) Oh ne'er mind, here 'tis:

Friday, 9/9, 7:30 pm
Saturday, 9/10, 7:30 & 10:00 pm
Sunday, 9/11, 4:00 pm
Monday, 9/12, 7:30 pm (PWYC)

Friday, 9/16, 7:30 pm
Saturday, 9/17, 7:30 & 10:00 pm
Sunday, 9/18, 4:00 pm

Friday, 9/23, 7:30 pm
Saturday, 9/24, 7:30 & 10:00 pm

Fringe Encore!!!

One more chance t' see YARRRH! A hearty thank ye t' all our mateys who came t' our show 'n got us into th' encore! The encore is at 8:30pm on Sunday, 8/14, at the Gremlin Theatre! See the YARRRH! Fringe Encore page in order to buy tickets.

Another satisfied customer!

"Just saw YARRRH! at #mnfringe. Great if you enjoy lovely women, laughing & having a great time. Avoid if you hate fun." -- Stan Peal

Next Show: Tuesday, August 9th, at 5:30 PM

We're still living on the high from Sunday's performance! Please check out our reviews on the MN Fringe website!

Opening Day!!!

YARRRH opens today at 1pm at the Gremlin Theatre, St. Paul, MN!!!!

Lavender be likin' us!

YARRRH! The Lusty, Busty Pirate Musical be featured on racks all over the Twin Cites. Lavender magazine's John Townsend calls it one of "13 FRINGE SHOWS NOT TO MISS!" and tells ye why. Scott Pakudaitis's portrait of our lusty, busty belles be on the cover and on the inside, too! YARRRH!

The Inn & Out

Come visit Rosie at the Inn & Out!!!

Video courtesy of Andrew Melby.

From the MN Fringe Preview

YARRRH on Fresh Fruit

Listen to KFAI's Fresh Fruit show on 7/21/2011 where Ariel Leaf talks about YARRRH! Ariel speaks from about 5 min 33 secs to 8 min 30 secs.

Checking out the competition

While YARRRH! will certainly be the most outré pirate show in town, it will not be the only pirate show in town. Last Friday, the humble scribe of the Fringe's Lusty, Busty Pirate Musical put on his Groucho glasses and snuck off to the Riverview Theatre to see Pirates of the Caribbean 4.

We must admit: No towns, pirate ships, or even taverns will be destroyed in the course of YARRRH! For sheer spectacle, we can't compare. Which is as it should be, considering 1) POTC4 spent roughly 100,000 times what YARRRH! did, and 2) you couldn't really fit their sets and costumes into the Gremlin Theatre, let alone set them up and strike them in 10 minutes.

And yet, to this viewer, who wanted nothing more than to be entertained, POTC4 feel short of YARRRH! in some crucial areas. In the first place, while Penelope Cruz (be still, my beating heart!) has the potential to provide plenty of Bustiness, this was a Disney picture, so cleavage was notably tame. As for Lustiness, this picture had perhaps 2-3 minutes of it in a film running well over 2 hours. So we can claim total victory on the Lusty, Busty front!

And about that two-hour plus running time. There isn't that much difference between the basic plot structure of POTC4 and YARRRH! They're searching for the fountain of youth, we're searching for treasure. They have Spaniards, we have a hand puppet. (Actually, we need our hand puppet, and their show would improve without the Spaniards.) But we take care of our plot in 58 minutes and we have five songs!

Some people say, "less is more." Others say, "more is more." But only YARRRH! The Lusty, Busty Pirate Musical dares to give you both less and more. Make your reservation today!

Wind in our sails!

Fair winds be a-blowin', and buzz be a-buildin' for "YARRRH! The Lusty, Busty Pirate Musical."

First, a committee of hearing impaired Fringe fanatics has picked YARRRH! as one of the shows they would most like to have ASL described. We are honored! As a result, the performance on THURSDAY, AUGUST 11 at 8:30 will be ASL described at no cost to you or to us. (A big hand for the awesome Fringe folks!) A friendly warning: Historically, this is one of the best-attended time slots of the Fringe, so make your reservations early if you want to attend an ASL-described performance!

Second, the Fringe has asked five local arts figures what shows they are most looking forward to seeing ("Fringe Tracks" at www.fringefestival.org). Tif Roberts, accurately described as "the funniest cabaret host in the world," picks YARRRH! as one of her most highly anticipated shows. "Ok, call me a thespian lesbian," she writes, "but three actresses playing ten gender-bending roles, naughty language, boobs, pirates, and boobs. Yo ho, ho. It is indeed a pirate's life for me." Clearly, Tif is coming to our show with the proper (or improper?) attitude!

Third, we have been invited to plug our show on KFAI's FRESH FRUIT as part of their annual Queer Fringe Binge. So turn your knobs to 90.3 FM from 7:00-8:00 on Thursday, July 21! Ariel Pinkerton Leaf, coproducer and actor (Captain Desirée La Femme etc.) will be telling all --- or at least as much as she can without spoiling major plot points. We are proud of this invitation. While we consider YARRRH! to be a rollicking good time for adults of any sexual orientation, we hope that its camp quotient and pansexual naughtiness will make it one of this year's most GLBT-friendly Fringe productions.

Finally, we will be delivering live and in person an official YARRRH! tease at the Fringe-for-All on Monday, August 25. The first three minutes of our show will be delivered by two of our talented, lovely, and intrepid actresses at Mixed Blood Theatre. The cost for the event is a $4 Fringe button (which you'll have to buy anyway to see any Fringe show) and you will actually have the opportunity to see a whole mess of three minute previews, so you might get some ideas of what other shows you want to see at the Fringe. The show starts at 7:30 p.m. and we'll be on --- well, somewhere in the show. We'll find out about an hour before you do. Whee!

To Dream the Impossible Dream

Sure we're a small theatre --- arguably the Twin Cities' smallest. But we can still dream big, so when the call went out from Scott Mayer to submit proposals for Ivey Awards entertainment, we thought, "Why not apply?"

Look at it this way: the quality of our local theatre awards show has been getting better and better every year, but there's still one thing it's never had: a good, dirty pirate song. And we have several of those. In fact, our big dilemma is whether to propose a dirty song or a dirtier song.

Some might worry because the 1,000-seat State Theatre is almost ten times bigger than the 115-seat Gremlin, where we'll be performing for the Fringe. We say, "Bring it on!" We're waiting to do it. We're wanting to do it. If chosen, we have more than enough lust and bust to fill the State Theatre. And we can take full advantage of mikes nestled in our heavily advertised cleavage.

Arrrh nation's heritage

We, as a nation, are in grave danger of losing our collective piratical pop culture heritage. Fortunately, some folks are doing something about that.

No, I don't mean YARRRH! Yes, we steal and twist conventions from classic pirate movies, only resorting to complete invention when absolutely desperate. But the result, as action-packed and naughty as it will be, is really very postmodern and not to be confused with the classics themselves.

Another popular entertainment, the Pirates of the Caribbean series, is also eroding our collective knowledge about pirate cinema because it is much less honest than we are about the extent of its thievery. When describing YARRH! to my sister, I mentioned the character of Cecily Toadmoor, the beautiful niece of the loathsome Cyril Toadmoor, governor of Jamaica. She said, "Oh! Just like Kiera Knightley in Pirates of the Caribbean." Oh, no, no, no. The trope of the daughter/niece of the governor being the love interest of the pirate captain goes back at least as far as Captain Blood (1935). Pirates had erased this from her memory.

But worse than this: some of our own cast members have never heard of Erroll Flynn!

Fortunately, Trylon, the Minneapolis microcinema, is coming to everyone's rescue and whetting our collective appetite for all things piratical with their "Pirates! Pirates! Pirates!" film series (Url: http://www.take-up.org/series/48/). During the month of June, they are showing five great pirate films: The Sea Hawk (1940, with Erroll Flynn), The Crimson Pirate (1952, with Burt Lancaster), Captain Blood (1935, Erroll Flynn again), The Pirate (1948, Gene Kelly and Judy Garland), and The Black Pirate (1926, Douglas Fairbanks --- live music by The Poor Nobodys).

These films are nowhere near as lusty and busty as YARRRH! is going to be, but they have romance, adventure, and stirring swordplay --- and you can bring a kid. Check them out! Then when you come to our show, you'll be able to impress your date by turning and whispering, "Oh that --- they stole that from The Sea Hawk."

Yarrrh, Dan Pinkerton

Spotlight: Eliot

You think actors have a tough life. Try being a puppet who wants to be an actor. Eliot (lower center, wearing eyepatch) has always dreamed of playing the lead in Private Lives or A Streetcar Named Desire. These dream roles have eluded him, but he has managed to star in So This Puppet Walks into a Bar at Thirst Theatre (along with Barbara Kingsley and Jim Lichtscheidl) and play Tiny Tim at Commedia Beauregard's A Klingon Christmas Carol at Mixed Blood Theatre.

Eliot auditioned for the role of Toby Bustle, the wee lad who becomes cabin boy on The Salty Cockerel, in our production of YARRRH! The Lusty, Busty Pirate Musical. He made callbacks, and is very encouraged by the fact that Fortune's Fool used him as a model in the YARRRH! publicity shoot. Like any actor, he figures hustle and ingratiating himself with the producers might give him an edge. "It's who you know, right?" he says. "But they may be looking for somebody shorter or younger, so I'm preparing for callbacks and trying to stay calm."

"Whatever happens," he adds, "I'll get fifteen minutes of fame because of the photo shoot. I had a great time! Mr. Pakudaitis made me feel so relaxed. What a pro. And the women were all so nice to me, even though I don't have the part yet. Plus, face it, I'm a breast puppet."

The first rehearsals

We've had our first few rehearsals. It has been great to have a few read-thrus and have a chance to hear all the songs. It is such a joy to tailor a song to a singers voice. As Dan and I were working on the songs we had each of the singers come and sing for us. Sometimes it was just 'Amazing Grace' in order to understand the voices. Sometimes we have them run through sketches for the songs from the show. Even though we've started rehearals, we're still working on the songs and making adjustments as we go. A musical is not written--it is rewritten.

Coming soon...

YARRRH! The Musical!!!