A centuries-old New England legend about the famous pirate Sam Bellamy and his love, Mary Hallett, is coming to Red Hook.
“The Royal Pyrate,” a new musical that reimagines Bellamy and Hallett’s tale in swashbucking style, will sweep into the historic Waterfront Museum for six performances starting Aug. 16.
Bellamy and Hallett’s story is well-known and oft-retold on Cape Cod, where they met back in 1715 and where Bellamy’s ship sank two years later.
But longtime friends and creative partners Jason Landon Marcus and Chas LiBretto — who wrote the music and lyrics and book, respectively — don’t remember exactly where they first heard about it.
“It seems like it came on the ether,” Marcus said. “We both just became infatuated with the story and the folklore and finding all the pieces of it that we could put together from the fragments that exist.”
Marcus and LiBretto have been working on the show for more than a decade, drawn in by “something at the heart of the story,” LiBretto said.
This version of “The Royal Pyrate” has a cast of just four people — including real-life couple Maggie Likcani and Danny Hayward as Hallett and Bellamy and Korie Lee Blossey as Blackbeard — and a band of six live musicians, including LiBretto on guitar and harmonica.
“I wanted [the music] to be kind of believable to the period,” Marcus said. “It’s acoustic instruments, fiddle, accordion, upright bass.”
He also wanted it to be true to “pirate genre,” but that was more open to interpretation.
“There are influences from English ballads, Irish and Celtic music, Caribbean calypso,” he said. “When you think of the pirate era, it was really quite a cultural melting pot, because you had people from Western Europe, from Africa, from the Caribbean, all kind of colliding on these spaces, these ships.”
The show blends sea shanties, pirate music, and roots rock as the lovers face adventure and an uncertain future. At the start of the show, smuggler Paulsgrave Williams, played by Lauren Molina, launches a swinging card game with a jaunty tune. Later on, Hallett, left alone and facing accusations of witchcraft while Bellamy is at sea, tries to explain herself in the ballad “The Wytch of Wellfleet.”
Bellamy and Hallett’s tale, while widely-known, is also a little hazy. The exact details of their lives are unclear, “wrapped up in hundreds of years of people misremembering the story,” LiBretto said.
Finding factual accounts of their history is “like a treasure hunt,” he said.
Much more is known concretely about Bellamy than Hallett. The best-kept records about the pirate came from the ships he robbed, LiBretto said.
“They took meticulous records — not the pirates — but the merchants and ships that were getting robbed,” he said. “There are like, insurance claims, there’s a record of the anarchy that was happening in the Caribbean.”
One speech believed to have been given by Bellamy to one of his victims was recorded and has survived to this day. Bellamy, the story goes, wanted to return the ship to the captain, but his crew voted to burn it.
Bellamy was apologetic but angry, and said the wealthy captain — like other rich men who made their fortunes legally — were no better than the pirates.
“They villify us, the scoundrels do, when there is only this difference,” Bellamy reportedly said. “They rob the poor under the cover of law, forsooth, and we plunder the rich under the protection of our own courage.”
The speech, Marcus said, is “very colorful.”
“It gives you a very good idea of his character,” he laughed. “Mary Hallett is a little more enigmatic to history, because a lot of the legends around her involve her being a witch.”
Legends said Hallett lured men to her death, or lived in the mouth of a whale. After her and Bellamy’s baby died, she was accused of killing the infant and was exiled from her community. Some people believe she waited patiently for Bellamy to return and was crushed when his ship sank. Others say she cast a spell that caused the catastrophe.
“The Royal Pyrate” fills in the gaps, using what’s known about the couple and what they may have been like to flesh out a new version of the story.
“When you look at them separately, they’re very fragmented, but when you put them together, they do kind of fill in this bigger picture,” Marcus said. “But as much as we could, we really did base a lot of it on historical research and record.”
In the end, the musical — about a pirate desperate for some cash to support his partner and child, and a woman facing unjust accusations after the loss of her baby — mirrors modern life.
“The story is 300 years old, but … one of the reasons we really wanted to do it this summer is it feels very relevant to us, at least, where we are politically and economically,” LiBretto said. “It just feels like this is a moment to explore our relationships with capital and where capital came from and what resistance can look like. And it’s not the first time in history that people have stood up and said ‘Enough.’”
“The Royal Pyrate” comes to the Waterfront Museum at 290 Conover St. in Red Hook for six performances from Aug. 16-30. Tickets start at $35.
