Broadway's biggest theatre, the Gershwin, is booked as the venue for six months. But this, folks, is Riverdance. So naturally, the real plan is to book it solid for 20 years. Already, it has attracted the largest advance bookings in the Gershwin's history. Seven million dollars' worth. Then again, says Clint Mitchell of the prestigious William Morris agency, big as the Gershwin is, it only holds 1,920 - "a third of what we're used to". But 20 years? On Broadway? Clint's grin broadens: "We're gonna kick their ass".
This, after all, is the company that has managed to grow and prosper despite 15 "copycat" companies currently touring the world, some of whom have raised brand awareness to a high art. "From the land that brought you Riverdance," is as subtle as it gets on some advertising bumph. Misleading? Us?
It is a couple of weeks before the Broadway opening and the final run-through is roaring through the gloomy SFX hall in Dublin's north inner city.
Brian Kennedy strolls on stage, woolly hat around his ears, his voice angelically clear in the familiar opening bars. Maria Pages strikes a pose, clacks her castanets and launches into a playful dance with the lovely, Manhattan-born violinist, Athena Tergis. Eight South Africans, led by the fabulously regal, Tony-nominated singer, Tsidii Le Loka, belt out hypnotising rhythms. Seriously muscular, acrobatic male Russian dancers lift and twirl some lissom colleens.
A Russian twists an ankle and winds up in ice packs; the male lead falls on his face during a flying leap; but otherwise it all flows smoothly towards the thunderous, spine-tingling Riverdance finale. It is a potent brew that famously defies definition. Clint describes Riverdance as "a new art form, a cross between dance, theatre and music, a touch of Cirque Soleil crossed with a bit of theatre". Whatever, it gives him the luxury of selecting only the "best and most conscientious promoters" in the US and then slapping them with a 38-page "rider", stipulating criteria such as full-page adverts, no tobacco or alcohol sponsorship, etc . . . Well heck, if you represent a show seen by more than 10 million people, which has generated video sales worth more than £90 million, and planted a brand so deeply in the popular lexicon that even Desperate Dan is "riverdancing" across the Dandy, then yes sir, you can issue as many 38-page riders as you like.
But what about all that dosh? The show's begetters concede gamely, if uncomfortably, that "it's bound to fascinate people". But Moya Doherty and John McColgan are - in a glib phrase that evokes a quiver of distaste in Doherty - certainly riverdancing all the way to the bank. This year, on the fifth anniversary of Riverdance - The Show at the Point, the original investors' percentage bonanza ran out. So farewell then, RTE (in for 20 per cent), Paul McGuinness, Maurice Cassidy and Tommy Higgins. Riverdance is now bringing it all back home to Doherty and McColgan: the £100 million turnover, the merchandising (worth about $18 million so far) and the handsome profits. "It's entirely ours. It's fantastic," says McColgan with a grin. "And if somebody had offered us all the money for the original investment, it could have been somebody else's."
Like all investments that are so pretty damn obvious in hindsight, this one is a real tooth-gnasher. What makes it funny is that the original cabal of investors was no golden circle. They were all that remained when the other promises evaporated, leaving Doherty and McColgan exposed for £800,000. Calamity could have come in the form of a blizzard or a bus strike leading up to that February premiere and Doherty, the cautious one, had never even gambled on a horse. "Was I ringing around looking for more investors? Was I what?" she asks incredulously. "John's a terrible optimist but I'd have given it to the first person who called. I remember sitting across the table during one negotiation - quite late in the show's development - and somebody looking me in the eye and saying, `you will not get anybody to buy this project at this stage. They won't do it. You're going to have to see it all the way and then maybe somebody will buy it.' "
But she negotiated "quite hard too . . . I knew that all investors, and rightly so, would seek to be treated on a favoured nations basis, so that sharpened my mind very quickly because, you know, you have a percentage and you divide it by five and - who-oo-ops . . . But we got very lucky because the first phase of the investor return was much greater than the continuing return." What that means is that (apart from RTE, the major investor, whose return wasn't scaled) Doherty was clever enough to negotiate a descending percentage for each subsequent year with the others.
The SFX retains an emotive resonance for the original participants; it's where the show had its final run-through before the 1995 premiere. But no one has been wafted off course by the fairytale. Today, despite a few misty eyes, the atmosphere is relaxed but workmanlike. Memories are still vivid. "Oh yes, I certainly do still think about it," Doherty says with feeling. "Every single thing, every step of the way from that time is still very marked. None of us ceases to be amazed at how it has survived . . ."
Sizing up the components of a Riverdance show is a bit like watching the credits roll on a movie based on a Maeve Binchy novel. From one spark of an idea has grown a multi-faceted industry. In an eyrie in Dorset Street, the costume designer, Joan Bergin, is overseeing the design and manufacture of 530 outfits. For the wispy, jewelcoloured creations fashioned from featherlight silks and velvets as well as the boucle wools and tweeds, she has drawn her inspiration from artists such as Harry Clarke and Charles Lamb. High-tech fabrics shoot shimmering colour as if being followed by a spotlight; dresses implanted with fibre optics seem to glow from within. Fabric painters, embroiderers, traditional weavers, jewellers, shoemakers and leather designers have all been drawn in.
It is worlds away from the original Riverdance concept of stark, pared down black - a look insisted upon by Doherty five years ago to distance the show from the old Ireland groove. Who is afraid of traditional Celtic imagery now?
The artist Robert Ballagh, whose set-designs and paintings have influenced the feel and look of the show, is also involved with Bergin in designing a range of jewellery to add to its lucrative merchandising arm. Drawing on the sun/moon imagery that permeates the sets, the jewellery in bronze, silver and gold will get its first outing at the Gershwin, pitched between $20 and $200.
Riverdance homeware and clothes are under discussion. McColgan and Doherty's total control over this as in everything else - despite many approaches from major stores seeking the Riverdance franchise - is part of the Riverdance legend.
So what do you do when you have created a living entity and enough money to do what you like? Retire to Barbados? Not quite. Doherty and McColgan still roll their sleeves up, but they are learning to take great chunks of time out; six weeks last summer with their eight- and 10-year-old boys, in their "modest" home in Naples, Florida, where Mike Murphy also has a condo on the beach. Another spell there at Christmas in a family gathering that included, to John McColgan's evident pleasure, his two grown children from a previous marriage - Lucy, who runs a corporate entertainment business and Justin, who is now a director/cameraman with TV3.
The success of Riverdance has also yielded obvious benefits at home, from a Howth bungalow a few years ago, to a beautiful £500,000 country home in Co Meath, and now back to Howth again, to Danes Hollow, a spectacular four-and-a-half acre site overlooking Dublin Bay for which they paid close to £1 million in 1997.
Recalling a time when they pushed buggies around Howth, dreaming of owning a house overlooking the water, McColgan reports that the "dream house" is finally taking shape. "It's not a massive house," he says. And no, there is not underground car parking for 35, but there is a basement swimming pool and internal parking for five cars. There will be lots of slate, stone and wood and light enough to satisfy Doherty's craving for the winter sun. "It's going to be a very fine piece of architecture," she says, "a joy to look at."
This is the place they will "stop in," says her husband. "Both Moya and I are northsiders," he says definitively. "Moya's family moved from Donegal to Clontarf when she was young. When I moved to Dublin, I lived in Clonmel Road in Ballymun. And our first home in Dublin was in Windgate Road in Howth. There's the sea and the sense of a peninsula, the village is a village and we know the chemist and the butcher and the newspaper shop and the doctor and the lovely sense of being part of a community."
Home life, chez McColgan, despite the frequent foreign work-forays, flows smooth ly, thanks to an introduction by Kathleen Watkins 10 years ago which brought Doreen and her husband, Leo, into their lives. "When I saw Doreen down on her hands and knees cleaning the fringes of some shabby old rug with a toothbrush, I thought - this woman is never leaving my life," Doherty says. "I couldn't have done what I have done without them. I always knew that whatever was going on, my children were safe and loved."
Which leaves McColgan and Doherty free to conquer new worlds. There is still TodayFM (of which they own 21 per cent), not an unalloyed joy, one gathers, either financially or creatively. McColgan was on the losing side in the battle which ultimately saw Radio Ireland dumbed down and reborn as Today FM. They also own 20 per cent of the Hot Press Hall of Fame, as well as all of Tyrone Productions, probably the country's biggest independent television producer. But McColgan and Doherty are also mixing it with the Hollywood big boys now. "We have a reputation in the US now . . . If you're seen to be a success, it's a fantastic door opener. And everybody's heard of Riverdance," McColgan says.
The Hollywood project involves a screenplay about the Great O'Neill, "a major historical drama" which has fired up a major director, a major actor (wild guess, Liam Neeson?) and a major budget of $30 to $40 million. They are also working on a "major new theatrical project which will take Irish music and dance on to an entirely new level". And yes, it will be on a "much bigger scale than Riverdance".
So, yep, they've moved up an intercontinental rung or two, but sitting in their Tyrone Productions offices, in the reborn PMPA building off Capel Street - now a minimalist's heaven of blond wood, cream chenille, Nigel Rolfe furniture and natural light - they can be equally upbeat about more home-spun interests. There is McColgan's seat on the Abbey board, Doherty's chairmanship of the Dublin Theatre Festival and her fund-raising activities for Draiocht in Blanchardstown - "the first purpose-built arts centre in Ireland . . . with the biggest stage in Ireland".
But she is "stepping back" from Riverdance: "I really want to move on and do something else . . . I have a certain creeping sense of restlessness and really, if you look at the history of anything I've done, I haven't hung around anything for longer than a year. But I think that is the job of a producer - to produce and move on."
As for her husband, despite speculation, McColgan insists he "wouldn't really" want the chairmanship of the Abbey "at this time . . . but I'm proud to be on the board and to be involved in something as central to Irish culture as the Abbey theatre."
So is this Mr Riverdance's stab at winning the approval of the artistic elite, as has been suggested? He sighs and confronts an old chestnut: "There will always be a cultural elite who will sneer at anything that is overtly commercial. Now if Riverdance were a six-man show running around the world and losing money, I'm sure they would be delighted with it. I understand that and it will ever be thus. Anything that is commercial can't be good, can't have intrinsic quality because too many people want to see it and if too many people want to see it, then obviously it doesn't have great merit. But the thing that gratifies me about the success of Riverdance is that there is an enormous pride in seeing in this production the standard of the performances and of the music, and the effect is has on audiences from Japan to San Francisco. People are still moved, engaged . . . I'm still enormously proud of it."
And even the biggest begrudgers must concede that spinning gold from this particular dream took vision and courage.
This pair made their own luck. McColgan had a mother who thought he was wonderful, even when he left school at 14. ssing up his Latin declensions that his hands were too swollen to cycle home. After stints as a telegram boy in the GPO (from which he was sacked for "fraternising with play actors" from Radio Eireann), trainee barman, and men's shop sales assistant among others, he had the chutzpah at 17 to apply for a vision mixer's job at RTE. He landed the job (having plundered a book on television production to find out what a vision mixer did), turning down a longed-for Abbey acting scholarship for the RTE "fortune" of £12 a week.
Much later, he would choose the hard road of independent television production over his comfortable niche as award-winning head of RTE's light entertainment department.
Meanwhile, as a team, he and Doherty struck gold when they met in RTE. He was the optimist while she was the more reflective one. Her parents were both schoolteachers who left Pettigo, Co Donegal when she was seven and moved to Dublin. She rebelled against the "academic approach which was very much the way you were measured in our house" and after leaving Manor House school in Raheny, dreamed of being an actor. Even after joining RTE as a secretary, she pursued acting courses and took leave of absence to tour with TEAM. And after all that, she says, she "never took to it, really", nor to the RTE presenting-jobs that came her way. She would find her metier finally, as an RTE producer.
Life between times, was bumpy enough. They both spent time working for the troubled TVam in London, he - "like a rat joining a sinking ship" - arriving there just as its household names, Parkinson, Ford and Rippon, were flouncing out. "Great experience," mumbles McColgan, almost to himself, "for Radio Ireland and Today FM".
Then, having set up Tyrone Productions with the aid of the £25,000 goodbye-money from TVam, they decided to return to Ireland. Although Doherty had been accepted onto the sought-after producers course in RTE, the Ireland of the early 1980s was not the most obvious place to be heading, to live with a separated man. "From every point of view, it was the worst possible time," she recalls . "The abortion and divorce referendums were hanging over the country and a priest friend of ours rang to ask were we daft to think of coming back to that kind of atmosphere. But I suppose I knew that I didn't want to live in London for the rest of my days . . ."
Looking back, every move of Doherty's had a purpose; whether to gain an NUJ card to work as a reporter in London, climb another rung or - as an RTE producer - to provide a regular income while the fledgling Tyrone Productions was struggling to its feet. School Around the Corner was Tyrone's first commission from RTE, shot in "cost-effective" bursts of nine shows in three days. "They were hard, lean times," says McColgan, "There was great resistance to the independents from RTE. They were obliged to commission a certain amount, but they gave you the least amount possible to keep you alive, so there was no way you could make any money. Then you'd be sitting waiting for the phone to ring . . ."
So by a fine twist of fate, has RTE gone then from virtually starving Tyrone to giving them the biggest contracts available, complete with facilities? "I suppose Riverdance has been very good to them . . ." chortles McColgan. "Though of course there's no direct co-relationship".
Meanwhile, Doherty went on to win an award for the shocking Tuesday File documentary, The Silent Scream, a programme about incest and child abuse that foreshadowed the many to come. She also produced a Telethon, a gruelling challenge with a four-month-old colicky baby back home, but one that would ultimately lead to Eurovision '94. The old Donegal work ethic was firmly in evidence through it all.
There was a revealing moment a few weeks ago as she stepped out of the SFX, heading for Dorset Street. Though the sky was spitting icy rain, she rejected the luxury of the chauffeur-driven car. Setting up a lively pace against the wind, she seemed deep in thought, until suddenly she said: "I don't understand it when people say they can't go out in the rain. Can't they just dry off afterwards? I remember in Donegal, my mother and I had to get to the school early so we could light the fire."
There's not a chance in hell of Moya Doherty retiring to Barbados or Naples, Florida. Nor, one suspects, will Tinseltown satisfy her need to take on projects that matter. Her next steps will be worth watching.