The dancing masters

Riverdance has opened many doors, and their new project hits the stage next year, Moya Doherty and John McColgan tell Siobhán Creaton

Moya Doherty and John McColgan, the husband and wife duo that created the Riverdance phenomenon, are getting ready to raise the curtain on their next Broadway hit.

They have joined with the team behind Les Misérables and Miss Saigon, to create The Pirate Queen, a musical based on Ireland's legendary sea queen, Grace O'Malley, or Granuaile. It is scheduled to open in Chicago early next year with an opening on Broadway in their sights toward the end of 2006.

Casting notices posted in the US describe the show as "a blend of pop, rock, musical theatre, and Irish music set in 16th-century Ireland and England". The Tony Award-winning writer Alain Boublil and composer Claude-Michel Schönberg have written O'Malley's story and are hoping the $10 million theatre production will be another box-office hit.

It's four years since Doherty (47) and McColgan (60) brought the story to two of the most creative people in musical theatre. "We didn't want to do another Riverdance as we felt we couldn't better it. We wanted a story. We thought about a musical with its routes in Ireland and with dance."

Fortunately, the pair fell in love with O'Malley's character and Doherty says they have made it their own. They have now put together an A-list American creative team and are looking forward to opening night.

McColgan and Doherty describe being involved in theatre as their primary interest and are ecstatic to be players on the world stage - and it's all thanks to the success of Riverdance. "I am quite sure if we hadn't had the Riverdance success Alain and Claude-Michel wouldn't have engaged with us," Doherty says.

Riverdance, the show that grew from a seven-minute Irish music and dance interval act in the 1994 Eurovision Song Contest, is one of Ireland's biggest exports. It was Doherty's idea to bring the music and dance act to the Eurovision, the show she was producing for RTÉ. The enthusiastic response of the audience on the night, followed by huge interest from television networks across Europe, was sufficient to convince the couple they had stumbled upon a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. Doherty's two-year contract with RTÉ was due to end, and she decided not to renew it, preferring to channel all of her energy into Riverdance.

The couple had other business ventures. McColgan had forged a successful career as a television director, and together they ran their own television production company, Tyrone Productions, making drama, documentary and entertainment programmes. They also had Abhann Productions and were founders of Ireland's second national radio station, Today FM.

"We knew it was the beginning of something that could grow," McColgan says. "We decided to do a stage show and record it for television but felt the live element of the audience reaction was something special, and that was the beginning of it. It was a fantastic and extraordinary time."

Doherty says it was a completely new experience for both of them, and they just built on the successful business model they used at Tyrone Productions to mount this ambitious new venture. "We weren't theatrical producers, even though we had both been involved in theatre. Because this was an idea that just exploded, we managed a lot of it ourselves. The foot was so far down on the accelerator that we hardly had time to think."

Doherty says the early days of Riverdance were nerve-racking but terrific. "There wasn't time for very long debates or doing an analysis of whether this was a good or a bad thing."

McColgan reminds her that a lot of people thought they were crazy to be mounting a show with a budget of €1.3 million. "While there was a lot of enthusiasm for the idea, when it actually came down to the wire, people who had said: 'God that's a great idea, I would love to invest in that' went missing. We then had to make that decision to take the financial risk ourselves."

They were supported and advised by those who did invest, including Paul McGuinness, Maurice Cassidy, Tommy Higgins, RTÉ - people who understood the business.

The couple had two young boys at this time, aged two and four, and Doherty admits it was hard to juggle everything. A local couple she had met during her first pregnancy moved into their home and looked after the children.

The new show was a runaway success and sold out in Dublin before they went into rehearsal. "We were really lucky. The business side was looked after. We knew the investors were going to get their money back and they might even make a small profit. Then we could totally concentrate on the creative side and that was really liberating," she says.

The show sold out in London and eventually moved to the US, opening at New York's Radio City Music Hall in 1996. "There were 5,000 people there that first night. People had travelled from Ireland - but you never know how it will go. You hold your breath. At the end of the evening 5,000 people jumped to their feet and cheered and stamped their feet. It was an emotional moment. At that moment you knew this show had life in America beyond this moment," he says.

Almost 10 years on, Riverdance has played more than 8,000 performances, been seen live by more than 18 million people in 250 venues worldwide, throughout 30 countries across four continents. The show has been viewed by a 1.5 billion global television audience, and has sold more than 2.5 million copies of the Grammy Award-winning CD and nine million videos and DVDs. The couple's wealth is estimated at more than €70 million.

"We didn't realise it at the time but looking at the history of musical theatre Riverdance was one of the top three events in the world at the time," Doherty says. "It broke a lot of moulds."

Doherty and McColgan won the Ernst & Young Entrepreneur of the Year award in 1999 and are on the judging panel that will select this year's winner to be announced on Thursday.

McColgan says that part of the buzz of being an entrepreneur is having the freedom to make your own decisions.

"You believe in your idea and in how it should be executed, particularly if it is something that hasn't been done before. Riverdance was a leap of faith. We absolutely believed that this had the potential to be something extraordinary and to transcend a one-off run in Dublin."

Their track record has catapulted them into theatre's major league. "It's great to get your first break. It opens doors," he says. "We have had the opportunity to work with all of the top people in North America, theatre promoters, owners and publicists. That's what business success brings."

As well as working on The Pirate Queen, McColgan is collaborating with Wes Craven, the Hollywood director of Red Eye and Nightmare on Elm Street, on a horror stage show called Magick Macabre. It is set to open in Las Vegas in 2007.

They live in Howth in north Co Dublin but spend long periods travelling. They will be pretty much based in the US in the months ahead as they put the finishing touches to The Pirate Queen. They are hoping it will follow box office hits such as Spamalot and Wicked from Chicago to Broadway.

"At the moment we have an enormous amount of goodwill. People want whatever our next production is," McColgan says. "Them wanting it is one thing but it has to be a hit and that's always a risk. You are only as good as your last show."