Killing Blackbeard

In 1718, the Royal Navy spiked the head of Edward Thache on a bowsprit and sailed it back to Virginia. Six years later, a London printer published a book that called him Blackbeard, gave him fourteen wives, and set fire to his beard. That book has been the source of nearly every Blackbeard story told since.

Killing Blackbeard is the musical the Crown's book made necessary. Across two acts and twenty numbers, the show stages the rise and fall of a working-class Atlantic republic - three years on a few decks, hundreds of men who voted for their captain, signed articles that promised equal share and equal say, and died refusing the empire that hunted them down.

Narrated by Mary Ormond, the widow whose name the records barely preserve, the libretto refuses the propaganda book that has shaped the legend for three centuries and reaches instead for what the Crown's own archives, court depositions, naval dispatches, archaeological evidence, actually documented. Edward Thache speaks here in his only verbatim quote that survives in the historical record. Caesar of Queen Anne's Revenge is named alongside Jean Dubou, the surgeon-major of La Concorde, and the Africans who chose the deck over the hold.

A new musical in two acts. Book and lyrics by Cameron Moquin. Music by Mike Scudieri.