This is a thumbs-up review, but before I explain that positive assessment, I must write about what left me absolutely gobsmacked even before the curtain went up on the new musical “The Queen of Versailles,” which opened Sunday at the St. James Theatre.
At the weekend preview I attended, the audience resembled a retired hookers’ convention at Mar-a-Lago. These were middle-aged women who took their fashion cues from “RuPaul’s Drag Race” and, with their fake boobs and Botox-pumped faces, made a tragically unsuccessful attempt to look 20, 30 years younger than their real age.
In 2008, when the first “Sex and the City” movie came out, fans of the long-running HBO series dressed up like Sarah Jessica Parker, right down to Carrie Bradshaw’s Jimmy Choos. Something similar is going on with “Queen” at the St. James. Fans of Jackie Siegel, subject of the 2012 documentary “The Queen of Versailles,” showed up at preview performances to replicate that billionaire’s surgically enhanced body and streetwalker fashion. Actually, the costumes (by Christian Cowan) that Kristin Chenoweth wears on stage in the title role are far less gaudy and booty-revealing than what occupied many of the seats in the orchestra at the St. James. At show’s end, after the obligatory standing ovation, there were even loud chants of “Jackie! Jackie! Jackie!”
These women had just witnessed a very different musical from the one I saw.
“The Queen of Versailles” has already been dubbed the MAGA Musical. The book by Lindsey Ferrentino and the songs by Stephen Schwartz cleverly channel Siegel’s aesthetic that too much is never enough. Here is a living ATM machine that spends an obscene amount of money because, as Jackie proudly explains, “I can!”
On a trip to France, after she has married the self-proclaimed Time Share King David Siegel (F. Murray Abraham), Jackie visits Versailles. Stepping into the Hall of Mirrors, she sees herself magnified into infinity, as well as eternity, and decides to re-create Louis XIV’s palace in Orlando, Florida.
Ferrentino’s book makes the inspired choice to open the show in that court of the Sun King (the enchanting Pablo David Laucerica) and Marie Antoinette (the imperious Cassondra James), and under Michael Arden’s always fluid direction, “The Queen of Versailles” flips back and forth between the old French royalty, who ended up being guillotined, and the new American power couple, who get hit with the 2008 economic meltdown. Before that financial calamity happens, Jackie takes a let-them-snort-caviar approach to life.
This production’s continual return to the real Versailles provides some much needed visual splendor (scenic design by Dane Laffrey), since the Orlando Versailles is under construction for much of the musical’s running time of two hours and 30 minutes. Construction sites aren’t pretty, and neither is this one on stage. For some reason never explained, Jackie and David Siegel install the world’s largest TV screen at their Orlando Versailles at the very beginning of its construction. It is this screen that envisions the many locales of Jackie’s rise from teenage Red Lobster waitress to abused spouse and mother to Mrs. Florida beauty contest winner to the suddenly rich spouse of David Siegel. Or as she puts it, “Only in America can you become a wife, a billionaire and a Jew all in one day!”
That terrific one-liner aside, Ferrentino’s book makes Jackie narrate too much of this journey. Chenoweth’s performance, Schwartz’s songs and Arden’s direction make the trip worthwhile, fortunately.
Ferrentino has the advantage that the real Jackie Siegel provides the “Queen” script with its best lines. And it is that uncommon wit that makes this bizarre woman’s story worth watching, and also turns “The Queen of Versailles” into that rarest of theatrical events: a genuine musical tragedy. “Gypsy” comes to mind. As with Rose, Jackie is both super smart and terribly driven. Both characters are woefully misguided in their ambition, since both are addicted to fame.
The “Gypsy” comparison is interesting for another reason. Stephen Sondheim wrote the lyrics for that 1959 classic, Jule Styne the music. However, when Sondheim went on to write both the lyrics and the music in the following decades for his now-classic shows, he did not follow in the easy melodic footsteps of Styne. Although it is forgotten today, many critics (especially at the New York Times) lamented that Sondheim didn’t continue to provide lyrics for Styne, whom they considered the far greater composer. It was Stephen Schwartz who picked up Styne’s far more traditional Broadway torch with the hits “Godspell,” “Pippin” and, of course, “Wicked.”
I’d argue that Schwartz’s more accomplished scores can be found in the far less performed “The Baker’s Wife” (1976) and “Séance on a Wet Afternoon” (2009). And now “The Queen of Versailles.”
To continue the “Gypsy” comparison: despite its classic status, the musical about stripper Gypsy Rose Lee’s mother has never enjoyed a long run on Broadway, neither in its original production nor its many revivals. The heroine Rose is too compromised and complicated, and doesn’t provide the story with a typical happy ending. Neither does Jackie. Rose turns her daughter into a stripper. Jackie uses her daughter’s death by suicide to shill for even more fame and wealth.
No doubt the women chanting “Jackie! Jackie! Jackie!” at “Queen” saw a different female character. Or maybe they had fallen in love with Kristin Chenoweth, who exudes such charm and charisma that even Jackie’s most appalling statements of white privilege and unbridled capitalism lose some of their shocking edge. Her piping Barbie Doll soprano remains as strong and individual sounding as it did when she played Glinda in “Wicked” over 20 years ago.
That character’s “Popular” is now a commercial for an Olay body cream. The second act quartet “Little Houses” in “Queen” will one day make a great realtor ad. Schwartz’s music doesn’t so much challenge as it pleases with its infectious pop lyricism tinged with the occasional nod to C&W.
David Siegel gives his wife precisely what she wants because he can afford her extravagances. When he can no longer afford them after the 2008 crash, he goes from adoringly generous to chronically stingy in an instant, and F. Murray Abraham makes that flip-flop utterly believable. Far more conventionally sympathetic are Jackie’s Filipino nanny (Melody Butiu), her daughter Victoria (Nina White) and her niece Jonquil (Tatum Grace Hopkins), who quickly becomes more Jackie’s child than Victoria ever was. They’re all victims in very different ways of Jackie’s extreme materialism, and one of the show’s slyer visuals is how much this mother-aunt wants to be younger than the two teenagers living in her house.
Ferrentino’s book could use some judicious cutting. There are missteps of overstatement: when Jackie gets her comeuppance, no one needs to see Jonquil figuratively pissing all over her aunt’s misfortunes at show’s end. Also, there are references to the “new ballroom” and the “East wing,” as if the reappearance of Louis XIV and Marie Antoinette isn’t already shoveling the parallels on a bit thick.
