Kristin Chenoweth in The Queen of Versailles.
Photo: Julieta Cervantes
There is a two-hour-and-40-minute luxury-car crash happening at the St. James Theatre. If I were the litigious type, I’d be trying to figure out how to sue for whiplash. Instead, here I am staggering homewards, still trying to twist my head back into position after The Queen of Versailles. If you’re morbidly curious about the experience, you could try for tickets to the new musical by Stephen Schwartz and Lindsey Ferrentino, with Kristin Chenoweth glittering relentlessly at its center. Or you could save the money and have someone slap you back and forth with a large salmon.
I’m not being nasty, at least not intentionally so. If a critic’s job is to say what you saw and how it made you feel, then right now I feel smacked around, and something smells fishy. Based on the 2012 documentary by Lauren Greenfield—about Jackie and David Siegel, Florida timeshare billionaires whose plans to “build the biggest house in America” were scuppered by the 2008 financial crisis—The Queen of Versailles swerves and overcorrects like a drunk driver. Tonally, it’s all over the map. Ethically, it would like to have its cake and also tell the peasants to eat it. It is the confused, contorted product of a set of absolutely incompatible impulses: to ogle, even lionize the Über-rich but also to critique them; to revel in conspicuous consumption and also to satirize it. Ultimately spineless, it ends up wedged in the middle, its highs shiny and hollow and whatever values it aspires to more performed than profound, like a kid rolling his eyes while writing “I must not engage in wanton acts of commercialism” 50 times on the blackboard.
Another Stephen, the most formidable of them all, was in his final work also intrigued by the gleam and precarity of insane wealth, and even he couldn’t quite pull off the balancing act of simultaneous judgment and sympathy for its accumulators. Whereas the cool, ambivalent eye of documentary can particularize a story like the Siegels’ to great effect, the stage runs hot. It tends to demand an artist’s moral commitment one way or another — at the very least, it will necessitate some clarity over what we’re all doing here. Ferrentino (on book) and Schwartz (on music and lyrics) give us little to hold onto beyond platitudes about the American dream and, on Schwartz’s part, good-natured groaners like “understand ’em” and “random.” Director Michael Arden, meanwhile, is up to his elbows just moving the cumbersome Legos of Dane Laffrey’s set around. Clearly the creators, like their protagonist, aspired to more: The show, notes the script, is intended as “a modern fable about the American Dream … Our main character does what America teaches: work harder, want bigger, never stop. Her unfinished palace becomes a mirror to a culture that mistakes accumulation for meaning. Jackie is as complicated as the nation that created her.”
That sounds good. But even if you stick a label on a hammer that says it’s a needle, it’s still a blunt instrument. Or, if you’re making a musical about the Siegels and then inviting its real-life heroine to come and see it (the king is dead, but the night I saw the show, Jackie herself was there, tiara on and fluffy white doglet in tow, royal-waving from center orchestra as people cheered and snapped photos), you can check all the boxes of a plucky homespun Cinderella story and then spike your sugary brew with some acidic reminders that capitalism is bad and that growing up ultrarich is hard too. Odds are you’ll end up with something pretty tough to swallow.
At the center of all the glitzy havoc—her face often looming on a huge flat screen that rolls around the stage, following actors like a hulking LED stalker—is of course Chenoweth. If nothing else, it’s fascinating to see where Wicked’s witches have traveled in the twenty years since their big breaks. Elphaba is communing with trees as Glinda, reunited with the composer of “Popular,” goes softcore Momma Rose for the influencer era in various sparkly minidresses and a half-finished mansion the size of the Taj Mahal. (As of earlier this year, the real Jackie’s personal Versailles still wasn’t complete, though she claims it’s getting close.) With her eternal prom princess energy, nice if mushy politics, and supercharged confetti canon of a voice, Chenoweth zips right into the part of Jackie as if it were one of those bespoke bodycon frocks. (In a way it is — the actor has called it her dream role and is among the show’s lead producers.) She certainly gets to show off both her belt and the agility of her instrument—there’s a sonically fun moment where Jackie does some coloratura warbling with Marie Antoinette herself (Cassondra James)—but to what end? Usually, it’s to keep driving undauntedly toward the “more and more” she wants for herself and her eight kids. (She’s got six with David, played by a bluff if blurry F. Murray Abraham in White Lotus patriarch mode, plus an oldest daughter from an allegedly abusive first marriage, plus a niece she’s adopted.) This is a woman who, on her way up from humble roots, got herself a breast augmentation without anesthetic to save the money. “Throw a towel over my head, gimme a Valium, and I am good to go!” chirps Chenoweth. That’s not heroism; that’s nuts. But Jackie’s defining value is framed as determination, and The Queen of Versailles is too busy handing her upbeat girlboss numbers to reckon in any meaningful way with the consequences. Musical theater loves a go-getter, and halfhearted irony just can’t stand up to this much zazz.
Still, those anthems to tenacity and, as Jackie patriotically calls it, “the right to pursue happiness” are less inherently cringey than the show’s most sentimental number, a soppy ode to the joys of limited means called “Little Houses.” After the 2008 crash has left the Siegels selling off their gold-plated tchotchkes, Jackie takes her oldest, Victoria (Nina White), back up to the small town in New York where her own ever-smiling parents (Stephen DeRosa and Isabel Keating) raised her in Pollyanna-ish semi-poverty: They got by, and they all played the numbers and watched “Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous” together on the couch every night. Now, the generations sing together—along with, back in Florida, the adopted Jonquil (Tatum Grace Hopkins) and the family’s Filipino nanny Sofia (Melody Butiu)—about how “little houses have big hearts.” Along with the schmaltz, there’s a grating false dichotomy at work. Following too closely in its protagonist’s footsteps, The Queen of Versailles presents only two options — tough but spiritually fulfilling material deprivation or unconstrained acquisitiveness. It’s a conservative, unimaginative worldview: either Marie Antoinette’s fantasy of the rural peasantry or her own lavish reality. The idea of actively defining an ethos apart from rampant gain and living by it in such a way as to let others live too… That doesn’t enter the picture.
Ferrentino and Schwartz might think that they’ve sidestepped the problem of aggrandizing Jackie by plopping Marie Antoinette and her husband, Louis XVI (Pablo David Laucerica), into the play. Every so often, the dead monarchs and their court sashay out of the past to offer unsubtle commentary. “No mob will storm your palaces,” they sing to today’s “American aristocracy.” “No blade across the throat for you / Instead it seems your peasant class / Will all turn out to vote for you!” As analysis, that’s not wrong, but where’s the sting of it inside this bizarre bonbon of a musical? Is it actually all that clever or effective when the queen of the title has invested in the production, when the audience wants photos and autographs with that queen, and when the reality we’re living in includes no end of mind-melting context — from the real David’s boast that he “got George W. Bush elected” to his description of Trump’s first victory as “the greatest thing that’s happened to me since I discovered sex”? Or the fact that Jackie and David published their teenage daughter’s diary after she died of an overdose? Or their more recent creation of an AI website assistant with her name? The cognitive dissonance is so violent it leaves you queasy.
There is one person in The Queen of Versailles who, beyond the content of her lyrics, is worth listening to, and that’s Victoria. Schwartz has written her two big belters of yearning, suffering teenagerdom, “Pretty Always Wins” and “The Book of Random,” and though the songs themselves don’t exactly transcend (especially not “Random”), White does in singing them. Her clarion voice slices through the show’s labored attempts to be both fable and fabulous. If there’s real tragedy here, it’s in watching her bulldozer mother roll on after her loss, like Mother Courage in Gucci. That’s probably the play Ferrentino and Schwartz wanted to write. So much for American dreams.
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Asked for the polar opposite of a Broadway splash about the woes of billionaires, one might reasonably come up with a new Anne Washburn play. Washburn is just about as “downtown” as downtown gets, if such a distinction still exists. She’s a formalist, her voice at once dry and slippery, her poetry epic in one moment and meticulously prosaic the next. Her Mr. Burns, a post-electric play is a sprawlingly brilliant contemplation of the human mythmaking impulse: It depicts three subsequent generations after an apocalypse wherein, decade by decade, the “Cape Feare” episode of The Simpsons is somehow reconstructed via oral tradition then transformed into a sacred-and-civic ritual on par with the Dionysian festivals of ancient Athens. A London reviewer called it “three hours of utter hell” after its premiere there. For my money, it may be the play of the first quarter of this century.
From The Burning Cauldron of Fiery Fire, at the Vineyard Theatre.
Photo: Carol Rosegg
I wish I were as thrilled with The Burning Cauldron of Fiery Fire, Washburn’s latest experiment now getting its premiere at the Vineyard under the direction of Steve Cosson, the playwright’s collaborator on both A Devil at Noon and Mr. Burns. There are other Washburn regulars here too, like the excellent actors Bruce McKenzie and Jeff Biehl, but despite all their long acquaintance, something about the project never quite comes into focus. Strangely, it turns out to share aspects with The Queen of Versailles: Here too the script describes—and, at times, prescribes—a production that isn’t really the one in front of us. And though Burning Cauldron suffers no issues of integrity (to quote one of its characters, its messiness comes “without the bad ethics”), it still feels amorphous in its ambition and surprisingly squishy at its center. I kept picturing a pulsing, many-tentacled blob — an intriguing creature that reaches out over and over with new gloopy arms to latch onto different weighty questions, then keeps reabsorbing all those potential inquiries back into itself without much ensuing revelation, transformation, or consequence.
The story concerns an off-grid “intentional community” in Northern California. There are 26 members but we get to know only a central handful, as the eight actors double as various adults and their small children. They’re well-intentioned social experimenters, misfits, and wanderers, trying to chisel an anti-capitalist existence out of compost and cast iron and collective prayer, but when we meet them they’re in crisis. One of their number (played by Tom Pecinka, apparently making a trademark out of troubled long-haired artists named Peter) has killed himself, and in their grief and out of a sense of ceremony, they’ve attempted a ritual burning of the body. “The decision, which we made collectively — and we did make it collectively,” says Thomas (McKenzie in a grizzled ponytail), the group’s most senior member and most voluble philosopher, “was made in great emotion and, like a lot of decisions made in great emotion, it was very satisfactory, but um … then there’s a lot of responsibility around it.” Especially what to do with the many parts of Peter that didn’t turn into ash. (“He’s too clumpy to scatter,” says the practical Simon, played by Biehl, in an exemplary bit of macabre Washburnian humor.) Or, more high-stakes still, what to do if his family comes looking for him.
It’s such a great set-up that the nebulousness with which the play then unfolds becomes tough to embrace. In a long sequence after intermission, the community performs a fairy-tale pageant, supposedly written by Peter and the kids, for Will (also Pecinka, in less hair and slicker clothes), Peter’s enigmatic brother who has in fact turned up in search of him. It takes a lot to make me lose patience with a play-within-a-play, but here, as with so many elements in Burning Cauldron, there’s potential being wasted. In Cosson’s rendering, this skit is far too lavishly produced to feel truly of its makers (it’s not scrappy — it’s “scrappy”); and though it introduces the portentous object of Washburn’s title, its symbols never really add up. There’s fire and death and rebirth and love and a magical chicken and a big red dragon and, jumping blithely in the cauldron’s lava, giggling “Fire Fish” — which all start to diminish when cutesy repetition comes without the oomph of thematic accumulation. Meanwhile, the David Lynch–style tension built by Will’s arrival just kind of fizzles. So does a scene in which a nonverbal, neurodivergent member of the community named Ghazal (Bartley Booz) eats a piece of paper that’s probably Peter’s suicide note. That character’s very existence verges on dangerously tropey—the disabled semi-prophet whose name is a form of poetry—and, at the same time, he’s hardly more than another dead end. The play’s fire fishes are ultimately outnumbered by its red herrings. Haunting and wonderful images coalesce then dissipate, or recur without a sense of aggregated force. (Monkey Boys Productions has built some banging puppets for the show, especially in its finale, but they’re fated to feel nifty in a vacuum.) Some incredible lines come out of people’s mouths, and then the clouds gather again.
“Is that smoke?” says one of the ensemble at the start of the show. “Or fog,” asks another as the actors all form a chorus together. Whichever it is, it obscures more than is theatrically effective. As Milo—the only character to transcend time in the story, who sometimes speaks across the footlights to us as an adult from the future, while also taking part in the action as his 6-year-old self—Bobby Moreno at one point offers this koan: “I was brought up to expect something from the world I can’t locate; I’m the holder of a question no one can answer to my satisfaction. Sometimes this is a burden, but it’s mainly an advantage. I’m never startled by the absence of a ‘there’ there; I never believed in one.” That’s got all the enticing ripples of profundity and still, to make a manifesto of it is risky. Walk out of a play’s shadows back into the clear light of day without a there to take with you, and even a burning cauldron will become little more than a brief candle.
The Queen of Versailles is at the St. James Theatre.
The Burning Cauldron of Fiery Fire is at the Vineyard Theatre through November 30.
