NEW YORK – No one can work harder on Broadway right now than Kristin Chenoweth, who carries the weight of a McMansion musical on her petite frame and makes it look like she's lifting nothing more than several overstuffed Hermes, Prada and Chanel shopping bags.
Chenoweth's troupe has reunited with its Wicked co-star Stephen Schwartz, who wrote the score for The Queen of Versailles. The play, which opened on Broadway at the St. James Theater on Sunday, is an adaptation of Lauren Greenfield's 2012 play. documentary about a family building one of the largest private homes in America in a style that combines Louis XIV with Las Vegas.
When the Great Recession of 2008 crashes the party, a Florida couple who are never satisfied despite having everything struggle to make mortgage payments on this unfinished (and possibly unfinished) Orlando colossus. Even the banks don't know what to do with this giant white elephant.
The first half of the musical traces Jackie's journey from a hard-working hillbilly from upstate New York to a beauty pageant winner in Florida who escapes an abusive relationship with her young daughter. Her dream of snagging a rich husband comes true when she meets David Siegel (F. Murray Abraham as a flamboyant, vulgar resort magnate). He is decades older than her, but is as rich as Croesus, proudly becoming the “Timeshare King”.
As David finances her every whim, Jackie discovers the joys of consumerism as her family expands along with her line of credit. David adopts her first child, Victoria (Nina White), a sullen teenager who doesn't appreciate her mother's extravagance. And the couple had six more children before they adopted Jackie's niece, Jonquil (Tatum Grace Hopkins), a Dickensian waif who turns up with all her belongings stuffed into plastic bags.
The book musical, written by Lindsey Ferrentino (whose plays include the veteran's recovery story “An Ugly Lie Is a Bone”), focuses only on Victoria and Jonquil, leaving the other children to our imagination, along with most of the pets, who suffer from the swing of lavish attention and mindless neglect that is the Siegel family order.
Jackie had no intention of building such a ridiculously gigantic house. As she explains in the number “Because We Can,” “We just want our dream house/And the house we're in now/Even though it's nice/It's only 26,000 square feet/So we're just bursting at the seams.”
This version of “The Queen of Versailles,” which features much of the visual design by stage and video designer Dane Laffrey and which may make Mar-a-Lago seem restrained, embraces the sociological fairy-tale aspect of the tale. To emphasize the political point, the musical begins at the court of Louis XIV and returns to France near the end of the play after the French Revolution has bloodied the guillotine with the powdered heads of heartless aristocrats.
Jackie sees herself as a modern-day Marie Antoinette, but instead of saying, “Let them eat cake,” she forces her driver to bring enough McDonald's to feed the entire crew. Chenoweth, who shines like a holiday ornament on Liberace's Christmas tree, achieves a canny balance of quixotic generosity and upstart casualness in her portrayal of a woman she refuses to ridicule.
Kristin Chenoweth and the cast of The Queen of Versailles.
(Julieta Cervantes)
The second half of the musical is about what happens when super-rich people go broke—broke not in the sense of starving, but in the sense that they have to stop buying luxury goods in bulk. With his timeshare empire hanging in the balance, Abraham's David transforms from Santa Claus into Ebenezer Scrooge, belligerently retreating to his home office like a beaten general preparing a counteroffensive and treating Jackie like a trophy wife who's lost her golden shine.
Ferrentino expands the timeline beyond the documentary to include what has happened to the family in the years since the film's release, with Jackie thrust into the spotlight as a Real Housewife with her spinoff. Federal bailouts worked wonders for the haves like the Siegels, while the have-nots were left to fend for themselves—victims of questionable mortgage lending practices and the American mantra of “more, more, more.” But no one escapes the brutal moral punishment, not even Jackie, after she suffers a tragedy that no amount of retail therapy will ever fix.
“The Queen of Versailles” has become even more intense since its run last summer at Boston's Emerson Colonial Theatre, but it's still an unwieldy production, despite the cast's impeccable showmanship. Michael Arden direction. The problem is not the production, but the changing raison d'être of the musical.
The first act follows the documentary quite directly. Making the film becomes an invitation to tell Jackie's story in the mythical terms she prefers. The musical spoils her not with a smirk, but with a knowing smile. It is the culture that is distorted, not those who embrace its distorted values.
But not content with satirizing how the story of the Siegel family connects Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous and Dynasty to the shallowness and cruelty of Donald Trump's America, the series reaches for levels of tragedy. However, achieving great emotional depth is not easy while donning the comedic mask of plastic surgery.
Kristin Chenoweth as Jackie Siegel in The Queen of Versailles.
(Julieta Cervantes)
Schwartz has composed an American time capsule of Broadway pop, with the same variety as “Wicked” but with less bombast and without any standout blockbuster numbers. The music moves from the bright parody of “Mrs. Florida” and “The Ballad of the Timeshare King” in the first act to the more sentimental “Book of Chances”, in which the vulnerable Victoria gives vent to her suffering, and “Little Houses”, in which the modest lifestyle of Jackie's parents (played by Steven DeRosa and Isabelle Keating) is celebrated in increasingly grandiose musical fashion in the second act.
Oddly enough, one of the show's most arresting songs, “Pavane for a Dead Lizard”, is about a reptile that starved to death due to Victoria's negligence. The number, a duet between Victoria and Jonquil, does not make any importunate emotional demands and is all the more piercing for its restraint. (White's Victoria and Hopkins' Jonquil come into their own here, breaking down the protective armor of their defiant characters.)
Melody Butiu, who plays the Siegels' Filipino nanny and indispensable helper, holds a more willing place in our hearts for all she had to sacrifice to support her distant family. Her material lack exists stoically in the shadow of the family's monstrous excess.
In “Caviar Dreams”, Jackie declares her “champagne wishes” to become “American royalty”. Chenoweth, whose comic brilliance breaks the fourth wall to connect directly with the audience, enjoys Jackie's humor without ridiculing her, even when singing an operatic duet with Marie Antoinette (Cassondra James). But the material never allows Chenoweth to soar emotionally, and the clunky final number, “This Time Next Year,” requires her to land a plane after the show's navigation system has essentially shut down.
“The Queen of Versailles” is designed to bring out the full Broadway brilliance of Chenoweth. She never looks less than perfectly photoshopped, but the production ultimately overplays her strengths. New musicals are a pipe dream, and this is a massive show, staggering in scale and staggering in ambition. If only Chenoweth's dazzling star power didn't have to do so much of the heavy lifting.
