“The Queen of Versailles,” the much-anticipated reunion of “Wicked” collaborators Kristin Chenoweth and Stephen Schwartz, offers the diva her richest opportunity to date to flex her dramatic muscles, while inspiring the composer-lyricist to the most emotionally affecting score, bar none, of his long career. This true-life riches-to-rags-to-rebirth saga, chronicled in Lauren Greenfield’s 2012 documentary of the same title, offers more in the way of sociopolitical critique than is usual for a mass-market entertainment. But it’s the production’s lavish appointments, and equivalent star power that offer the strongest prospects for commercial success when the show, now premiering at Boston’s Emerson Colonial Theatre, lands on Broadway in 2025 or ’26.
The making of that documentary provides the Act 1 structure for Orlando’s own Jackie Siegel (Chenoweth) to review the backstory to her great endeavor: building the largest private home in America on the order of Louis XIV’s fabled mirrored palace. Her working-class origins, designs on wealth, and capture of the heart of “Timeshare King” financier David Siegel (F. Murray Abraham, staggeringly good) are narrated against the backdrop of the still-unfinished manse, three towering levels on Dane Laffrey’s set connected by rolling scaffolding and staircases, and a giant projection screen (images also designed by Laffrey).
Sporting Christian Cowen’s eye-popping, just-this-side-of-parody costumes, Chenoweth exudes exuberant humor and don’t-screw-with-me-fellas moxie as she shares her prodigious appetite for objects and children. Though only two of the Siegels’ eight kids appear, they’re enough to give mama major headaches: firstborn Victoria (Nina White) fancies herself an unappreciated plain Jane, while poor relation Jonquil (Tatum Grace Hopkins) is adopted and seduced by excess. (Of the Siegels’ dozen or more pets, we meet only a python, an unattended lizard — for whom Schwartz provides an amusing musical elegy — and a single teacup Pomeranian named Muumi, cute enough for a whole menagerie.)
Come the crash of 2008, David’s leisure-world empire collapses, and Abraham’s patriarchal mien and tolerance turn to crabby solitude with the prospect of unloading their dream for pennies on the dollar. Greenfield’s documentary ends with the couple at their lowest financial ebb, though Chenoweth’s rousing Act 1 closer, defying the gravity of their plight, confirms that her personal movie is far from over. Like Molly Brown, she ain’t down yet.
With the family’s slow but sure Act 2 revival, librettist Lindsey Ferrentino comes into her own. Her much-produced PTSD drama “Ugly Lies the Bone” demonstrated a moral conscience second to none among her generation of playwrights, and she wields it here to show the vapidity of Jackie’s “Champagne Wishes and Caviar Dreams,” a recurring motif in the score, and their excruciating impact on those around her. (Particularly affecting is White’s scorchingly sung summary of Victoria’s life as seen in the whines and raging of her private diary, “My Book of Random.”)
As the losses and departures mount up and Versailles rises from the ashes, echoes of “Citizen Kane” creep in with Jackie in her private Xanadu crooning “American Royalty,” another Schwartz motif, while attended by shadowy figures from the past. I won’t reveal who they are or what they contribute, other than the sense that history’s inequities are most decisively repeating themselves on the steps of the palace.
Tony-winning director Michael Arden (“Parade”) is too much the showman not to recognize that, at almost three hours, the piece begs to be tightened. A couple of songs and reprises could go (though one number seems oddly missing, a ballad for the exquisite Melody Butiu in which she can rationalize nannying for the Siegel brood while separated from her real family in the Philippines). More importantly, the audience gets ahead of the storytelling several times in Act 2, a sure way to set patrons to checking their watches. Arden has plenty of time to rework things.
When he does, I trust the social satire won’t have its teeth pulled. Chenoweth is courageous and skillful in presenting a protagonist of utter folly, who never quite fathoms where she went wrong. We do, though, and the lesson of false values comes across like a whipcrack. Given a choice, Jackie’s story asks, who wouldn’t give everything to have everything, at whatever cost to the soul?
Source Agencies
