![\"Kristin](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/11\/da31a225fa1923450a5dc2dd66873e75ce-queen-of-versailles-2.rvertical.w570.jpg\")
<\/p>\n <\/p>\n
\n Kristin Chenoweth in The Queen of Versailles.
\n Photo: Julieta Cervantes\n <\/p>\n
There is a two-hour-and-40-minute luxury-car crash happening at the St. James Theatre. If I were the litigious type, I\u2019d 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\u2019re 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.<\/p>\n
I\u2019m not being nasty, at least not intentionally so. If a critic\u2019s 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<\/a> by Lauren Greenfield\u2014about Jackie and David Siegel, Florida timeshare billionaires whose plans to \u201cbuild the biggest house in America\u201d<\/a> were scuppered by the 2008 financial crisis\u2014The Queen of Versailles swerves and overcorrects like a drunk driver. Tonally, it\u2019s 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 \u00dcber-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 \u201cI must not engage in wanton acts of commercialism\u201d 50 times on the blackboard.<\/p>\n Another Stephen, the most formidable of them all, was in his final work<\/a> also intrigued by the gleam and precarity of insane wealth, and even he couldn\u2019t 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\u2019 to great effect, the stage runs hot. It tends to demand an artist\u2019s moral commitment one way or another \u2014 at the very least, it will necessitate some clarity over what we\u2019re 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\u2019s part, good-natured groaners like \u201cunderstand \u2019em\u201d and \u201crandom.\u201d Director Michael Arden, meanwhile, is up to his elbows just moving the cumbersome Legos of Dane Laffrey\u2019s set around. Clearly the creators, like their protagonist, aspired to more: The show, notes the script, is intended as \u201ca modern fable about the American Dream \u2026 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.\u201d<\/p>\n That sounds good. But even if you stick a label on a hammer that says it\u2019s a needle, it\u2019s still a blunt instrument. Or, if you\u2019re making a musical about the Siegels and then inviting its real-life heroine to come and see it (the king is dead<\/a>, 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\u2019ll end up with something pretty tough to swallow.<\/p>\n At the center of all the glitzy havoc\u2014her face often looming on a huge flat screen that rolls around the stage, following actors like a hulking LED stalker\u2014is of course Chenoweth. If nothing else, it\u2019s fascinating to see where Wicked\u2019s witches<\/a> have traveled in the twenty years since their big breaks. Elphaba is communing with trees<\/a> as Glinda, reunited with the composer of \u201cPopular,\u201d 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\u2019s personal Versailles still wasn\u2019t complete, though she claims it\u2019s getting close<\/a>.) With her eternal prom princess energy, nice if mushy politics<\/a>, 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 \u2014 the actor has called it her dream role<\/a> and is among the show\u2019s lead producers.) She certainly gets to show off both her belt and the agility of her instrument\u2014there\u2019s a sonically fun moment where Jackie does some coloratura warbling with Marie Antoinette herself (Cassondra James)\u2014but to what end? Usually, it\u2019s to keep driving undauntedly toward the \u201cmore and more\u201d she wants for herself and her eight kids. (She\u2019s got six with David, played by a bluff if blurry F. Murray Abraham in White Lotus<\/a> patriarch mode, plus an oldest daughter from an allegedly abusive first marriage, plus a niece she\u2019s adopted.) This is a woman who, on her way up from humble roots, got herself a breast augmentation without anesthetic to save the money. \u201cThrow a towel over my head, gimme a Valium, and I am good to go!\u201d chirps Chenoweth. That\u2019s not heroism; that\u2019s nuts. But Jackie\u2019s 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\u2019t stand up to this much zazz.<\/p>\n Still, those anthems to tenacity and, as Jackie patriotically calls it, \u201cthe right to pursue happiness\u201d are less inherently cringey than the show\u2019s most sentimental number, a soppy ode to the joys of limited means called \u201cLittle Houses.\u201d 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 \u201cLifestyles of the Rich and Famous\u201d together on the couch every night. Now, the generations sing together\u2014along with, back in Florida, the adopted Jonquil (Tatum Grace Hopkins) and the family\u2019s Filipino nanny Sofia (Melody Butiu)\u2014about how \u201clittle houses have big hearts.\u201d Along with the schmaltz, there\u2019s a grating false dichotomy at work. Following too closely in its protagonist\u2019s footsteps, The Queen of Versailles presents only two options \u2014 tough but spiritually fulfilling material deprivation or unconstrained acquisitiveness. It\u2019s a conservative, unimaginative worldview: either Marie Antoinette\u2019s 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\u2026 That doesn\u2019t enter the picture.<\/p>\n Ferrentino and Schwartz might think that they\u2019ve 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. \u201cNo mob will storm your palaces,\u201d they sing to today\u2019s \u201cAmerican aristocracy.\u201d \u201cNo blade across the throat for you \/ Instead it seems your peasant class \/ Will all turn out to vote for you!\u201d As analysis, that\u2019s not wrong, but where\u2019s 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<\/a>, when the audience wants photos and autographs with that queen, and when the reality we\u2019re living in includes no end of mind-melting context \u2014 from the real David\u2019s boast that he \u201cgot George W. Bush elected\u201d<\/a> to his description of Trump\u2019s first victory as \u201cthe greatest thing that\u2019s happened to me since I discovered sex\u201d<\/a>? Or the fact that Jackie and David published their teenage daughter\u2019s diary<\/a> after she died of an overdose? Or their more recent creation of an AI website assistant<\/a> with her name? The cognitive dissonance is so violent it leaves you queasy.<\/p>\n There is one person in The Queen of Versailles who, beyond the content of her lyrics, is worth listening to, and that\u2019s Victoria. Schwartz has written her two big belters of yearning, suffering teenagerdom, \u201cPretty Always Wins\u201d and \u201cThe Book of Random,\u201d and though the songs themselves don\u2019t exactly transcend (especially not \u201cRandom\u201d), White does in singing them. Her clarion voice slices through the show\u2019s labored attempts to be both fable and fabulous. If there\u2019s real tragedy here, it\u2019s in watching her bulldozer mother roll on after her loss, like Mother Courage<\/a> in Gucci. That\u2019s probably the play Ferrentino and Schwartz wanted to write. So much for American dreams.<\/p>\n _\n<\/p>\n 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 \u201cdowntown\u201d as downtown gets, if such a distinction still exists. She\u2019s 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<\/a> is a sprawlingly brilliant contemplation of the human mythmaking impulse: It depicts three subsequent generations after an apocalypse wherein, decade by decade, the \u201cCape Feare\u201d<\/a> 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 \u201cthree hours of utter hell\u201d after its premiere there. For my money, it may be the play of the first quarter of this century.<\/p>\n \n From The Burning Cauldron of Fiery Fire, at the Vineyard Theatre. I wish I were as thrilled with The Burning Cauldron of Fiery Fire, Washburn\u2019s latest experiment now getting its premiere at the Vineyard under the direction of Steve Cosson, the playwright\u2019s 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\u2014and, at times, prescribes\u2014a production that isn\u2019t 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 \u201cwithout the bad ethics\u201d), it still feels amorphous in its ambition and surprisingly squishy at its center. I kept picturing a pulsing, many-tentacled blob \u2014 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.<\/p>\n The story concerns an off-grid \u201cintentional community\u201d 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\u2019re 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\u2019re in crisis. One of their number (played by Tom Pecinka, apparently making a trademark out of troubled long-haired artists named Peter<\/a>) has killed himself, and in their grief and out of a sense of ceremony, they\u2019ve attempted a ritual burning of the body. \u201cThe decision, which we made collectively \u2014 and we did make it collectively,\u201d says Thomas (McKenzie in a grizzled ponytail), the group\u2019s most senior member and most voluble philosopher, \u201cwas made in great\u202c emotion and,\u202c like a lot of decisions made in great emotion, it was very satisfactory, but um \u2026\u202c then there\u2019s a lot of responsibility around it.\u202c\u201d Especially what to do with the many parts of Peter that didn\u2019t turn into ash. (\u201c\u202cHe\u2019s too clumpy to scatter,\u201d 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.<\/p>\n It\u2019s 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\u2019s 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\u2019s potential being wasted. In Cosson\u2019s rendering, this skit is far too lavishly produced to feel truly of its makers (it\u2019s not scrappy \u2014 it\u2019s \u201cscrappy\u201d); and though it introduces the portentous object of Washburn\u2019s title, its symbols never really add up. There\u2019s fire and death and rebirth and love and a magical chicken and a big red dragon and, jumping blithely in the cauldron\u2019s lava, giggling \u201cFire Fish\u201d \u2014 which all start to diminish when cutesy repetition comes without the oomph of thematic accumulation. Meanwhile, the David Lynch\u2013style tension built by Will\u2019s 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\u2019s probably Peter\u2019s suicide note. That character\u2019s very existence verges on dangerously tropey\u2014the disabled semi-prophet whose name is a form of poetry<\/a>\u2014and, at the same time, he\u2019s hardly more than another dead end. The play\u2019s 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\u2019re fated to feel nifty in a vacuum.) Some incredible lines come out of people\u2019s mouths, and then the clouds gather again.<\/p>\n \u201cIs that smoke?\u201d says one of the ensemble at the start of the show. \u201cOr fog,\u201d asks another as the actors all form a chorus together. Whichever it is, it obscures more than is theatrically effective. As Milo\u2014the 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\u2014Bobby Moreno at one point offers this koan: \u201cI was brought up to expect\u202c something from the world I can\u2019t locate; I\u2019m the holder of a question no one can answer to my\u202c satisfaction.\u202c Sometimes this is a burden, but it\u2019s mainly an advantage. I\u2019m never startled by the absence of a\u202c \u2018there\u2019 there; I never believed in one.\u201d That\u2019s got all the enticing ripples of profundity and still, to make a manifesto of it is risky. Walk out of a play\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n The Queen of Versailles is at the St. James Theatre. Sign up for The Critics<\/p>\n A weekly dispatch on the cultural discourse, for subscribers only.<\/p>\n Vox Media, LLC Terms and Privacy Notice<\/p>\n![\"From](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/11\/00de02d2301fe57b298bd424c13747b1a1-burning-cauldron-fiery-fire-washburn.rhorizontal.w700.jpg\")
<\/p>\n
\n Photo: Carol Rosegg\n <\/p>\n
The Burning Cauldron of Fiery Fire is at the Vineyard Theatre through November 30.<\/p>\n