‘Queen of Versailles’ musical: How the other half lives says something about us | Review
BOSTON — The ancient Greeks wrote plays to honor their gods, and Shakespeare turned his quill to British royalty. Here in America, our imaginative fancy turns to billionaires — our equivalent of gods and royals — and Orlando’s own Jackie Siegel now has a big-budget musical that shares the socialite’s title: “The Queen of Versailles.”
Funny, smart and delightfully tuneful, while cannily holding the audience responsible for our cultural fasciation with excess, “The Queen of Versailles” is onstage in Boston at the Emerson Colonial Theatre, which couldn’t be more appropriate: Its gilded decor is based on the real palace of Versailles — “that big one in France,” as one character in the musical remarks.
Jackie Siegel came to fame through the 2012 “Queen of Versailles” documentary that chronicled the efforts of her and husband David, the time-share mogul who owns Westgate Resorts, to build their 90,000-square-foot dream home in Windermere’s Lake Butler Sound neighborhood. (Westgate Resort flags feature in one of the musical’s zanier production numbers.)
That dream home in progress is in fact modeled on the French palace dreamed up by the “Sun King” Louis XIV back in the 17th century. A scene in “The Queen of Versailles” shows the Siegels on their honeymoon there, with Jackie acting like the stereotypical loud and bumbling American tourist. The bit, like much of the show’s many comic moments, gets a big laugh from the audience.
A character later in the musical wonders if the world is “laughing with us or laughing at us.” Jackie’s blithe response: “It doesn’t matter.” That right there is key to what makes “The Queen of Versailles,” playing a pre-Broadway engagement, so deliciously entertaining for much of its nearly three-hour length. Only toward the end, does the propulsive production start to falter, but more on that in a moment.
The story by Lindsey Ferrentino (who also wrote the intelligent “Ugly Lies the Bone”) and the clever lyrics by composer Stephen Schwartz (“Wicked,” “Pippin,” “Godspell”) allow the audience to laugh both with and at the Siegels — and laugh at ourselves, as well, for even caring about the crushed jewels they want in the floor of their logic-defying home or the dilemma of how to fit an entire Benihaha in the basement.
This leads to another aspect of the musical that works well: We care because Jackie — a Genghis Khan-quoting former Mrs. Florida beauty queen — doesn’t. In an age where every little thing is dissected and criticized on social media, isn’t it nice to think of having so much money you really don’t worry about others’ opinions?
And considering Siegel was part of script meetings, she apparently doesn’t worry. Jokes are made about her Botox treatments and breast augmentation. One character refers to her as “the lady with the boobs,” saucily given their due by costume designer Christian Cowan.
We first see the onstage Jackie in an oversized feather boa and sparkly shoes, both in her signature pink. She’s played by Kristin Chenoweth, the Tony-winning dynamo who originated the role of Glinda in “Wicked.”
At intermission, I heard a patron say, “This role was made for her, like Barbra Streisand in ‘Funny Girl.'” I would concur. Chenoweth has the ability to mesh Siegel’s humble beginnings — menial jobs from Red Lobster server to hospital corpse cleaner — with her current status in the economic stratosphere. She’s approachable in her warmth, and unbelievable in her spending, and never less than compelling as a human being.
“I don’t wanna Sharon Stone y’all,” she chirps as Jackie, as she tries to get her legs crossed correctly for the camera crew filming the 2012 documentary. That filming continues throughout the first act, and it’s a clever idea: It allows Chenoweth, as Jackie, to speak directly to the audience as if she is speaking to a camera.
Oscar winner F. Murray Abraham plays David, and he’s a charmer. He also succeeds in letting us see David’s rougher and humbler edges around his delight with the success he has found. His best moment: After the 2008 financial crash, we find him in a plain white tank top, bellowing at his kids to turn off unneeded lights. See, they’re just like us.
Schwartz’s music is catchy, memorable, sometimes surprising (he rhymes Susquehanna, as in the New York river, with Americana) and most important, knows how to be appropriately cheeky. A song detailing David Siegel’s rise to success is fashioned as a country ballad: He’s this age’s cowboy, finding his fortune — literally — on the frontier of aspirational wealth. “The Queen of Versailles” reunites Schwartz and Chenoweth some 20 years after “Wicked,” with a call-out to a line from the earlier music delighting those in the know.
Dane Lafferty’s scenic design is opulent where needed, and also contributes to the sense of motion instilled in the production by Tony-winning director Michael Arden. “We don’t stop and we never will,” Chenoweth’s Jackie tells — warns? — us.
Where the production falters is when real life complicates the giddy complicity of our celebration of the American dream gone to extreme.
Coupled with the story of building that house is the more serious business of daughter Victoria’s death from a drug overdose. While Jackie is getting what she wants, Victoria is falling apart. The show tries very hard to balance these stories without taking away from the sense of fun, and for a long time it succeeds. But there is no fun in youthful death, and there’s not enough foreshadowing in the first act to satisfactorily integrate the tragedy in the second.
That being said, Nina White does a lovely job as the increasingly disillusioned Victoria; her confusion, disgust and eventual despair written all over her face. Director Arden’s decision to have her make a few ghostly appearances, however, is a bit too much — even for a show that’s all about too much.
The activist work done by the Siegels after Victoria’s death is acknowledged, including a fundraiser for an anti-drug foundation established in her honor at the Orlando Museum of Art.
Speaking of Orlando, how does it fare? Well, I chuckled at a sign advertising the “Evening Sentinel” newspaper (So close!). A local broadcaster is portrayed as a yokel, pronouncing the “s” on the end of Versailles. (To be fair, we’re more fluent in Spanish than French.)
And a line about the house stating “We’re building it in the most beautiful place in the world: Orlando, Florida!” rather insultingly but comically got the biggest theatrical laugh I’ve heard at the City Beautiful’s expense since Elder Price dreamed of coming here for putt-putt golfing in “The Book of Mormon.”
“The Queen of Versailles” is expected to mount a Broadway production in the 2025-26 season, and these pre-New York runs are designed to refine the show. But this one already is in darn good shape, likely better shape than the Siegels’ Orlando house, which still isn’t finished after 20 years of construction and suffered significant damage in 2022’s Hurricane Ian.
In a theatrical conceit that works well until a somewhat muddled take on the French revolution, Jackie interacts with King Louis XIV and Marie Antoinette, inhabitants of the real Versailles. They sing about why they would spend so much money on a house: “Because we can.”
“The Queen of Versailles” manages to suggest that it’s also because we commoners, or “the peasants” as King Louis says, want them to do it — for us. That’s why theatergoers leaving the Emerson Colonial in Boston were plunking down $40 for baseball hats emblazoned with the phrase “caviar dreams.”
This is our American mythology, and these are our American gods.
“The Queen of Versailles” plays at the Emerson Colonial Theatre in Boston through Aug. 25. Follow me at facebook.com/matthew.j.palm or email me at [email protected]. Find more arts news at OrlandoSentinel.com/entertainment.