Review: Kristin Chenoweth-Led The Queen of Versailles Has Curb Appeal but Not Much Else

The Palace of Versailles stands as a monument to hubristic excess. The decadence epitomized by its gilded walls and hall of mirrors led directly to the French Revolution. Socialites Jackie and David Siegel manage to keep their heads several centuries later, but The Queen of Versailles, the musicalization of their lives receiving its world premiere at the Emerson Colonial Theatre in Boston, loses its teeth along the way. Composer Stephen Schwartz and librettist Lindsey Ferrentino take a view-from-nowhere approach to the Siegels’ quest to become American royalty that neither properly indicts the pair for their follies nor sets them up as objects of sympathy.

The source material, a 2012 documentary by Lauren Greenfield, managed to do both. Unfolding amid the financial collapse of 2008, the film showed the couple as ruthless strivers who struggled to understand how the rug of success got pulled out from beneath their feet. Although the musical hews closely to the events depicted on screen in the overlong first act and dramatizes the real-life scenes that occurred after the cameras stopped rolling in the second, the characters on stage have far less dimension than their living counterparts. You struggle to love or hate them because the stakes feel so low.

The action follows Jackie (Kristin Chenoweth) from her drab beginnings in Endwell, New York, to the lap of luxury in Orlando, Florida, where she marries time-share tycoon David (F. Murray Abraham). Inspired by a honeymoon trip to France, they endeavor to build the largest single-family home in the United States, a replica of Marie Antoinette’s vast mansion. (Apparently the lessons of 1789 were lost on them.) But when the market crashes and leaves the couple essentially penniless, they’re stuck with an unfinished estate and a wavering sense of identity, as they struggle to live within their ever-diminishing means.

The riches-to-rags scenario proved fertile ground for human drama in Greenfield’s hands, but Schwartz and Ferrentino keep the characters at arm’s length from the audience. Jackie seems merely superficial and shallow — there is hardly a trace of the scrappy personality she used to claw her way to the top — while David comes across as ornery and withdrawn. When major milestones happen in their road to financial recovery, such as Jackie’s embrace of reality stardom or David’s use of a predatory system to his own advantage, they emerge without much grounding, as if they were simply preordained. Seeing as the Siegels’ gave their life rights for this musical, it’s hard not to wonder whether they’ve insisted on a sanitized portrayal that smooths some of their sharp edges.

Schwartz’s ability to craft a catchy tune remains unparalleled, and Jackie’s first act “Caviar Dreams” will surely join “Corner of the Sky” and “The Wizard and I” in his pantheon of infectious “I Want” songs. The problem is that the score never really develops from there. Chenoweth, who throws herself admirably into the demands of the role, is left singing variations on the same theme for nearly three hours. Jackie, the striving teenager, and Jackie, the pillar of prosperity, feel exhaustingly similar. Other numbers in the show make little sense, like a country-western paean to closing the deal for David and his staff, and while Abraham possesses a generally attractive voice, to describe its relationship to pitch as relative would be generous.

The musical finds its center, and its soul, in two numbers that highlight Victoria, the Siegels’ teenage daughter who chafes under the weight of her family’s expectations. As portrayed with immense likability and stunning vocals by Nina White, the songs “Pretty Always Wins” and “Book of Random” come closest to presenting a three-dimensional figure — in this case, a young woman whose quest for understanding and belonging lead to a tragic end. White ideally projects Victoria’s discomfort with the lavish lifestyle that constitutes her reality and her desire to escape into a simpler world, even if it comes at her own peril.

A bevy of Broadway talents that include Isabel Keating, Stephen DeRosa, Melody Butiu, and Greg Hildreth languish in underdeveloped roles. Newcomer Tatum Grace Hopkins demonstrates a spunky streak as Jonquil, Jackie’s down-and-out niece, although her wholehearted embrace of life’s finer things here clashes with how she’s portrayed in the source material. In perhaps the production’s most risible choice, a chorus of 18th century French aristocrats occasionally interrupt the story, offering a commentary on the endless cycle of greed and avarice. While a somewhat intriguing idea on paper, in practice, they add nothing but a longer running time.

Director Michael Arden finds some balance between the superficial spectacle and hardscrabble reality as the center of the Siegels’ world, but the overall production feels flabby and disjointed, with myriad ideas thrown into the mix to see what will stick. A necessary sense of vulgar luxury remains missing from Dane Laffrey’s scenic design and Christian Cowan’s costumes. An over-reliance on video projections (also by Laffrey) seem designed to evoke the constant presence of a documentary camera, but their continued use throughout the second act, when the filming has ostensibly stopped, feels incongruous and alienating.

The Siegels ultimately regained their fortune, their status, and their Versailles, but in a telling postscript, the home remains unfinished as of today. What appears to be the height of grandeur from the outside is ultimately a façade. The same can be said for The Queen of Versailles, a project awash in talent that’s ultimately as artificial as a replica of the Ambassadors’ Staircase.