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The Queen of Versailles starring Kristin Chenoweth (St. James Theatre, Broadway) - ★★ REVIEW
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Mickey Jo (Theatre Critic)
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Mickey Jo (Theatre Critic)
So a couple of weeks ago when I saw the Queen of Versailles at the St James Theatre on Broadway, I posted a little Instagram story about it, which immediately got an astonishing number of responses all asking exactly the same is it as bad as we've heard? And my reply to all of them was the same. I regret to inform you it's actually worse. And it transpires before I could even find time to sit down and review the thing. The Queen of Versailles, which is set to close on Broadway on January 4, has already learned a difficult lesson as they sing in the show, pretty wins, but unfortunately lacklustre, tone deaf and soulless loses every time. Oh my God. Hey, welcome back to my theatre themed YouTube channel. Or hello to those of you listening to this review on podcast platforms. Get ready to have a good time over the next however long it's going to take to talk about this one. My name is Mickey Jo and I am a professional theatre critic here on social media. I recently made inquiries about officially reviewing the Broadway musical the Queen of Versailles to be met with an extraordinary brick wall in the place of where a press team usually and so during my two weeks on Broadway, while I was officially covering a handful of other shows, I attended this one in an unofficial capacity. I know the shock, the horror, which is no big deal, especially after seeing it, at which point I entirely understand why they didn't want me in the building. Regardless, I went and having now processed my response to the experience that was seeing this show, I am ready to bring you all of my thoughts. For those of you listening on podcast platforms, I am holding a little white fluffy dog that I bought at the merchandise stand before the show even started. I don't have to like the thing to buy the merch, and even though it would be lovely to commit to the bit and stroke him the entire time, I'm concerned about what I might do to this merchandise during my frustrated rant. So I'm gonna put him down now. And before we begin and wade into the full review, I would like to address the elephant which is in the room. No, no, not this one. I'm also not talking about the backlash to Kristen Chenoweth's social media comments. We've talked about that enough already. You can go and find out my feelings and my thoughts on that in a previous video. Wherever you are seeing or hearing this, I want to talk about the fact that the show has already announced that they are closing prematurely. People evidently made their feelings known about this on media, and several stars and members of the Broadway theatre community have expressed their disappointment that people are celebrating the closure of any show, especially in the current financial landscape. And it may seem sort of needlessly cruel that, given the fact this show's fate is already sealed, I am still coming on here to tell you what I thought of it. And while I do want to express my genuine and utmost sympathies for the company, the creatives, everyone working in and on and around this show, inside and beyond the St James Theatre. I do still think, as I always have, that it is important to honestly and accurately appraise the quality of theatre, and the human cost of the whole thing is no justification for bad art. Otherwise, this is all going to happen all over again. A post mortem on this one does feel necessary because the question emerges how the hell, or perhaps why the hell, did they bring this to Broadway in the first place? That is not a question that I have any power to answer in today's review. It is a question that I think will only become more pertinent, however. So with a reminder to share all of your thoughts and feelings about the Queen of Versailles in the comments section, down below and to subscribe if you would like to hear more of my reviews, let's begin and talk about this musical and why it just sucked. American Royalty this was not. Let's talk about why. So ordinarily I would save my thoughts on performances until towards the end of these reviews, but I want to talk about this production and about Kristin Chenoweth simultaneously, because the two do go hand in hand. And the reality is that this probably wouldn't have made it to the stage if it weren't for the fact that this is a star vehicle very possibly designed for and certainly subsequently built around the talents of Kristin Chenoweth, Tony Award winning Broadway star and household name. Of course, the original Glinda in the Broadway production of Wicked. This is definitely fodder for a longer video essay, but it has for some years now fascinated me that both she and Wicked co star Idina Menzel have since that very successful time been failed by just about every Broadway vehicle that they have built for themselves. And I say built for themselves. Kristin Chenoweth is also a producer on this one and over the past few years had suggested that she might have been working on workshop versions of Death Becomes her, possibly even with Idina Menzel, if you can imagine that, as well as portraying Tammy Faye in a musical which of course has come to fruition, and Dolly Parton, which has also come to fruition. All of those projects without her, as she puts all of her eggs in the basket, that was Queen of Versailles. And so much of the experience of seeing this reminded me of seeing Idina Menzel in redwood. For ways I will continue to articulate as we talk about this show, but largely because it felt so clearly like something someone had sculpted for themselves without the true necessary push and pull of earnest and helpful collaboration. And before the show arrived at the St James Theatre, there was a pre Broadway production at the Emerson Colonial Theatre, I believe, in Boston, Massachusetts, where the feedback from audiences largely seemed to be that the show needed a little bit of work, which perhaps was the understatement of the decade, but that Kristin Chenoweth was fantastic in it. And I would contend that I, perhaps controversially do not think that Kristin Chenoweth is giving a stellar performance in this show. I think she's giving a lot of a performance because that's what it's been built to be. She is doing exactly as much on stage as she is willing to. It's a big Broadway return for her, the likes of which she perpetrates every few years. Same thing with Idina Menzel they do screen projects, they do concert tours, they come back to the stage, they come back to broad that is infrequently enough that it can always be marketed as their big return every single time. And she has had built and designed and crafted for her this theatrical marathon of a performance, but one that doesn't require her to take on this kind of chameleonic transformation. She doesn't disappear into a character. She is unmistakably throughout this Kristin Chenoweth doing what audiences want her to do on stage, playing someone charming with comedy moments who is perhaps a little bit naive. If you go back through her most celebrated role, these are running themes. Someone who eventually, a little ways into the second act will perhaps have their eyes opened by another character on stage and begin to wake to the smallest of moral lessons and who at some point in the show will use her classical vocal training to sing something high and impressive, the shoehorning of which into this show is so spectacularly clumsy. Now, if you checked out my review of Redwood earlier this year, you may recall that I said a lot of audience members seemed actually to be satisfied enough because what they were really buying tickets for was seeing Idina Menzel on stage, perhaps even seeing her fly on stage and hearing her go nyeeah. And hearing her belt something, because that's what she is iconic for. And those audience members seemed not to mind which words she was saying because all they're doing is coming to a theatre to see a show that no one knew anything about other than Idina Menzel and trees. To hear her make this impressively loud and piercing noise with Kristen, it's almost exactly the same thing, but it's a slightly different timbre. And for years she's been going on talk show, she's been going on the View, and Barbara Walters has been saying, do a high note about that abruptly. And she has just pulled one out and the audience goes, yay. She did the thing. That's all they want from her. And so even though for the majority of this score it sits in a very belty place, which is very interesting in Kristin Chenoweth's voice and actually something I didn't hate listening to, there arrives a moment in the second act of this show where she has to do a high classical thing because otherwise the audience is going to leave unsatisfied. And the way we get to that is to have her appear in one of several flashback scenes that occur. Don't worry, I will tell you what this show is about. I realize that we haven't yet got to the explanation of what the hell this is. They're one of several flashback scenes that her character Jackie Siegel is sort of dreaming of that depicts the 18th century French royal court, including Marie Antoinette. And she duets with Marie and they've been actually singing something about the way of life then and the way of life now. And only in this particular moment they have a Mary Poppins and her own reflection style operatic high note duet. And yeah, I told you in Redwood the lyrics didn't matter. They don't hear either because they're just going la la la la la la la. Like TRA la la I think is the official lyric. Kristen does a high note and everyone loses their minds and applause because that's her thing and that's all they really needed. And you have to imagine a lot of people will be walking out of this show satisfied enough because they came to see Kristin Chenoweth and they mistake perhaps that she is doing great performance work and great acting on that stage, when is a lot of acting. She has commissioned this role which is extensive, which is demanding, but which isn't necessarily that substantial or meaningful a performance, which is also not particularly her fault because that substance and that meaning is what you would find in the material. And unfortunately the material is trash. Which brings us somewhat sharply to my thoughts on the Queen of Versailles as a musical, separately from its leading lady. And we ought to begin this moment with a little bit more of an explanation as to what this actually is, if you have no idea. The Queen of Versailles is based on a celebrated documentary film of the same name which I haven't watched. I'm now sort of morbidly curious to, but I think it would annoy me more so than anything else, especially from the vantage point of late 2025. It depicts Jackie Steagall, formerly Jackie Mallory, who grew up in in a very working class home and then married into extraordinary wealth. The late David Siegel. She'd already had something of a life before all of this. She had already become a mother. She had found herself in an abusive relationship in Florida that she fled from by winning a beauty pageant. The successful implementation of her looks and her charm and a little bit of anatomical augmentation is, it is suggested, also a part of how she ends up in this marriage with David Siegel, many years his junior. But this is backstory and context that we get in the musical. The documentary doesn't begin until later in both of their lives when after having married, they are together building what will be the largest private home in America. An exact replica of the French palace of Versailles, which is vast and grand and luxurious and extraordinary and wildly over the top and entirely out of place in Florida, needless to say, but for reasons which, bizarrely, are never really clearly articulated in this musical, this is something that Jackie is relentlessly determined to do. It becomes a lot more challenging, however, when, during the filming of the documentary, which is what made it so fascinating, the 2008 financial crash took place, during which time the seagulls suffered just as much as everybody else, except for the fact that, of course, they absolutely didn't. It did, however, bring the construction of their version of Versailles to a halt, all of which is depicted within this show, as is the release of the documentary itself, which is something that Jackie celebrates and enjoys, even if those around her notice that people are laughing at her and that the documentary is perhaps even scrutinizing her a bit more than she realizes. She is grateful for any and all press attention. She thrives on this. She subsequently parlays that little moment in the spotlight into something of a minor reality TV career, a spotlight which I guess is focusing back on her now in a small way, because she is very celebratory of the fact that she is being depicted on Broadway in the Queen of Versailles. The real Jackie Siegel, who in her downtime likes to celebrate how great maga, politics and Trump are, loves this show, which sort of ought to be telling enough. But then again, it is suggested that she also loves the documentary. The show is an occasional framing device, depicts, like I mentioned, a handful of members of a French aristocracy from the late 18th century, I think. I'm not a historian, I'm just a stressed theatre critic. And even as we jump between scenes then and scenes now, and even as she sort of sees the ghosts of them when she and David visit the palace of Vasara on their honeymoon, which is when they find the inspiration to build one of their own in this extraordinary moment of excess and wealth. And why not? We can do whatever. I can give you anything. Let's make a giant house in Florida. Because never was a better marriage ordained than one between one of the most expensive homes ever built for a family and hurricane seasons. But even as we see the ghost of all of these centuries old bewigged French characters, even as she appears in her own dream sequence, they have startlingly little to say, or the show has startlingly little to say on their the half. There is one little moment that cuts through when they are being led to the guillotine. Spoiler alert, I guess, for what happened to Marie Antoinette. And they sing something about how the working class in the US right now, today will never instigate a revolution in the same way that the French did at the time, because they have been, via this false idea of democracy, conned into believing that they all have the capacity to become millionaires and billionaires. And so they will support those who do. Which did hit me just a little bit. Certainly more so than anything else that the show had to say. I just felt it was sort of misplaced in this particular story. And it talks about an interesting idea, but not one that really relates to the Siegels, especially because, as we have seen in the first act, Jackie herself came perhaps even impressively from working class origins, from this, I guess, blue collar background. And the notion of a population refusing to rise up and demand their own rights really has more to say about political subservience, especially in the US than it does about people getting annoyed at displays of extraordinary wealth. Which brings us fairly neatly to the biggest central issue of this musical. If you hear nothing else that I say in this review, hear this. This is why the Queen of Versailles on Broadway, to my mind, does not work. And it's because this musical, depicting someone controversial at the best of times, certainly in the current political and financial moment, seems to strive to a deliberately apolitical choice when it comes to how her story is going to be told. Because as far as the material goes, she isn't skewered, she isn't depicted in a harsh light. It tends more positive, largely because of Kristin Chenoweth's depiction of her. But it feels like this has been conceived as a show where two sides of the aisle, politically speaking, can sit side by side in the same theater in the orchestra section. And one person who represents half of the audience can walk away going, gosh, what a cautionary tale. What a great reminder of the reality that money can't buy you happiness and that this is not something that we should strive for, that this is no way to live. And the person sat next to them, the other half of the audience behind them, perhaps from a more conservative background, perhaps Republicans could walk out of that theatre and say, wow, what a woman. You know, she just kept on going, what an incredible life. What a fantastic performance from Kristin Chenoweth. Let's go get a chick fil a and kick a minority. I don't know. It just feels as though the show is leaving room for interpretation so as to not alienate half of its potential demographic, which is unfortunate because alienating a large amount of its demographic may in fact be something that already happened before it started previews. But like I said, we've talked about that already. We're going to move on. Essentially, it's just really impossible to determine whether or not not this show is actually trying to tell you a cautionary tale or trying to depict her positively. And it feels like Chenoweth in the center of the whole thing, spending so much time on stage in conversation with us, the audience singing the Act 1 finale, singing the final song of the show, having the final moments of the show alone on stage, is trying to bring real humanity and honesty to this character. She is trying to understand the human being that is this woman who in her depiction is startlingly close to Kristin Chenoweth herself. Herself who still has a southern accent, despite the fact that Jackie Siegel, to my knowledge, does not and did not live there. And if the material around her stood entirely in criticism of Jackie, then that would work because that would push against Kristen's depiction, which brings heart and honesty, and she would push back. But instead the material has this reluctance to really kind of criticize Jackie in the way that we might expect it to. And then Kristen comes out, Ernest comes out charming, making you fall in love with this woman. And so uncomfortably, that's what starts to happen. But you're looking around at everything and saying, I feel like I ought not to. But the show isn't telling me that. And it's confusing. And I'm not suggesting the audience needs to be spoon fed socio politically, but I do wish that the show would figure out how to at least pick up a knife. That makes it sound like I wanted someone to be stabbed. And that's not what I'm suggesting. The metaphor may have evaded me a little bit at the end there. I'm just frustrated about this show because I think there is an interesting enough story to be told here. Our protagonists in musicals don't all need to be good and honest people. Look at your Sweeney Todds, look at your Gypsies, for crying out loud. But as my friend Kate pointed out the other day talking about the show on TikTok, when we look at Gypsy, you have a really important, vulnerable supporting arc from Louise. And the Queen of Versailles has something similar with Jackie's daughter Victoria, played by Nina White. However, her entire arc, though it is very emotionally turbulent, is never really dealt with with the same kind of emotional intelligence, sensitivity. And before we talk about that performance and that character, I promise you we will get on to this book and these songs. I want to reflect a little bit on the fact that the whole thing reminds me of the Tammy Faye musical, which I think actually had more going for it and more to talk about and had a sense of who its heroes and its villains were than this one does. But at the same time, the question that the Broadway community at large was asking when that show arrived at the Palace Theatre was, was who is this for? And that question feels even more important for a show like the Queen of Versailles in 2025 under the second Trump presidency, when not only is the real life human being at the center of this show who celebrates its existence a vocal Trump supporter who has been photographed alongside him in solidarity, but also even glancing beyond her when considering the austerity being experienced around the nation, around the world being experienced over the last few weeks because of a government shutdown as this show was press performances on Broadway, at Broadway ticket prices, people were struggling to eat, to put food on their tables, to feed their children. Meanwhile, an extraordinary amount of money, a seven figure sum of money has been spent to put this show on stage, to tell a story about excessive wealth and say not nearly enough about the problems with all of that. And I fear I could keep going down this road. But for the sake of my blood pressure, let's move on and talk. Talk about the score and.
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Mickey Jo (Theatre Critic)
So this is not only a Broadway return for leading lady Kristin Chenoweth, it is also a reunion with her and Wicked composer Stephen Schwartz. Stephen wrote the music and lyrics for this show. The book Meanwhile was written by Lindsey Ferrantino, who is a playwright. The musical has been directed Meanwhile by Michael Arden. We'll talk a little bit more about him and his creative team further down the line, but given his recent string of very honest, heartfelt, soul bearing Broadway successes, this feels entirely incongruous to the rest of his work. Anything that he touched within this feels sort of unrecognizable. There's a certain quality of of slickness in some of the presentation, but a lot of what he did here does feel a lot like what I describe as directing traffic rather than really honing a show and turning it into a diamond. Anecdotally and without any knowledge of how the actual production process worked or what the rehearsals or workshops may have been like, it seems as though he was brought into the project so that it could benefit from what his name could do. Because he has become arguably the most prestigious director in town right now when it comes to new musicals because of the Tony Award winning success of maybe Happy Ending because of his own multiple Tony Award wins, but not given enough creative power to really shape the thing. Because I can't imagine that this man who got censored on national television for advocating for gay rights would deliver something this deliberately apolitical and tepid. Michael Arden's work has always had something to say. The Queen of Versailles simply does not. But we're not going to talk about him just yet. We are going to talk about Stephen Schwartz and Lindsey Fantino. And Stephen Schwartz is a composer that I have an extraordinary amount of respect for and I am a fan of so much of the work that he's put on stage. And I will preface this by saying I did enjoy a lot of the additional material that he wrote only a few years ago for the stage production of the Prince of Egypt in London's West End. At the same time, I do think largely that the majority of the work done over the last decade or so of his career has not stood up to the standard of his earlier work of Pippin, of Wicked, of the brilliant things that he wrote, wrote in his earlier years. And I think a similar thing is happening here as what we have seen happen with the work of Sir Lord Andrew Lloyd Webber. Because here's the thing, when they were young men, when they were early rising star composers, they were not the most powerful people in the room. When Andrew Lloyd Webber was working with Hal Prince on the Phantom of the Opera, Hal Prince had the power and the authority to tell him to go and rewrite something. When Stephen Schwartz was working with Bob Floyd Fosse on Pippin, Bob Fosse was undeniably the most powerful person in that room and he would be able to tell young Stephen Schwartz to go and rewrite something. Now the power dynamic is skewed and these composers have so much power. There's every possibility that Stephen Schwartz remains very receptive to criticism and that Michael Arden told him to go and rewrite a bunch of songs. If he did, it didn't make them much better unless they were really dreadful before. Because I am sorry to say, the Queen of the Sun Die is to my mind the worst work of Stephen Schwartz's career that I've heard. At least I've not. I've not done a lot of listening to the Magic show. And there is the slightest sense of character within this score. What's really difficult to infer is any sense of a prevailing melody. And we noticed this, I felt a little bit in the new musical editions for Wicked for Good that he presumably may have been writing around the same time that he was developing material, material for the Queen of Versailles. There's a few songs in this score that play a little into my working theory of Is that a good musical theater song or is it just High and Loud? Of which one of them, possibly even my favorite in the show is Pretty Winds. I say that with an admittedly low bar for it to surpass. This is a song sung by Jackie's teenage daughter Victoria, who is struggling with body image issues, especially in the environment that she now finds herself in. She, as a infant, was raised by Jackie as a single parent in a one bedroom apartment, maybe even a studio apartment, where the two of them really had nothing except for each other. So they have a very special connection. Their relationship, however, has become more fraught when her mother remarried and she is now living amongst all of this wealth that she can't really find herself in. She can't find happiness in everything that money can buy her. She has no affection for the new home, this visa replica that her mother is building, and she wished her mother could understand that hers ultimately is a very tragic story based, as is the entire musical in truth, the response to which from her mother is pretty galling and equally based in truth. But before all of that can happen, she sings two or three songs. The first she sings and she is portrayed by the brilliant Nina White, is the song I already told you about. Pretty wins. It has a very impactful ending because she is singing the hell out of it and she puts a lot of emotion into the pretty performance of the song. The recurring lyric, however, is a little bit ineffectual and I can write that off because this is the voice of a teenager. Where it gets harder to listen to is when she reads from her own diary and sings a song called My Book of Random, which I'm sorry to say is probably among the weakest musical theatre songs we've heard in some time now. Very possibly there were weaker songs in Redwood and I would tell you which ones if only I could remember any of them. And I'll say that for the Queen of Versailles, at least a few of these have cemented themselves in my brain. Like there's American royalty and there's we did and set out to build the biggest home in America. So much of it sounds deeply country, which is not a sound that I associate with Florida. But I'm not American. Perhaps I'm misrepresenting the entire identity of that state.
- [28:09]
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- [29:26]
Mickey Jo (Theatre Critic)
There's also a duet that she sings with another character with her cousin, whose name and I couldn't understand this when they were saying it, John Quill, which sounds like something that ought to be prescribed for sleep deprivation. Played by Tatum Grace Hopkins, Jackie's brother's daughter, I believe, taken in by the family and because she has grown up in poverty and amidst her parents addiction, is initially hugely indifferent to this very lavish lifestyle, but quickly becomes accustomed to it. She and Victoria initially butt heads, but subsequently develop a friendship and they bury a dead lizard together. And of course that's a moment that gets musicalized in this show. It seems at one point like we're going to round a corner into a plotline where Victoria gets too jealous about Jonquil bonding more with her mother and like going to the documentary premiere with her. But that never really manifests. Victoria has too much other stuff going on. It's also difficult to know exactly how much the real life Jackie Siegel wanted included in this show because she has been involved in its development. She and David are both credited in the program, presumably for some level of creative contribution because they're not listed with the producers otherwise. The score from Stephen Schwartz has moments where it sounds a little Janine Tesori esque. There is this meandering final song that never really manages to sink its teeth into anything resembling a melody, which contributes to the lunacy of the final moments of this show, which leave us utterly adrift in the middle of an ocean of confusing storytelling. Because we go to a blackout as Jackie is left alone. Alone singing to a phone attached to a ring light on a tripod in her home on this glorious staircase, with everyone who she hoped would be there with her having fled from her side, either temporarily or permanently. It's a horrifying image familiar of Rose performing Rose's turn in the final moments of Gypsy, with the main difference being that is an incredibly well written song and a sort of a three act play of. Of a song. And whatever it is that Jackie sings here that Kristen sings as Jackie simply isn't meaning. Not only do we land any kind of a meaningful commentary on what it is that we just watched, but we also don't even notice that it's meant to be ending. I was sort of flabbergasted when we went to a blackout and then we started bowing. I was seriously so astounded that that was the end of the show and it hadn't said anything. And in retrospect, you can look at that ending and you can extrapolate from it. Oh, that's what it was saying. That was the comment by showing her like. Like that. But it's not articulating it with clarity. It's not giving voice to that. It's not saying anything with conviction, because it's living in this tentative place of like, oh, she's gonna see this about herself. And we don't want to irritate too many people. Let's just kind of leave everything as very subtly implied and let people choose their own adventure. Which to my mind, is horribly dissatisfying. The book, I thought, was not really a problem in terms of the scenes which were written, the dialogue, how had its charms. There were other moments that went under explored. There is another really abrupt section when David is trying to make everything work and sell off properties during the financial crash. And Jackie is still determined about Versailles. He's reminding her that they might have to sell it, and she wants him to come down and have dinner with his family. And he makes a comment about her being ugly. This is years into their marriage, and the harshness of that and the cruelty of that, that never really gets followed up on. We don't check in with how she's feeling about it, with her vulnerability, with her perceptions of herself. It's a musical that spends the entire duration telling us stuff, but not really showing us and not digging into those feelings either. She has a line fairly early on when she hints at her abusive first marriage where she says she only wants to show the good stuff. There's another musical that does that, which I saw recently, recently called Get Down Tonight. It's a jukebox musical about Harry Casey, who created Casey and the Sunshine Band. But the show's narrative eventually forces him to confront the realities of his life. And the notion that he doesn't want to is just a little something that happens earlier on in the show before he comes to terms with the truth. And that never really happens in the Queen of Versailles. We never really get emotional honesty from her, if indeed there is any to give. My even bigger book issue, though, is just the way that the whole thing is structured. Like, we start with the documentary filming. We start amidst the construction of Versailles and then we flash back. But it feels like a very pedestrian way to go about it. It feels like the most obvious musical biographic structure, and it's disempowered from drawing any kinds of parallels with things that happen later in her life. We occasionally see These French characters. Characters. But we just sort of go through the motions of what she did to get where she is, which has flashes of inspiration and just occasionally the means for a regular audience member to be able to emotionally access it. But for the most part, hers is neither a relatable nor a particularly inspirational or encouraging life story. And the book, and just about everything about the production does too little to assuage that feeling. Finally, let's talk about the choices of this creative team and some of the things that the show does achieve. Well, Now I mentioned how it feels like Michael Arden was never really given the keys to the car on this one, or the keys to the palace, should we say. And that being said, there is a slickness in the direction and what he is able to achieve on this legitimately extraordinary set. Like, I was sat a few rows back in the center of the orchestra, staring up at the whole thing, and it is vast and gorgeous. And I remember thinking, at a certain point in the show, we're just never going to see see any finished version of Versailles, because that would be too difficult to achieve on a Broadway stage. And, you know, foolish of me, because we do. There is this incredible set reveal, which bafflingly happens in almost complete silence as a curtain raises to reveal them all stood there. And not a powerful silence where it's like a shock, stunned, like here it all finally is, but just an awkward nothing of a silence. It does, however, look just extraordinary. The scenic design is from Dane Laffrey, as is the video design and scenery 10 video 8. Because this multi tier, grand staircase, inclusive marble finish that we see in various levels of construction throughout the show and upon which and around which we establish other homes and other locations, is so beautiful and so impressive and so theatrically capable and really convinced, conveys scale and enormity. We can see just one grand room on a Broadway stage and we can get a tangible sense of just how huge this property is going to be. But in the moments that we look at before construction began on Versailles, and in the years when construction had to be paused, we have to create different locations, while Versailles is sometimes obscured in lighting or just sort of hanging there unfinished, sort of ominously. One of the ways in which we do that, as well as bringing on other locations and set pieces and scenic art items, is by using screens. And a screen appears from the beginning of the show as well to convey the documentary that is being filmed. And of course, the last few visits I paid to the St. James Theater were to see Jamie Lloyd's groundbreaking revival of Sunset Boulevard, which really raised the game when it comes to our expectations on screens. And the absolute lack of lag that that had wasn't necessarily replicated by the live video team in the Queen of Vic, though they still achieved a lot of very impressive things, they also managed to perpetrate a decent number of good reveals. You may have seen the clip on social media when the character of Jackie makes her first appearance in the show, when there is an empty chair and then something is wheeled in front of it and then this moves past and suddenly Kristin Chenoweth, or whoever it may be at that performance, is sat there in pink, looking regal, and is greeted by entrance applause. APPLAUSE. There's a similar moment that happens during the screening of the documentary that she attends at a film festival. And we think that what we're looking at is Jackie. And then she appears again from elsewhere. There is a certain amount of style and flourish to the visual presentation of the entire thing. If you couldn't hear any of it, if you were to just look at the thing, then you might be able to enjoy it. We do have to talk about the costumes, which are as striking as they are occasionally tasteless, and a quick Google search will tell you very realistic. For Jackie Siegel, I did think that the way that she was costumed, giving a eulogy at a family funeral, was in incredibly poor taste, but it transpires that that's very much familiar of what she actually wore in real life to said funeral. So there's that Christian Cowan is the costume designer who is a legitimate designer making a Broadway debut with this project, and all of the pink, all of the sequins, the evolution of Jackie, the style that she has throughout, but the way that it does begin to legitimately look more expensive, the difference between, to use kind of pejorative language, trashy to wealthy, but perhaps lacking in a little bit of good taste, versus the very different aesthetics of her husband, David, portrayed by F. Murray Abraham, who is on that stage, and her niece and her daughter and their own shifting aesthetics, and her parents, who she returns to visit, who still covet this quiet, simple life that they've always led, as well as, lest we forget, the ornate outfits and wigs worn by these 18th century French characters. And it is quite legitimately a sumptuous visual feast. Imagine what a production this could have been if married to substantial and meaningful material. I know I can only say that so many times, but there's a frustration factor there when you have have brilliant creatives, brilliant performers, everyone involved in this, a lot of top tier talent coming together to make something inherently flawed because of where it stands or refuses to, where it sits down lazily in the current sociopolitical climate. It's also a show, for what it's worth, that I think would be way more watchable the second time around. I think there is a frustration factor and a baffling quality the first time that you experience it. And if you returned to the Queen of Versailles already knowing where the bar was and you know I was not expecting a good show, I was surprised. It was even worse than I was anticipating. Certainly it's worse than the New York Times critics pick, that it has been staggeringly afforded an accolade which it receives alongside a handful of deserving shows and also some of last season's worst new musicals. But if you were planning to return to this, perhaps to catch the final two scheduled performance performances of standby Jackie Siegel, Sherry Renee Scott, who, for what it's worth, I imagine is maybe even more suited to the role, but obviously doesn't have the same nationwide worldwide star power of Kristin Chenoweth is not as much of a household name, though she is a bona fide Broadway leading lady because she has the capacity to play irony. Where Kristin Chenoweth more usually opts to play this earnest charm, I dare say you would have upon your second visit to the show, a slightly more positive, extreme experience. It is watchable. Michael Arden has ensured that much. There is some level of entertainment factor. You can separate yourself entirely from the reality of who this woman not only was, but continues deliberately to be. You can separate yourself from the harsh realities of many people's lives in the current financial climate. And you can watch Kristin Chenoweth being legitimately very good at what she does in a role that fits her even more perfectly than the slinky booby dresses that she wears on stage. But I will say if you have the choice to see literally anything else on or off Broadway, go see that instead. So this would be the part of the review where I would issue some kind of a summing up statement or a conclusion. And I think I've said it enough times. I think I have made my feelings on the Queen of Versailles abundantly clear. I want to to add to that that I obviously have a level of political indifference and I've talked a lot about my frustrations with the show's reluctance to really have a perspective on its own material meaning by extension that we don't really have any kind of an understanding of how we are supposed to feel and therefore no emotional investment whatsoever so we leave the theater feeling just nothing. But there is also, from an artistic standpoint, just so much wrong with this show, with this material. I feel like it has inherently apparently been built wrongly and with misguided intentions. It isn't always valuable to at all times consider the audience when you are trying to write something honest and authentic, but I don't know that those qualities were ever really a part of the construction of this project. And on this occasion, considering the audience and sitting down and trying to figure out who the hell that might be perhaps may have been used useful, because I can't tell you who this is meant to be for other than Jackie Siegel herself. And while she could feasibly buy every single seat in the theater, sit on one herself and put her dog next to her at that point, what are we even doing? And it is also, to a certain extent moot because like I said before, the Queen of Versailles has already announced that it will close early on Broadway on January 4th. My expectation is that its legacy will be similar to Reynolds Edwards, that it may not attain that many Tony Award nominations, and ultimately within a few years it may be forgotten or remembered only as another disastrous flop accompanied by a social media storm endured by its formerly beloved leading lady. I will reiterate the sympathies that I extend towards all involved with the show because this has been a successful chapter for just about no one. And not to labor the point, but I include in that the audience members who saw it, which is the final thing that I am going to say about the Queen of Versailles on Broadway. I will not have the chance to see this show again in intrigued as I would be to see it with Sheri Renee Scott. Of course, if you have seen the show either on or pre Broadway, I would love to know what you thought. Let me know all of your thoughts and feelings about the Queen of Versailles in the comments section down below. If you feel I have been disproportionately unfair. If you have positive things to say about any other aspect of this show, please share them with us. In the meantime, thank you so much for listening to this review. There will be many more to come. From my most recent trip to New York, I saw nearly 20 shows, many of which I thoroughly enjoyed, almost all of which I enjoyed more than this one. If you want to hear my thoughts on those, make sure you're subscribed right here on YouTube. Turn on notifications so you don't miss it the second that I drop a new video or go follow me on podcast platforms. As always I hope that everyone is staying safe and that you have a stagey day for 10 more seconds. I'm Mickey Jo Theater. Oh my God. Hey, thanks for watching. Have a stagey day. Subscribe.
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