The Queen of Versailles has opened on Broadway, and the reviews are scorchingly negative.
Critics are jeering everything from its concept and messaging to its songs, structure, and runtime (nearly 3 hours with the intermission included). Few theater fans could have predicted such an intense lashing for a musical that reunites two Broadway legends who contributed to Wicked becoming a smash hit from stage to screen: composer/lyricist Stephen Schwartz and actress Kristin Chenoweth.
Frankly, having seen The Queen of Versailles musical, I’m even more befuddled by the barrage of pans, because it is outrageous fun. But that’s not all. It’s a brazen exploration of the achingly American pursuit of happiness through obscene wealth. And far from being simply a finger-wagging cautionary tale, it becomes a hilarious and thought-provoking commentary on not only Americans’ burning desire for more, but also our snarling schadenfreude as we watch the wealthy fail.
Credit: Julieta Cervantes
Shouldered by the petite powerhouse that is Chenoweth, The Queen of Versailles is a bold and bonkers musical that had me cackling in Act 1 and tearing up in Act 2, with my mind left spinning as the curtain called. So, what’s the deal with this peculiar production?
The Queen of Versailles goes beyond its eponymous inspiration point.
Credit: Julieta Cervantes
Broadway and off-Broadway have been home to a slew of plays and musicals inspired by movies. Right now, you can see Death Becomes Her, The Outsiders, Beetlejuice, Heathers: The Musical, Romy & Michelle: The Musical, or Exorcistic: The Rock Musical. However, it’s far less often that the movie inspiration for a musical is a documentary.
The Queen of Versailles is based on Lauren Greenfield’s 2012 documentary about Jackie Siegel (Chenoweth), a former beauty pageant winner turned trophy wife of “timeshare king” David Siegel (played onstage by F. Murray Abraham), who was 30 years her senior and massively wealthy. Together, they dreamed of rebuilding the Palace of Versailles — in central Florida. However, the Great Recession of 2008 put a hold on their plans, threatened their holdings, and put an intense strain on their relationship.
Where the movie ends with the Versailles house unfinished and the Siegels flailing to save it from sale or foreclosure, the musical follows Jackie and her family through the film’s Sundance premiere and her subsequent reality-TV stardom (like her appearance on Celebrity Wife Swap). While her 2022 show, Queen of Versailles Reigns Again, is not directly mentioned, the pink, glittery fashions she favored there, as well as the ongoing obsession with finishing Versailles even in the face of great personal tragedy, does make it into Act 2. However, Jackie and her family get a major Broadway musical overhaul.
Kristin Chenoweth is the indisputable star of The Queen of Versailles.
Credit: Julieta Cervantes
Reimagined for Broadway, Jackie’s never-say-die attitude is translated as an unflappable and girlish resilience in Chenoweth’s performance. The first act digs deeper into Jackie’s blue-collar roots (“Champagne Dreams”) and less-than-glamorous jobs (“Keep on Thrustin'”), including waitressing at Red Lobster and washing down corpses for an old folks home. Chenoweth tackles these bits with a bouncy showmanship that suggests Jackie uses a smile as a shield to get her through the tough times, including an abusive marriage to her first husband (“Mrs. Florida”).
However, it’s when Jackie is singing about her grand ambitions to be a queen “like Marie Antoinette” with zero self-awareness that Chenoweth is at her bubbly best. Like she did as Glinda with “Popular,” Chenoweth is a force of unrepentant whimsy as she trots and glides around the stage in furiously sequined mini-dresses and heels. Sometimes, she’ll carry a fluffy white Pomeranian (an ode to the real Siegel’s pack of pets). Other times, she’ll give grand gestures to the comical baubles Jackie has spent a fortune on (in real life, too).
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No matter how garish or absurd the moment, Chenoweth is so enchanting that you might well be spellbound by her sales pitch of more, more, more. In song (Schwartz) and book (by Lindsey Ferrentino), Jackie spins a yarn about coming from immigrant grandparents, growing up in a small town, and just wanting more for her children. It’s a story echoed less laughably in the experience of the Siegel’s immigrant nanny Sofia Flores (a heart-wrenching Melody Butui). But when is enough enough?
Jackie is such a larger-than-life figure that she feels more like a caricature than a flesh-and-blood person. But The Queen of Versailles balances its anti-heroine’s intense energy, insatiable desires, and determined (and toxic) positivity with her two teen daughters.
Nina White and Tatum Grace Hopkins are stellar as the princesses of Versailles.
Credit: Julieta Cervantes
While in the documentary all nine of the Siegel children get some camera time, the musical smartly keeps most of them offstage. Instead, the focus narrows to Jackie’s eldest, Victoria (Nina White), and Jackie’s niece/adopted daughter, Jonquil (Tatum Grace Hopkins), who grew up in extreme poverty only to be thrust into a life of perverse luxury (“I Could Get Used to This.”)
Through these two girls, The Queen of Versailles digs deeper into themes that were only lightly touched on in the movie. Self-conscious Victoria looks to her mother and Jackie’s beauty queen friends and feels she’s falling short of their superficial but stringent standards (“Pretty Wins”). Feeling isolated from parents focused more on failing finances than nurturing, the two girls bond over a silly song, “Pavane for a Dead Lizard.” But within the lizard’s funeral, the girls themselves seem like pets abandoned to the whims of a fickle master. As the second act turns darker, these two ground the heartache, where Jackie can’t help but squirm toward a silver lining.
In that, Jackie becomes a tragic figure, like King Lear or Anna Nicole Smith. She’d hoped her wealth would save her children from the harsh realities she knew growing up, be it pining, heartbreak, or abuse. But in building her castle, she didn’t create a safe space for her children. Her endless thrusting toward the dream cost her more than she could imagine. And in the end, she is a victim of her own desires, damned by her wish come true.
The Queen of Versailles is a compelling commentary on American culture.
Credit: Julieta Cervantes
In the musical, Jackie is influenced by the elegant affluence seen in TV shows like Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous or Dynasty. But her style is deeply nouveau riche. Covered in bubble-gum pink sequins, with big, implanted boobs, high, high heels, long blond locks, and a bejeweled necklace that reads “Queen of Versailles,” she is undeniably tacky, feeding her massive family with super-sized McDonald’s orders. She’s a trophy wife who flung herself into reality TV to maintain her fortune through dubious fame; the kind of rich woman America loves to loathe. Hell, Bravo’s built a collection of reality shows all about our obsession with watching the rich and tasteless.
However, through the plotline of Jackie’s daughters, audiences of this Queen of Versailles are pushed toward an empathy not found in the 2012 documentary. The musical urges us to get in on the guilty pleasure of gawking over Jackie and her preposterous displays of wealth in Act 1. But with Act 2, we’re urged to consider what she lost for all she gains. What’s more tragic, we are given a better insight into her life than the character is. (This is also true of the documentary, in which she tells the filmmakers on camera that the movie might teach her things about her life and marriage that her husband won’t share with her.)
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Within the show, Schwartz works in a curious (and at times wobbly) device: Scenes in which members of the French aristocracy (King Louis XVI, Marie Antoinette, and unnamed hangers-on) sing about the clever maneuvering of American millionaires, who can become self-proclaimed royalty without fear of being violently overthrown. This cheeky historical angle gets less laughs than the allusions to the Trump Administration’s extravagances. (Lines about Versailles’ ballroom being finished, but the East Wing being a wreck, got laughs and hoots from the audience when I attended.) However, this comparison does create a broader context for Jackie’s absurdities.
Credit: Julieta Cervantes
Beyond that, however, The Queen of Versailles also offers something exceptional for the cheap seats. Bringing the making of the documentary into the musical, a large TV screen occasionally plays helpful imagery or offers close-ups of Chenoweth in some of her flashier moments. Even the balcony has a great view of the screen depicting this Broadway icon giving her all. So, you don’t need to be in the pricey orchestra seats to see a hell of a show.
The Queen of Versailles will find its audience.
By intermission, I marveled that critics were so overwhelmingly panning the show. What I was seeing was fun, surprising, and occasionally savage, yet with an emotional intelligence. Audiences weren’t urged to like Jackie but, rather, to at least understand where she came from. The second half of the show is less rollicking than the first, and some songs stumble to capture the agony of being a teen (“Book of Random”). But still, I was riveted.
There’s something deliciously unhinged about this production. Perhaps critics didn’t expect that from a Broadway show with such prestigious talent attached. Personally, I was reminded of the electric energy and ludicrousness of off-Broadway’s Titanique, which imagined if Celine Dion crashed a Titanic museum tour to regale attendees with the movie of Titanic — as she remembered it — and lots of Celine Dion songs. That show is still one of the silliest things I’ve ever seen, and a treasured memory of life theater. The Queen of Versailles is less scrappy, flaunting a confident production design that entails multiple sets, including the French Versailles and the Florida copy — ever in construction. Yet this had the charm of such off-Broadway experimentation.
There’s a beguiling complexity, though it’s not so much to Jackie herself. She is so resolute in pursuit of her goals that she becomes essentially trapped in her self-serving vision. But The Queen of Versailles takes a step back from the doc, the reality TV, and the people who inspired it to wonder what might have happened when the cameras weren’t rolling. In this space, they somehow made room for “eat the rich” humor and earnest humanity. Is the balance flawless? No. But is the show fantastically entertaining? Absolutely.
The Queen of Versailles is now playing at the St. James Theater.
