"There is a two-hour-and-40-minute luxury-car crash happening at the St. James Theatre. If I were the litigious type, I'd 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're 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."
"Tonally, it's all over the map. Ethically, it would like to have its cake and also to tell the peasants to eat it. It is the confused, contorted product of a set of absolutely incompatible impulses: to ogle, even lionize the Uber-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."
The Queen of Versailles runs two hours and forty minutes at the St. James Theatre and centers Kristin Chenoweth in a glittering performance. The production adapts the 2012 documentary about Jackie and David Siegel, Florida timeshare billionaires whose plan to build the biggest house in America was derailed by the 2008 financial crisis. The musical repeatedly shifts tone, torn between ogling the ultra-rich and satirizing their excess, reveling in conspicuous consumption while attempting critique. The result is a conflicted, ultimately spineless show whose spectacle feels superficial and whose moral posture remains uncommitted.
Read at www.vulture.com
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