Cocktails for Two

By Richard Zoglin

Queenie was a blonde, and her age stood still, And she danced twice a day in vaudeville

Few people probably knew those lines a few weeks ago, but they are about to become the most familiar on Broadway. They're the opening couplet of The Wild Party, a book-length narrative poem by Joseph Moncure March published in 1928. The author was a former New Yorker editor, and the poem caused something of a scandal in its day (it was banned--no fooling--in Boston). But it was long out of print until a new edition, illustrated by the cartoonist Art Spiegelman, appeared in 1994. In the introduction, Spiegelman reported that a big fan of the poem was the Beat writer William Burroughs, who claimed it was "the book that made me want to be a writer."

Now, it seems, it's the book that has made a lot of people want to be Broadway showmen. In an odd coincidence, The Wild Party is the source and identical title for two musicals opening on the New York City stage only weeks apart. Both follow March's story of Queenie and her abusive boyfriend Burrs, who throw a party that attracts an array of Roaring Twenties types and ends in violence. In the depleted world of Broadway musicals--where only three new shows with an original book and score opened last season--the idea of two based on the very same 70-year-old work is pretty wild in itself.

The Wild Party, version A, which opens on Broadway in April, boasts the biggest firepower: a star cast that includes Mandy Patinkin, Eartha Kitt and Oscar nominee (for The Sixth Sense) Toni Collette; music and lyrics by highly touted young composer Michael John LaChiusa (Marie Christine); and direction by co-adapter George C. Wolfe, head of New York City's Public Theater. But their show is being beaten to the boards by The Wild Party, version B, with book, music and lyrics by less highly touted young composer Andrew Lippa (who contributed some bouncy new numbers to the recent Broadway revival of You're a Good Man, Charlie Brown). His show is being staged off-Broadway, at the Manhattan Theatre Club, but has been optioned by two Rent producers, who want to move it to Broadway. That could mean some confusing conversations with the Telecharge operator.

How did this happen? Lippa says he discovered the poem in a bookstore in 1995 and saw it as a chance to write "my Cats," referring to the soon-to-close Andrew Lloyd Webber show based on T.S. Eliot's poetry. LaChiusa says he first read the poem even earlier--1994, so there!--though he didn't start to work on it for nearly three years. Lippa's version was the first to be staged, in a workshop production at the Eugene O'Neill Theater Center in Connecticut in the summer of 1997. (LaChiusa's had its first reading a few months later.) The two creative teams profess unconcern at the possibility of Party overload. "They're going to be two completely different shows," says Wolfe. "That's the fascinating phenomenon of art: you can paint a picture of a bird, and I can paint a picture of a bird, and they can be two completely different birds." Still, Wolfe's bigger-budget production has perhaps more to lose if it is perceived as an also-ran.

Lippa's Party, which opened last week, is an ambitious but disappointing show. A lot of grime and edge have been added since the charming workshop production in Connecticut nearly three years ago. We're greeted by a bleak set of brick tenement walls, with few props arrayed on the stage--an old-fashioned bathtub, a Victrola, a toilet (the last is actually used by an actress onstage, a bit of business the other Wild Party would be wise not to copy). Gabriel Barre's shrill production seems intent on giving us a hangover before the party is over. The show's best feature is Lippa's tuneful and clever score, which evokes the '20s without self-conscious quotation marks. But the characters lack flesh and blood, and the competent performers--including Taye Diggs and Idina Menzel, two veterans of Rent, and Julia Murney as Queenie--seem trapped in a puddle of flat Champagne.

Which means either that March's poem isn't quite the rich material many imagined or that it will take the second Wild Party to prove it can work onstage. A few numbers previewed early for the press seem promising; at least they show that LaChiusa, fresh from his operatic downer, Marie Christine, is not the most depressive songwriter on Broadway. But it remains to be seen whether he can get into the Party spirit.

--Reported by William Tynan/New York

With reporting by William Tynan/New York