Review: House of McQueen, an Off-the-Rack Bioplay about the Famous Couturier

The myth of the tortured artist is one of the more well-worn clichés of western drama. But like a trusty pair of blue jeans, cliché is what most people live in day-to-day. Apparently, that included the boundary breaking designer of clothing one can only don on the runway, Alexander McQueen. He’s the subject of Darrah Cloud’s House of McQueen, now making its debut at the bespoke new venue, the Mansion at Hudson Yards.

The story is a familiar rags-to-riches bildungsroman—Horatio Alger with more blow. Young Lee McQueen (Matthew Eby) has a keen eye for fashion, crafting doll’s clothes and styling outfits for his sister, Janet (Jonina Thorsteinsdottir), as they both suffer the abuses of her husband (Joe Joseph). Such girly behavior distresses Lee’s father (Denis Lambert), who wishes his son would become a normal (read: heterosexual) taxi driver, like him. But Lee’s mother (Emily Skinner) encourages him to apply for an apprenticeship on London’s Savile Row at the tender age of 16—and he gets the job.

“I want to learn everyfing, everyfing, everyfing,” Lee (Luke Newton) says to a head tailor at Anderson & Sheppard (Lambert), then a fashionista trust-funder (Spencer R. Petro), then a gatekeeper (also Petro) at the Milan headquarters of Romeo Gigli. His hero’s quest to accumulate technical knowledge leads the East End boy to Central Saint Martins, where his gruesome graduation collection catches the eye of industry insider Isabella Blow (Catherine LeFrere, somehow perfectly blending dry wit with maudlin self-pity). She encourages him to adopt his middle name, “Alexander,” and guides him into the upper echelons of the industry, where he finds wealth, fame, and mountains of cocaine.

The opening is strong. Cloud frames her biography with the designer’s 2010 suicide, then jumps around in the narrative to present snapshots of his life. She displays an admirable willingness to experiment with form, as in a later scene that depicts the fashion industry as a nonstop dance competition—keep moving or you’re out. It’s an apt metaphor for any prestige industry.

But like an intricately feathered garment dreamt up as a beautiful sketch, the execution of this dramatic collage proves too taxing for Cloud, who eventually reverts to a “and then this happened” chronology. This becomes particularly deadly in the second act as McQueen’s career reaches new heights while his mental and physical health deteriorates. What should be a terrifying climb to a precipice feels a lot more like circling the drain.

This is despite energetic performances from the ensemble cast, under the sharp direction of Sam Helfrich. Jason Ardizonne-West’s sleek set design provides for rapid transitions while never really allowing us to mentally leave the runway. Brad Peterson’s projections do much of the heavy lifting, incorporating video of McQueen’s actual shows while transporting us around the world. A bump of cocaine cues a kaleidoscope of electronic stimuli, flashily lit by Robert Wierzel, with thumping electronic music provided by sound designer G Clausen. Unfortunately, it all begins to feel like compensation for a fundamentally dull script.

Costume designer Kaye Voyce succeeds in the difficult task of bringing high fashion to the off-Broadway stage, offering eye-popping replicas of McQueen’s actual work while dropping telling details into more everyday looks: a flash of Mephistophelean red lining in Tom Ford’s jacket; a pair of slutty jean shorts on one of McQueen’s many boyfriends (Tim Creavin plays them all with subtle distinction); the baggy tee and jeans that, like his accent, marked McQueen as unashamedly working class.

His hair buzzed and mouth framed by a light bristle, Newton (who most viewers will know from Bridgerton) looks strikingly like the late designer. He makes a respectable off-Broadway debut with a performance that evinces much homework (McQueen’s shy little bows at the end of a runway show) but also a fair amount of mental gear-shifting as the actor tries to keep up with the frantic pace of Helfrich’s direction.

But the performer who really hits us in the gut is Skinner as a sweet English mum, delivering Gregg’s sandwiches to the starving models backstage. “Isn’t anybody here takin’ care of you? Doesn’t anybody care? Can all of you just please not give Lee any more drugs? Please? Answer me,” she pleads, and is ignored. It’s devastating.

“We’re your real family, darling,” one of McQueen’s hangers-on says early in the play. While we valorize the “chosen family” as a tool of queer liberation, offering an alternative to the homophobic abuse we often experience from our biological families (McQueen certainly did), Cloud at least has the courage to tell this truth: Chosen family often comes with its own oppression, and regularly evaporates in times of need. It’s not radical love, but an extension of the consumer mindset, in which our closest relationships can be selected and discarded, like a bit of fast fashion.

Sadly, House of McQueen isn’t primarily interested in drawing those connections. Despite its pretension to humanize the late designer, it mostly serves as a hagiography of McQueen the misunderstood genius—a romantic who only wanted a life of love and creativity, yet somehow found himself surrounded by posh vampires, subsisting on a diet of broken hearts and speed. It absolutely downplays the designer’s complicity in this behavior, his well-documented penchant for cruelty and even violence.

Of course, most of the bioplays that come through this town do exactly this. In that light, House of McQueen is your garden-variety exercise in estate-approved mythmaking (nephew Gary James McQueen serves as “creative director”). It gets the job done, but one wonders if a visionary like McQueen, who knew how to make his audience stew in discomfort, deserves something bolder.