Review: Michael John LaChiusa’s The Wild Party at Encores!

I had to catch my breath during the curtain call of The Wild Party, now receiving an extraordinary concert staging from Encores! at New York City Center. I can only imagine how the performers feel.

Michael John LaChiusa (music, lyrics, and book) and George C. Wolfe (book) have taken the raw metal of Joseph Moncure March’s narrative poem of 1920s debauchery and engineered a relentless freight train of jazz, gin, and jealousy. It chugs toward the audience at full speed, delighting and disturbing in equal measure. It produces a rush of dopamine that can only portend a brutal comedown. I’m still coming down now.

The Wild Party played 68 performances and 36 previews on Broadway in the spring of 2000, inauspiciously opening just weeks after an off-Broadway musical by the same name using the same source material (a concert revival of Andrew Lippa’s The Wild Party was presented by Encores! Off-Center in 2015). Arguably, both musicals opened too soon, in the waning days of America’s post-Cold War victory lap and over a year before the events of September 11, 2001, would shatter the delusion of the end of history. What could those happy people of the new Millennium possibly know about waking up to a looming sense of dread and attempting to fill the growing void with drugs, sex, and sundry forms of stimuli? We here in the new ’20s have intimate knowledge of how the roar so often serves to block out a desperate whimper.

Queenie (Jasmine Amy Rogers) and Burrs (Jordan Donica) are vaudeville show people (Donica first springs from a trunk wearing blackface, the first shocking sight in an evening full of them). She wakes up tired on a Sunday afternoon, and her request for a cup of coffee sends Burrs into a violent rage. She defends herself with a kitchen knife. They’re clearly not in a good place, but why not share that with friends? They decide to throw a party.

We meet prizefighter Eddie (Evan Tyrone Martin) and his former chorine wife, Mae (Lesli Margherita, funny and ferocious). She has unwisely brought along her 14-year-old kid sister Nadine (Maya Rowe, horrifying). Rich ambisextrous playboy Jackie (a chaotic and sexually aggressive Claybourne Elder) brings the coke and a desire to screw with “brothers” Oscar and Phil D’Armano (Wesley J. Barnes and Joseph Anthony Byrd bring old-fashioned showmanship to their numbers and feel like a real long-term gay couple, with all the gleeful libertinism and barely suppressed jealousy that entails). Lesbian stripper Madelaine True (Meghan Murphy, sultry and voluptuous) has brought a new date named Sally (disturbingly spaced-out Betsy Morgan). Fledgling Broadway producers Gold and Goldberg (KJ Hippensteel and Andrew Kober) are thrilled to just be there. And veteran performer Dolores (Tonya Pinkins) seizes the opportunity to snag new benefactors.

Queenie seems bored by all of them. She only really perks up with the arrival of her old frenemy Kate (Adrienne Warren, beautiful and cruel) wearing on her arm a new man named Black (Jelani Alladin, smooth as top-shelf scotch). We know she wants him, and she gets her opportunity as gin and cocaine work their dark magic over the revelers.

The controlled chaos of director Lili-Anne Brown’s production conveys layers of intrigue in this complex social ecosystem—the petty rivalries, fashionable posturing, and taboo desires that give these people a reason to get up in the afternoon.

Arnel Sancianco’s scenery captures the “third act passion set” that is Queenie and Burrs’s apartment, but its depth allows us to view multiple overlapping scenes as they transpire in real time. Linda Cho’s fabulous period costumes sparkle under Justin Townsend’s lighting, which darkens and blurs as the evening progresses and Katie Spelman’s frenetic vaudeville choreography gives way to a tangle of heaving bodies and grasping limbs.

Desire fuels these characters, none more terrifyingly than Burrs. With a mischievous tenor and menacing physicality, Donica embodies a man driven by insecurity, desperately compensating with his public performance as a puckish rake. He’s a kettle reaching boil during “How Many Women in the World,” in which Burrs reflects on Queenie’s talent for setting him off.

No longer Betty Boop, Rogers proves she is more than ready to take on more three-dimensional characters. Her Queenie is the dazzling star of the party, an ostensible cynic who still dreams of genuine connection. We feel every lyric in her aching duet with Alladin, “People Like Us,” in which she sings, “People like us, we take lovers like pills. / Just hoping to cure what we know we can’t fix. / And we’ll lay in their arms and we’ll say pretty things. / We’ll be there but not there, but we’ll still get our kicks.” It’s the Grindr theme song we need but don’t deserve.

Playing a role originated by Eartha Kitt, Pinkins approaches every line with a subtle purr in her voice, a tribute to her predecessor that never crosses the line into mimicry. And why should it? Pinkins is one of the great stage performers of our time, and she once again proves it with the apocalyptic 11 o’clock number “When It Ends,” which is liable to turn at least a few audience members into doomsday preppers.

We hear each lyric thanks to Alex Neumann’s gorgeously calibrated sound design, which perfectly balances the vocals against the muscular brass and seductive woodwinds of Bruce Coughlin’s orchestrations. Daryl Waters conducts the Encores! orchestra for this nonstop symphony of Jazz Age hedonism, which casts a spell over the audience and holds us there, enchanted, for two hours. Encores! always gives a score its very best hearing, and after revisting LaChiusa’s Wild Party, I’m convinced it’s an underrated masterpiece of American musical theater.