The Wild Party, and: The Wild Party (review)

The Wild Party. Book, Music, and Lyrics by Andrew Lippa. Manhattan Theatre Club. City Center Stage, New York, New York. 6 April 2000.

The Wild Party. Music and Lyrics by Michael John LaChiusa, Book by Michael John LaChiusa and George C. Wolfe. The Joseph Papp Public Theatre/New York Shakespeare Festival. Virginia Theatre, New York, New York. 19 April 2000.

Last spring, the New York theatre world was confronted with an unprecedented development: two separate productions inspired by the same source material and sharing the same name were staged simultaneously. Both the Manhattan Theatre Club and The Joseph Papp Public Theatre/New York Shakespeare Festival presented musicals based on Joseph Moncure March's 1928 poem "The Wild Party," a scandalous verse narrative about a debauched party thrown by a volatile vaudeville couple during Prohibition. While MTC's version was staged Off-Broadway, the Public Theatre's production opened on Broadway (the theatres, however, were a mere four blocks from each other). With George C. Wolfe as co-writer and director, the Public Theatre's production was especially anticipated. The productions, however, had more similarities than differences, and both resembled each other more than either resembled the original source material.

"The Wild Party" sketches the mutually destructive relationship between Queenie, a sexually ambitious and antagonistic vaudeville dancer, and Burrs, a vicious, violent clown whose act follows Queenie's. One morning, after a hang-over-induced fight, the two decide to throw a wild party. Their guests represent the colorful milieu of the New York vaudeville world: promiscuous, uninhibited, and violent. When Queenie's close friend Kate arrives with her new man, Black, Queenie decides to make Burrs jealous by seducing the gorgeous, young newcomer. The evening spirals towards intoxicated excess and carnal indulgence, and the party turns into a drunken orgy. When Burrs finds Queenie and Black together, he pulls a gun. The party, and the poem, ends abruptly when, after a struggle, Burrs himself is shot by Black. Discordant rhythm patterns, inconsistent rhyme schemes, and truncated lines jar the reader and give the poem an urgent, forward momentum that builds to the bacchic spectacle and culminates in jealous rage.

New York city at the end of the 1990s resonates March's 1928 poem. As the policing of the city's nightlife and public space becomes more and more repressive, opportunities for social contact and self-expression continue to diminish. The illicit and criminal relationships explored in March's poem stand in sharp contrast to the increasingly sanitized sexual landscape of the city and present alternatives to normative modes of intimacy and sociality. The impulse to stage this poem at this historical moment was well informed, and musical theatre seemed particularly well suited to capture the fluid sexual lifestyle and moral abandon of March's characters. Unfortunately, neither MTC nor the Public Theatre managed to present what makes the story so timely or engaging.

The scale of MTC's Off-Broadway production was more amenable to the intimacy of a party in a cramped Manhattan tenement. The band performed backstage, visible through venetian blinds of apartment windows. The platform serving as the apartment relied on only a few pieces of furniture to suggest a one-room flat. Throughout the show, the apartment fragmented into jagged segments that could be rearranged, giving the audience the sense they were viewing it from different angles (now the bed, now the bathtub would be in the front). The action played literally at the audience's feet in the small theatre. Yet the sense of a party was never fully realized. In an effort to dramatize Queenie and Burrs's abusive relationship, the sociality and ensemble nature of the story was subordinated to the individualized psychology of the four principal parts (Queenie, Burrs, Kate, and Black). Through maudlin ballads, these characters were shallowly sketched into melodramatic figures, with Queenie the fallen woman terrorized by the vicious Burrs (one song trying to articulate the psychology of an abusive relationship bore the unfortunate title...