Queen of Versailles

I saw The Queen of Versailles during its now closed Broadway run, and I left angry. This show asks you to sympathize with billionaires who built their fortune through timeshares and predatory sales tactics aimed at working families, then acts shocked when the 2008 crash interrupts their palace fantasy. I kept waiting for the show to show self awareness. It never did. Critics kept calling it tone deaf and I agree.

On paper, this should have been a fascinating adaptation. It is based on Lauren Greenfield’s documentary about Jackie and David Siegel building a Versailles sized mansion in Florida during the financial crisis, with music and lyrics by Stephen Schwartz and a book by Lindsey Ferrentino. That is a loaded setup. A musical could have used it to interrogate greed, denial, and the way wealth insulates people from consequences. Instead it mostly plays like a glossy postcard to excess.

Visually, it is eye candy. Huge sets. Big reveals. Expensive looking everything. It is the one area where the show does its job. More than one review even admits that the spectacle is the strongest argument for being there. The problem is that the show treats the spectacle like meaning, and it is not.

The score did nothing for me. A few weeks later, I cannot remember a single song. Not one. That matches a lot of the pushback I read after the fact, where critics described the material as bloated and unfocused, with music that struggles to land emotionally while the show cannot decide if it is satire or sincerity.

The biggest tonal failure is that it seems to want tears for people who caused real harm, while barely grappling with that harm. Reviewers repeatedly pointed out that the show cannot resolve the basic question of how we are supposed to feel about Jackie Siegel, and that the piece ends up shallow and emotionally hollow. That is exactly how it played in the room for me.

Kristin Chenoweth, political controversies aside, felt miscast to me. She is so inherently likable, and that quality works against this story. Her performance can glitter and charm all it wants, but it cannot change who Jackie Siegel is and what she represents. Multiple critics basically landed on the same problem, saying Chenoweth has skill and star power, but the show itself leaves her stranded inside a story that keeps rewarding the wrong people.

It also matters that Jackie and David Siegel were credited as investors, which means the musical is not just about them. It is also for them. That made the whole thing feel even more gross to me, because any attempt at critique gets tangled up in self celebration. If the show was aiming for satire, it failed. The world does not need a big glossy musical that treats the housing crash like a temporary inconvenience for the rich.

I am sad anytime a show closes because real people lose work. Cast, crew, front of house, wardrobe, swings, musicians, everyone. I hope they all got paid. At the same time, this was a very expensive show that closed early after harsh reviews and heavy criticism, and I understand why. It reportedly had a very large budget, and the pushback was loud and consistent. My ticket was free or I would not have gone, and after seeing it, I feel even stronger about that.