When the Great Recession of 2008 crashes the party, the Florida couple who are never satisfied despite having everything find themselves scrounging to make the mortgage payments for this unfinished (and possibly unfinishable) Orlando colossus. Not even the banks know what to do with this gargantuan white elephant. <\/p>\n
The first half of the musical traces Jackie\u2019s rise from a hardworking upstate New York hick to a Florida beauty pageant winner who escaped an abusive relationship with her baby daughter. Her dream of nabbing a wealthy husband comes true after she meets David Siegel (F. Murray Abraham, in vivid vulgarian resort mogul mode). He\u2019s decades older than her but as rich as Croesus, having proudly transformed himself into the \u201cTimeshare King.\u201d <\/p>\n
With David funding her every whim, Jackie discovers the joys of consumerism as her family expands along with her credit line. David adopts her first-born, Victoria (Nina White), a sulky adolescent who doesn\u2019t appreciate her mother\u2019s lavish ways. And the couple proceed to have six more children together before adopting Jackie\u2019s niece, Jonquil (Tatum Grace Hopkins), a Dickensian waif who shows up with all her belongings stuffed into plastic bags.<\/p>\n
The musical\u2019s book, written by Lindsey Ferrentino (whose plays included the raw veteran recovery story \u201cUgly Lies the Bone\u201d) deals only with Victoria and Jonquil, leaving the other kids to our imagination along with most of the pets that suffer the seesaw of lavish attention and thoughtless neglect that is the Siegel family way.<\/p>\n
Jackie didn\u2019t set out to build such a ludicrously gigantic residence. As she explains in the number \u201cBecause We Can,\u201d \u201cWe just want the home of our dreams\/And the house we\u2019re in now,\/Although it\u2019s sweet,\/It\u2019s only like 26,000 square feet,\/So we\u2019re just bursting at the seams.\u201d<\/p>\n
This version of \u201cThe Queen of Versailles,\u201d making the visual most of settings by scenic and video designer Dane Laffrey, that can make Mar-a-Lago seem understated, embraces the sociological fable aspect of the tale. To drive home the political point, the musical begins at the court of Louis XIV and returns to France near the end of the show after the French Revolution has bloodied up the guillotine with the powdered heads of callous aristocrats.<\/p>\n
Jackie sees herself as a modern-day Marie Antoinette, but instead of saying \u201cLet them eat cake\u201d she has her driver bring back enough McDonald\u2019s to feed an entire film crew. Chenoweth, who is as gleaming as a holiday ornament on Liberace\u2019s Christmas tree, arrives at a canny balance of quixotic generosity and parvenu carelessness in her portrayal of a woman she refuses to lampoon.<\/p>\n
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Kristin Chenoweth and the Company of \u201cThe Queen of Versailles.\u201d<\/p>\n
(Julieta Cervantes)<\/p>\n
The second half of the musical recaps what happens when the super rich face ruin \u2014 ruin not in the sense of going hungry but of having to stop buying luxury goods in bulk. With his timeshare empire hanging in the balance, Abraham\u2019s David transforms from Santa Claus to Ebenezer Scrooge, belligerently withdrawing into his home office like a beaten general plotting a counteroffensive and treating Jackie like a trophy wife who has lost her golden sheen.<\/p>\n
Ferrentino extends the timeline beyond the documentary to include what happened to the family in the years since the film was released and Jackie took to the spotlight like a Real Housewife given her own spinoff. The federal bailout worked wonders for the haves, like the Siegels, while the have-nots were left to fend for themselves \u2014 casualties of questionable mortgage practices and the \u201cmore, more, more\u201d mantra of America. But no one escapes the brutal moral accounting, not even Jackie, after she suffers a tragedy no amount of retail therapy will ever make right.<\/p>\n