IT’S the Jazz Age. The ’20s. Black and white musical idioms are mixing as intimately and outrageously as blacks and whites themselves. The clatter of Fitzgerald and Stein and Picasso and Langston mix in.
A narrative poem written in 1926 by Joseph Moncure March called “The Wild Party” captured a certain aspect of the time. It was the tale of an all-night drug- and alcohol-driven debauch at the apartment of vaudeville players Queenie and Burrs.
This forgotten epic, recently republished, has inspired two musicals this season. The first, by Andrew Lippa, was merely glum and sordid. The second, with music and lyrics by Michael John LaChiusa and book by LaChiusa and George C. Wolfe, gets some of the sexiness and wit and raw, driven desperation of the ’20s.
This “Wild Party” gets the flavor of the period – the emptiness, the cheerful flinging of oneself into partying and drugs.
LaChiusa, author of “Marie Christine” and a very uneven talent, is comfortably at home here amid vaudevillians at play and at havoc. He does a good, competent job of making a lively, moving Broadway musical of a crazy scene.
Queenie, a raucous, sexy, flippant blonde vaudeville dancer, is played with irresistible charm and desperate abandon by Toni Collette, an Australian movie actress (“Muriel’s Wedding” and “The Sixth Sense”) in her New York stage debut.
Collette’s fevered vivacity and fierce appetite for life make us like her Queenie. The woman is in a relationship with the failing, angry, doomed vaudevillian comic Burrs, incarnated with an eerie intensity by Mandy Patinkin.
Patinkin becomes at extreme moments of tension a manic, black-face performer. He’s an Al Jolson from hell, a white man ill at ease with the black idiom he has appropriated. Patinkin is magnificent in his mad, frenzied appetite to thrust his bitterness on all the revelers – including us, who are forced to join in his jibes.
Other colorful celebrants abound. There’s Eartha Kitt as Dolores, an ageless fount of vocal venery and bodily bravura. Kitt, still beautiful and boastful, knows that “beauty won’t matter and brains won’t matter” when the party ends but that “the right stuff” – being fabulous and fabulously professional – will count. She has some lurid by-play with two producers named Gold and Goldberg (Adam Grupper and Stuart Zagnit in delightful performances).
Kitt is sensational, too, as a grim-faced dispenser of sober counsel to Queenie.
There are also the uptown friends and singers Phil and Oscar who are together and torn apart and get back together; a wild, wonderful touch of Harlem provided by Nathan Lee Graham and Michael McElroy.
The party’s lesbian is done superbly by Jane Summerhays, who is very funny as the lovelorn lady.
The party is brought to a riveting climax when Patinkin, in black-face, breaks in on Queenie and her new love, the dapper ladies’ man Black, who is brought to life with a mix of showy, gigolo glamour and fresh unspoiledness by Yancy Arias.
With “People Like Us” the lovers Queenie and Black have a standard lament of two lost souls trapped in an urban whirlwind.
“The Wild Party,” as delivered by Wolfe and LaChiusa, is an expansion of the New York of “On the Town.”
It’s a nervous, excited evocation of a New York nasty. But it’s also – perhaps allowing for love and certainly allowing for show business – an evocation of professionalism.
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THE WILD PARTY
Virginia Theatre, 245 W. 52nd St., between Broadway and Eighth Avenue. (212) 239-6200. Seen on April 11, 2000.