Two’s a Party and a Crowd

NEW YORK —  Get out your tip sheets: It looks like Broadway may have a horse race on its hands. And what’s at stake may be not only box-office grosses and Tony Awards but also whether there is room to accommodate two vastly different approaches--conventional versus experimental--to American musical theater.

This season, in a unprecedented development, theatergoers will have a chance to see two new musicals both called “The Wild Party” and both based on a 1928 poem by Joseph Moncure March about a sexually magnetic chorus girl named Queenie, her abusive lover Burrs, and Black, a handsome stranger who comes to their Jazz Age Prohibition party. And what a party it is--hooch and drugs, oversexed lowlifes and underage minors, love and lust, murder and mayhem. It kind of makes “Chicago,” that other Prohibition-era party, look like a Tupperware gathering.

First one out of the gate is Manhattan Theatre Club’s production, which stars Taye Diggs, Idina Menzel, Julia Murney and Brian d’Arcy James. It features direction by Gabriel Barre and book and songs by Andrew Lippa, two relative newcomers whose previous collaboration was 1995’s “john & jen,” a modest off-Broadway musical. For now, this “Wild Party” is off-Broadway, but waiting in the wings are two commercial producers, Jeffrey Seller and Kevin McCollum of “Rent” fame, who are primed to move the show almost immediately to Broadway, depending on the critical response. MTC won’t disclose the cost of the musical, but, with a cast of 19, it’s expensive.

Meanwhile, the Public Theater’s “Wild Party,” with a cast of 15 including Oscar nominee Toni Collette, Mandy Patinkin and Eartha Kitt, is set to begin previews on Broadway on March 10 with an opening April 13. The $5-million musical, a co-production between the Public and a group of Broadway producers, including movie mogul Scott Rudin, is the creation of George C. Wolfe, the head of the Public who is acting as producer, director and collaborating on the book with the show’s songwriter, Michael John LaChiusa.

Wolfe is the celebrated Tony-winning director of “Angels in America,” “Jelly’s Last Jam” and “Bring In ‘Da Noise, Bring In ‘Da Funk.” But he comes to this “Party” after spearheading the expensive flop of last season’s Broadway revival of “On the Town.” LaChiusa is a serious composer who’s been threatening to cross over for some time, earning admiring reviews for such shows as “Hello Again” and “First Lady Suite.” But his “Marie Christine” earlier this season at Lincoln Center was widely regarded to have been a lugubrious, if noble, failure.

Not surprisingly, the jockeying for every advantage has already begun. The “Party” line is, “There is room for both of us.” However true that may or may not be, the two productions promise to be very different. And their distinct approaches offer a rare insight into a perennial tension between art and commerce, between the conventional and the cutting edge, between where the American musical comfortably finds itself and where some artists are pushing hard to take it.

“I believe in melody,” says Lippa, a 35-year-old composer and arranger who is nominated for a Grammy this year for his work on the cast album of “You’re a Good Man, Charlie Brown.” “People want to get on the wings of a tune and fly.”

“I believe you can take the audience anywhere,” says the 37-year-old LaChiusa, who, while conceding the importance of melody, insists that he won’t pander to those musical theatergoers who yearn for “hummable” songs. “You can present them with the most atonal and crazy material, and they’ll go with it as long as the story is good and the characters are engaging. The material I’ve been drawn to wants to push the envelope.”

*

Coincidentally, both composers came across March’s poem, which was reissued in 1994 with illustrations by Art Spiegelman, about the same time. Both say they were drawn to the theatricality of its haunting first lines: Queenie was a blonde and her age stood still / And she danced twice a day in vaudeville.

March was 26 and had just resigned as managing editor of the New Yorker when he wrote his shockingly racy poem. The un-PC epic follows the exploits of Queenie, Burrs and the games and violence that ensue when Black catches Queenie’s eye at a party the couple throw for their reprobate friends, including the promiscuous Kate, the ambisexual dancer Jackie, the brutish boxer Eddie, the predatory lesbian Madelaine and the dissembling Dolores. The raunchy subject matter delayed the book’s publication for two years until a printing of 750 copies made it an underground sensation, though it remained banned in stoic Boston.

With his death in 1977, after a career as a Hollywood screenwriter (“Hell’s Angels”) and State Department documentary writer, March left a legacy of two major works: “The Wild Party,” on which a 1975 movie flop starring Raquel Welch was partly based, and “The Set-Up,” the story of a washed-up boxer that was made into a 1949 film starring Robert Ryan.

In his introduction to the reissue of “The Wild Party,” Spiegelman noted, “Maybe it’s March’s perfectly pitched tone of bewildered innocence curdled into world cynicism that resonates so well in our ‘90s.”

Describing himself as “not a cynic,” Lippa says of the poem, “It’s a love story in a world where love doesn’t thrive easily and a story in which Queenie needs to learn the lesson of love. At the risk of sounding Pollyanna, she has a chance for real love after being in a screwed-up relationship. And that’s an incredibly powerful thing, dramatically.”

Lippa grew up in suburban Detroit, listening to and loving Motown, Earth Wind & Fire, Barry Manilow and Frank Sinatra, until an introduction to musical theater in high school, via Andrew Lloyd Webber’s “Evita” and Stephen Sondheim’s “Sweeney Todd,” set him on his present course. “I think all those influences are in my score for ‘Wild Party,’ ” he says. “I still listen to a lot of contemporary music--rap, rock, pop--and I wish there was a lot more going on between that and the musical theater.”

Lippa says he hopes to serve as a bridge of sorts between those two worlds and finds it a hopeful sign that composers like Manilow, Paul Simon and Elton John are making forays into the commercial theater. “People look for trends, but I don’t think there are any. Good work will [come] out,” he says. “I don’t believe there are any great musicals languishing on anybody’s shelves.”

Professing a love for both Jerry Herman’s “Hello, Dolly!” and “Sweeney Todd,” Lippa says he draws inspiration from the whole canon of musical theater history. “I don’t have a sense of having to break new ground, to push the envelope. I think that’s better left in other people’s hands,” he says. “I want to please an audience. I’m inherently an entertainer who wants to please myself first, I guess. I just hope and pray that others feel the same way.”

*

The early response for MTC’s “Wild Party” is good, and it’s getting strong word of mouth. The show’s garish look seems to be inspired by the Weimar paintings of Otto Dix, and its fluid staging by Sam Mendes’ hit revival of “Cabaret” and Bob Fosse’s “Chicago.” As in those musicals, the characters of “The Wild Party” are driven by their id, and it was that material, says director Barre, that dictated the highly stylized, fevered approach. “I was struck by how inherently theatrical and eccentric these people were,” Barre says. “The arrogance of this society, the interest in boundaries only so they can cross them, such hellbent, raw hungers are so much a part of where we are now.”

Barre came to directing through performing, having learned stagecraft through his involvement as an actor in the productions of Tom O’Horgan (“Hair,” “Jesus Christ Superstar”), Joe Layton (“Barnum”) and Harold Prince (“The Petrified Prince,” written by LaChiusa, whose work he admires). From them, he says, he learned how to fill the stage with “a certain largess,” a generosity of theatrical gestures and presentation.

“There is, I think, always a question of how much to challenge an audience, especially in the beginning, versus the impulse to make certain conventional choices to bring them along earlier,” Barre says. “But I don’t think you can arbitrarily decide to do anything different for its own sake. We’re out to entertain, and there are plenty of conventional moments in the show. This one needs them in particular, as relief from the intensity of the ride.”

LaChiusa and Wolfe, on the other hand, don’t seem particularly interested in offering any respite from the hellish dreamscape they’re envisioning for their “Wild Party.” That’s not to say they are indifferent to the expectations of an audience. On the contrary, says LaChiusa, “The audience is first and foremost in my mind, absolutely. I’m not writing in a vacuum. But if the expectation is to get instant gratification from a song, from a lyric, from a theatrical moment, then the question is, do we gratify that, or do we try to change that expectation through experimentation and risk?”

That question is particularly crucial to LaChiusa, because he is adamant that art can even effect social change. Both the composer and director Wolfe note that the Public’s “Wild Party” has been inspired in part by “Terrible Honesty: Mongrel Manhattan in the 1920s,” Ann Douglas’ social history of a time when the cross-fertilization of racial politics, sexual freedom and new money was blowing apart the old orders.

*

In this “Wild Party,” the American underbelly is raw and exposed: The character of the boxer Eddie, white in both the poem and in MTC’s production, is African American and thus in a socially unacceptable marriage. Dolores, a peripheral character in MTC’s production, is played by Kitt, a pivotal character who’s emblematic of the masks that almost everyone at the party is assuming: She is passing herself off as a Spanish aristocrat, when in actuality she is a harlot who in the words of the poem is “somewhat negro and a great deal Jew.” Dolores is in league with Burrs in hustling Gold and Goldberg, two “Jewless Jews” who are trying to assimilate their way into WASP-ish society.

“Theater can change our culture, but doing costume revivals like ‘Kiss Me Kate’ won’t do that,” LaChiusa says. “When you hear people say they want tunes they can hum, they really want to be taken back to a simpler time. They want a nostalgia booster shot. But we don’t live in a simple time. There is so much happening out there that we have to grow up and experiment with the form to address those issues. It may make people work harder, it’s more scary, but it’s also more exciting.”

Wolfe believes directors also have an obligation to come up with new and experimental storytelling devices. “If you live in a culture, creating art, then you’ve got to allow yourself to be influenced by everything swirling around in that culture,” he says. “You can’t restrict yourself only to musical theater references. The way I’m directing it, ‘Wild Party’ is almost like an independent film onstage as a musical.”

If MTC’s production recalls Kander, Ebb and Dix, the Public’s appears to take its cue from the 1920s of Brecht, Blitzstein, Weill and Covarrubias, the 21-year-old Mexican and contemporary of March whose Cubist style is giving the show its marketing look. “Everyone is smashed up against each other like they are at this party, and when everybody’s dancing this close to the edge, somebody is bound to fall off,” Wolfe says.

The production’s take on conventional Broadway techniques is tellingly expressed in orchestrations by Bruce Coughlin. Violins, a staple of Broadway musicals in expressing love and intimacy, are to be used when the characters are being “emotionally false.” As the masks are stripped away, the sound is more dissonant and primal, inspired by the Duke Ellington Cotton Club Orchestra of the period. “These people are hanging out there by the intensity of their sexual energy--violins don’t help,” Wolfe deadpans.

The producer-director says that he is very enamored of the Prince-Sondheim legacy, naming “Pacific Overtures” and “Follies” as influences. “There was always this sense that there was a dark world out there just waiting to eat up the musical stage. That’s why everybody was singing and dancing like crazy to keep this dark world at bay,” Wolfe says. “But Prince and Sondheim and [Michael] Bennett and Fosse said, bring on that dark world and let it coexist with entertainment. ‘The Wild Party’ is the next step in this evolution: The dark side and entertainment side exist in each of these characters. I like to tell the cast that if ‘Virginia Woolf’ and ‘The Iceman Cometh’ had a child who could sing, it would be ‘The Wild Party.’ ”

Indeed, Wolfe’s comments echoed those of Barre and Lippa in their approach to the same material: this coexistence of light and dark, of show-biz flash and nihilistic destructiveness, of innocence and corruption, love and sexual desperation. Both creative teams note that what ultimately happens to Queenie is less important than the journey she takes. And that seems true of both musicals as well. Whatever the respective outcomes for both “Wild Party” efforts, their side-by-side presence is a dramatic and telling reminder of just how different creative journeys can be.