Sarah on theater

I don’t think the show ever really provides a convincing answer - why am I sitting down to watch a musical about this woman? Why now? (“Because we can!”) But also she’s relatable in a cartoonish way here in the great city of lifestyle inflation, Kristin is really well cast in the part, some of the songs (not all) are genuinely pretty fun (esp. when they bring out Louis XIV and Marie Antoinette), and I respect that they didn’t tie a syrupy bow on it. It’s all over the place but lovably so. Prob a critical bomb but I like that Kristin is having fun

My Krum-gets-the-Snitch kneejerk here is that Sherie is a meaningful improvement over Kristin as Jackie but the show may be worse off for it. There just isn’t any there there. Sherie is a good performer who can’t really bail out the not-so-good material whereas Kristin’s sugary wine-aunt energy made it, at the very least, an endearingly hot mess.

The crowd was super energetic, which is always fun. A lot of people came out just for Sherie, judging by her minute-long ovation at first entrance. She really does have the look for this. Sure, there’s the bombshell thing, but I really mean the look in her eyes & her facial expressions—blown up Sunset-style by the mockumentary cameras—which flash with droll wit in Jackie’s early bootstrap-her-way-out-of-the-middle-class scenes, then go slack, dead, & forlorn as she realizes the promise of her American Dream. It makes the emotional side of the story sing, to the fullest extent that it can, wrapped in a bunch of story beats that condemn her every choice as solipsistic social climbing, a French Revolution framing that suggests she ought to be beheaded, and a tonally-inconsistent bag of songs that includes (oh, my favorite) a cowboy sing-along.

Indeed, the show’s cardinal sin is that it can’t make up its mind whether we ought to root for or even care about Jackie, and the left-leaning Broadway audience certainly isn’t going to give a billionaire the benefit of the doubt. Then you consider that Jackie is a real-life person being enriched by the property, and it feels a little icky. Is it a cautionary tale or plain old reality TV voyeurism? (“All press is good press,” the character reminds us.) It’s too bad, because there are some impressive creative efforts going into this. Nothing impresses me quite like a set that makes good use of vertical space, and the airy palace, Versailles, depicted in various states of construction, is certainly the tallest on Broadway since at least last year’s Hills of California. The costuming, too, is pretty stunning; Jackie has at least one new dress (and often more) in practically every scene and faux-Birkins in half a dozen colors. Michael Arden adds some fun directorial flourishes, too, like chaotic house-construction blocking and a couple of nifty tricks with body doubles.

Stephen Schwartz seems like a sweet guy and I don’t want to dog on his score too much. There were a couple songs I liked, particularly “Golden Hour” and “Show ‘Em You’re the Queen.” Sherie also sounds especially fabulous on the showstopper closing numbers of both acts, “This Is Not the Way” and “This Time Next Year.” The former is a distractingly obvious clone of “Defying Gravity,” though, and without Kristin, it loses a certain metatextual “it’s her turn” justification from her being the second banana in 2003. I really didn’t care for the daughter’s solo songs, especially “Pretty Wins,” which was a bit patronizing.

I think there’s a version of Queen of Versailles rattling around in there somewhere that’s actually very good, and I think that version may in fact star Sherie Rene Scott. But the fun-but-flawed show we got instead was written for Kristin Chenoweth, and, for better or worse, if you go at all, hers is the essential way to see it.