SpeakEasy Stage Company is one of Boston’s leading purveyors of musicals, but the troupe has never been in the " Some Enchanted Evening " business. Such fare as Violet and Floyd Collins rubs against the Rodgers & Hammerstein grain like sticks on a washboard. And now SpeakEasy floats, on a sea of bathtub gin, the first production since its 2000 Broadway debut of Michael John LaChiusa’s The Wild Party. It’s a spry, jagged, disenchanted evening sprung from a 1926 epic poem by Joseph Moncure March about an all-night debauch thrown by a couple of Roaring Twenties vaudevilleans. Directed by Andrew Volkoff and manned by 15 talented performers bristling with manic, menacing energy, the show proves both a theatrical accomplishment and a cautionary tale in the Liza-at-Studio-54 mode. (Funny how often lost generations recur.)
March’s poem, which was banned in Boston upon its 1928 publication, actually inspired two new musicals in 2000; the other was an Off Broadway treatment by Andrew Lippa. The LaChiusa show, which had more champions, siphons its opening shot straight from the poem: " Queenie was a blonde, and her age stood still,/And she danced twice a day in vaudeville./Grey eyes./Lips like coals aglow./Her face was a tinted mask of snow. " LaChiusa and co-librettist George C. Wolfe run with the mask theme, creating a florid array of revelers whose guzzling, sexed-up shenanigans are a front for raucous desperation. As for the " sexually ambitious " Queenie, who’s trapped in a dangerous live-in liaison with a mean minstrel clown named Burrs, a late-night decision to let someone see beneath her mask of voraciousness and face paint bears tragic results.
The story, lifted along with some of the best lyrics from the poem, is played out against the fête of the title and a persistently slinky jazz-and-blues-derived score ably rendered here by a seven-person combo led by pianist Paul Katz. But first, Queenie and Burrs are introduced in a quick succession of vaudeville bits that includes an audacious turn by Burrs in a shiny purple suit and blackface as he croons in a minstrel accent to a pickaninny hand puppet. The Wild Party does not wince at the racism and sexism of its day. In fact, the New York demi-monde it both celebrates and x-rays is notable for its blurring of racial and sexual lines at a time when most Americans were marching in heterosexual lockstep within strict ethnic enclaves.
Flocking to the bash held at the Oriental-whorehouse apartment of Queenie and Burrs are a host of swinging types, each of whom is given a moment. There’s slumming bisexual playboy Jackie, with his cigarette case of cocaine; black boxer Eddie with his white wife, ex-chorine Mae and her city-struck baby sister, Nadine; lesbian stripper Miss Madelaine True and her drug-zonked date, Sally; vamping has-been star Dolores Montoya (Eartha Kitt on Broadway); a couple of goggle-eyed Jewish producers; and the brothers D’Armano, a dress-alike black duo who croon droll ditties and aren’t brothers unless incest is as much the rage as the black bottom. Eventually Queenie’s old friend Kate shows up with a suave gigolo named Black who shares the hostess’s malaise and proves her undoing.
This somewhat relentless piece is not a fabulous musical. The period-pastiche score, which acknowledges Ellington, Gershwin, and Porter, tends to run together. LaChiusa makes good use of screaming horns, though, to signal the onset of melodrama. (As Burrs forewarns, " When I break, nasty things occur. " ) Both the frenzied cynicism and the pre-emption of vaudeville make The Wild Party seem, at times, like leftover Chicago. But despite some awkward lugging around of the set, SpeakEasy does a heck of a job with it. The mostly non-Equity cast does not boast a bad voice, and the stereotypical dramatis personae are vividly painted. Vocal notables include Kent French as the loose-cravat playboy and Brian Robinson as the more waggish half of the D’Armanos (he cracks through the frenzy with the haunting " Tabu " ). Rachel Peters brings a classical soprano to Sally’s Porgy and Bess–like lament, " After Midnight Dies, " and admirably rouses her character from near coma to hoof it with the rest of the cast.
A platinumed Bridget Beirne brings her rich vocals to Queenie, though she hardly seems damaged goods. Sharing her disaffected duet " People like Us, " José Degado too proves an able singer, but he lacks sufficient charisma for the gigolo Black. Merle Perkins, swinging her black sequins, lacks little as Kate. But the standout is Christopher Chew as the compulsive Burrs, sneering, smoldering, and dragging himself across the floor Jolson-style as those " nasty things " increasingly threaten to occur. This guy’s next party should be Sweeney Todd.
