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"Revelations Amid All the Revelry --'Wild Party' Gives Reason to Rhyme"The Record By R. Feldberg
About a minute into "The Wild Party," leading lady Toni Collette bares her breasts to the audience. So you know this isn't going to be your typical Broadway musical. In fact, after an exhaustingly frantic beginning, which frames the show's story as a vaudeville cartoon -- Collette's character, Queenie, is a vaudeville performer -- it settles down to become a smart, imaginative entertainment. Director George C. Wolfe, who stumbled with his last musical, "On the Town," has bounced back to his "Bring in 'Da Noise, Bring in 'Da Funk"- "Jelly's Last Jam" form, with a very stylish show. As has been well-publicized, this is the season's second musical to be based on Joseph Moncure March's epic 1928 poem about a debauched Jazz Age night of revelry. Its superiority to the other "Wild Party," which closed Sunday at the Manhattan Theater Club, is a matter of consistency of vision, strong staging and performances, and plain old entertainment know-how -- it's fun to watch. The show, which opened Thursday night at the Virginia Theater, moves sure-handedly from its raucous, farcical opening to a quiet final moment in which all artifice and illusions are stripped away, the high-living characters having come to earth with a sobering thud. The setting is an apartment shared by the promiscuous Queenie and her lover Burrs (Mandy Patinkin), a brutal vaudeville clown. Much more elegant than suggested in March's poem, the gilded space designed by Robin Wagner, with its vaulting windows, is a beautiful evocation of the Twenties, glowing in a kind of spectral darkness. (The atmospheric lighting design is by Jules Fisher and Peggy Eisenhauer.) The guests arrive for the party, and, as they drift in and out of shadows, they're sharply delineated by Wolfe and composer-lyricist Michael John LaChiusa. Although not every song is as distinctive as it might be, LaChiusa's score has bite, humor, and strong emotions. It' s much more accessible and immediate than his high-toned score for " Marie Christine" earlier this season. Great use is made of the malevolent Burrs' vocation as a clown -- and Patinkin's gleeful, manic intensity -- in several funny-eerie scenes, most notably in a savagely amusing song called "Wouldn't It Be Nice?" Also on hand is Eartha Kitt. Playing an aging actress still on the prowl for roles, the ageless Kitt purrs a couple of showstoppers, with our sense of performer and character getting dizzily intertwined. If Collette, the Australian actress best known for the films "Sixth Sense" and "Muriel's Wedding," is less vivid than her stage-veteran co-stars, she still gives a true, accomplished performance as the brassy-blond Queenie. Also notable in a very good cast are Tonya Pinkins, as Kate, Queenie's conniving friend and rival; Marc Kudisch as a cocaine-sniffing bisexual playboy; Jane Summerhays as a lesbian actress, and Nathan Lee Graham and Michael McElroy as a pair of entertainers who harmonize onstage and off (their bouncy novelty number "Uptown" has a great Twenties flavor, in a score that only intermittently suggests the era). The one disappointment is Yancey Arias as Black, the suave mystery man Kate brings with her. Black is the catalyst at this party of jaded friends and acquaintances, winning Queenie's love and precipitating the violence that blasts a hole in the evening. But the bland, slightly built Arias lacks the magnetism to make such an impact believable. What's most impressive, finally, about this "Wild Party" is its theatricality, Wolfe's sense of what works. In transforming the poem for the stage, he and LaChiusa took liberties, made changes, created a distinctive concept. The result isn't perfect, but it's something else that's very rare: a show that remains true to the essence of its source material while being fresh and original and entirely its own Broadway-musical thing.
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