Everyone’s the Life of Stylish, Turbulent Jazz Age ‘Party’

Some musicals are acts of compression--slabs of history, or history according to novelists, squeezed into an attractive, internationally exportable package. Others start with a familiar opera, such as “La Boheme” or “Aida,” stripping it down and speeding it up to suit various pop idioms.

Less frequently, musicals require expansion rather than compression. Anyone attempting to build a full-length musical from the tawdry riches of the Joseph Moncure March narrative poem “The Wild Party” has a few questions to answer up front, crucial to the amplification process.

Is there enough in the poem to start with? However detailed and pungent, does March’s 1928 source material contain the narrative fire needed to ignite an impressionistic portrait of Jazz Age hell?

March’s florid archetypes are as hard and cold as icicles, even though (as the poem says) they’re being sucked into “the soft, hot vortex of desire.” Can a show whose main character is a party find the right temperature setting for such a lowdown gathering?

Improbably, not one but two musical versions of “The Wild Party” have tried to come up with answers this spring.

The first, an off-Broadway incarnation at Manhattan Theatre Club, was produced and designed with Broadway in mind, though it never got there. (It closed earlier this month.) The second, infinitely richer show opened recently at Broadway’s Virginia Theatre.

It’s unfinished. Like many a party, it doesn’t know when, how or where to call it a bleary-eyed night. Yet for much of its intermission-less two hours, the Broadway “Wild Party” is a seductive vortex indeed.

One wonders if director George C. Wolfe’s production would’ve fared better with some critics if it weren’t preceded by another musical about a troublemaking party girl--Sam Mendes’ superb revival of “Cabaret.” You can sense Wolfe asking himself the “Cabaret” question: How much grunge can I get away with?

A lot, in fact, if it’s precise and stylish. Those adjectives also suit composer-lyricist Michael John LaChiusa, whose “Medea”-inspired musical tragedy “Marie Christine” came and went earlier this Broadway season. In “The Wild Party” he harks back to the nervous jazz rhythms of his earlier score “Hello Again.”

The results aren’t going for Hit Parade excerptability. At their finest, though, they infuse March’s party-goers--singers (one played memorably by Eartha Kitt), songwriters, white, black, straight, gay, ingredients for an explosive Manhattan cocktail--with a sharp variety of musical personalities. Mills Brothers three-part harmonies collide with unsettling Al Jolson-style “mammy” numbers. LaChiusa’s jagged melody lines, brilliantly orchestrated by Bruce Coughlin and reminiscent of Gershwin in a midnight-bluesy mood, overlap and interrupt each other, much as the characters do.

The party-givers are Queenie (excellent Toni Collette, Oscar nominee from “The Sixth Sense”), a vaudeville dancer, and her abusive live-in lover and fellow vaudevillian, Burrs (a rageful Mandy Patinkin). March once said that he didn’t try to write “anything ‘poetical’ or ‘lyrical’ about these characters.” They are lust corroded by violence, personified. Patinkin’s Burrs is terrified of losing the woman he’s driving away. When he spits out the lyric “You gotta make her love ya/No matter what the price,” he’s setting himself up for a fall like the ’29 market crash.

As an artist, Wolfe is drawn to those dancing at the edge of history’s precipice. In “Jelly’s Last Jam,” Wolfe bypassed a straight-up biography of controversial jazz great Jelly Roll Morton for a dazzling, kinetic dream of a show. More recently, Wolfe’s staging of the Savion Glover project “Bring in ‘Da Noise, Bring in ‘Da Funk” deployed the legacy of African American tap in much the same way “Jelly” did.

Everyone’s on the move, all the time, in “The Wild Party,” even though Joey McNeeley’s choreography isn’t up to the show’s overall level of invention. Both material and staging stumble just past the midpoint, with the matchup of Queenie and her newfound love, Black (Yancey Arias, walking through it). LaChiusa’s jazz and Tin Pan Alley vocabulary gives way to more ambitious but mundane balladry (“People Like Us”), as well as consciously operatic flourishes (“After Midnight Dies,” sung by a strung-out plaything portrayed by Sally Murphy). Black’s never made a focal point, and Queenie’s final, redemptive “This Is What It Is” isn’t what it needs to be.

For all that, “The Wild Party” is the most exciting mess I’ve seen in a long time. It’s something I want to see and hear again, soon. Which is more than I can say of the other “Wild Party.”

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The off-Broadway bash at the Manhattan Theatre Club featured a book, music and lyrics by Andrew Lippa. His riff on the March poem was shrill and silly enough to make you think March’s poem simply couldn’t be staged as a musical--or shouldn’t be.

LaChiusa’s Broadway score lends March’s nasty verse an undertow of sadness. Lippa’s off-Broadway effort was all about pep. His party-centric song list (“What a Party,” “A Wild, Wild Party,” “The Life of the Party”--everything but the Donner Party) ran willy-nilly across the 20th century. One minute it went for ersatz flapper music; the next, disco-driven thumpa-thumpa. Everything was forced, pushed, sexualized in ways suggesting adolescents trying to be grown-ups trying to be swingers.

The La Chiusa/Wolfe “Wild Party” has some of that strenuousness as well. Staging a climactic orgy is never easy, let alone a musical orgy. The Broadway “Party” begins at a manic, feverish pitch; the sight of Patinkin’s Burrs in Jolson-like blackface is wonderfully unsettling, but a briefly topless Collette (more appropriate to burlesque than to vaudeville) doing her thing amid a thicket of show-biz sleaze makes it hard for the party itself to suck us in. Even with this staging, even with this top-flight ensemble, the relentlessness gets to be, well, unrelenting.

What this “Party” needed was a fully staged tryout to find itself, either at its originating theater (the Public) or out of town. It’s maddeningly close to terrific. It ends, or at least unravels, a few scenes before Kitt’s lacquered, glorious chanteuse sings “When It Ends.” Even so, there’s a line from another March poem of the era, “The Set-Up,” that aptly describes it, especially in that tantalizing first hour: “Mean as a panther, crafty as a fox.”

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* “The Wild Party,” Virginia Theatre, 245 W. 52nd St., New York. $25-$85. (212) 239-6200.