The Wild Party On the Stage
When the lights went up on the Manhattan Theatre Club's version of The Wild Party, I have to admit, I already had pretty high expectations for what I believed the production should be. To say that I loved The Wild Party would be a gross understatement, but I went in with an open mind.
It began well enough, utilizing March's delicious bebop prose in the opening number, “Queenie was Blond.” And for awhile, the musical seemed to be going in the right direction. We were introduced to the “sexual ambitious” Queenie and her beau, Burrs, the clown who was “comical as sin.” Their tumultuous relationship is well-illustrated in the song “The Apartment (Sunday Noon),” which uses one of my favorite scenes in the poem, when Queenie wakes up at noon and purrs for Burrs to bring her coffee. March writes the thoughts of Burrs this way:
His teeth snapped.Mercifully, The Manhattan Theatre Club kept this aspect intact. However, the following fight, which ends in a rape (!) was all their creation & nothing of March. As was every moment of the play that follows. In this stage production, the decision to make the party grew out of Queenie's seething hatred for Burrs, as compared to the poem's catalyst, which was a dark game both Burrs and Queenie wanted to play. In fact, watching the play, I had a sneaking suspicion that the writers had forgotten to read the text of Spiegelman's book past chapter 3, and instead concentrated only on the illustrations. The costumes were picture perfect to Spiegelman's drawings, but what was coming out of the characters' mouths was anything but March's words. They even altered one of my favorite set of lines, the scene when Queenie first entered the party:
He was glittering-eyed.
For a moment or so he could not decide
Whether it would be best to throttle
Or the brain this woman with a nearby bottle.
A woman who slept
Like a corpse under sod,
And woke up tired!
Almighty God!
But to-night, Queenie surpassed them all.Can writing get any more tight? And yet, when the boys in the chorus ponied up to Queenie and told her “you're looking swell,” her reply was (and I am not joking), “Ya! Ya! Ya! Ya!” If March hadn't been dead yet, I am sure that would have pushed him into the beyond.
Exquisite in black;
Radiant;
Tall;
With a face of ivory,
And blurred gold for hair:
She was something to kneel before in prayer.
“My God Queenie; you're looking swell!”
Quoth Queenie:
“I'm feeling slick as hell!”
I have to admit, however, that watching the production, I began to understand the choices, as wrong as they might be. The poem is a slow delicious burn, but slow does not work on stage in a two-act structure, so they had to push the action up. So while it takes until chapter 8 of 10 in the last section of The Wild Party for Queenie and Black to kiss, it happened in the Manhattan Theatre Club's version right at the (surprise, surprise!) act break. While dramatically sound, it almost took all the wind out of the sails of the final act. In March's poem, the sexual tension between Queenie and Black was the gasoline in the sexual fire of the piece. With that tension out of the way, all that remains for the second act of the stage play is the characters singing self-obsessive songs. And to make matters worse, they even made the ending happy, erasing the witty, clipped last two lines of The Wild Party: “The door sprang open / And the cops rushed in.”
Cops? But then they can't live happily ever after. Ugh.
Ever onward to The Public Theater's production of The Wild Party. . . .
