Profile for Auggie27

MrsSallyAdams landed on a core problem: the musical "cleaned up" the captured verisimilitude in the documentary, sanitizing defining elements in all of the wrong ways. The creatives seemed to believe that the final reveal of the McVersailles would be so breathtaking as a theatrical coup, its completion alone would somehow validate the navel-gazing heroine's tortuous arc. "Look what she built!" Yet if the design dared to end with a whiff of Grey Gardens if not

My favorite projection in this thread is the suggestion that the Queen of Versailles will turn up at the Muny Opera. The idea of families hauling their four children out to swat mosquitoes and eat soft serve ice cream before this story unfolds takes the prize. I especially enjoy pondering the discussion in SUVS on the way home. "What happened to the girl with the rainbow hair?" "She got sick." "How come?" "She took the wrong medicine.&

For the final Wednesday matinee, 12/17/25, about 45% of the house is unsold, maybe more. The upstairs is wide open. There are few left left to see this, other than a handful of people who won't miss a (almost) legendary flop. 

The producers' comments that strategically blame "audience behavior" - must believe that outlier NY Times Critic Pick was the true appraisal of their show, and thus in Before Times Broadway, the COVID sh

They know the show won’t recoup on broadway, but they will make their money back from licensing."

Long game? What long game?

What theater company, stock venue, college - leave high schools out, with the language, drugs, and deaths - will produce this piece? It has no future. I can't see a Menier Chocolate Factory production re-inventing it with a cast of 10. But who knows? There was never an audience for this musicalized story, and without eithe

This news of a Chenoweth injury is horrifying. She has already endure two terrible unrelated head/neck injuries, and her problems date to Wicked in SF (at one Wicked preview I saw, she wore a bedazzled neck brace). If she's physically harmed again via a backstage accident, it's a dreadful turn at any point in a career; to occur with this show in its final struggling hour just heartbreaking. We can parse the flaws but this was a major marker for this actor. She believ

Sherie’s take on Jackie is wildly different from Kristin's. While Kristin brings her cloying “aw shucks, y’all” ditzy charm to the role, Sherie leans into something colder, sharper, and almost dead-behind-the-eyes. Never once does Sherie's Jackie try to win the audience over or be likable - something I thought Kristin tried a little too hard for."

 

Now this sounds more compelling. Which brings up a bigger

Several people have fairly raised Evita as a parallel subject, likely because like Jackie Eva possessed a bigger than life ruthlessness. Yet Eva Peron harnessed ambition and tied it to a nation's hunger for a proxy in government, or at least adjacency to the seat of power. Eva honed a message, against staggering odds (gender, class) became a communicator, and forged a connection to a swath of her culture that made her rise the stuff of myths. Eva was compromised and arg

In the last 18 hours, particularly Facebook, people have taken to social media with exclamatory paeans - offered in advance - to the casting as proof that this is an event. We get a lot of "I'm so there!" Many posters are quick to condemn those of us who aren't excited. As if such a wildly expensive endeavor for most consumers has to be viewed as a litmus test for supporting "the arts" or "the non-commercial theater." (Non-commercial? Simply because it is

Social media didn't sabotage this show.

The show sabotaged itself, in its POV-free decision to dramatize a woman whose life story told in the unique lexicon of musical theater has no audience. To paraphrase the late Hal Prince, you cannot sell a show that no one wants to see, no matter how often you proclaim the star's return or tether the project to the composer of Wicked. The Wicked audience has no reason to sit through Jackie's lurid tale,

I appreciate the honesty in the appraisal of the show sans the star and usual leading ladies. It's far from a putdown of the talented trio to note that the piece isn't actor-proof - or more fairly, a show that easily sails across the finish line without a star. It's got a fairly hard-to-sustain conceit - that opening that starts meta - that may not translate easily without a charismatic leading man to wink knowingly at the audience. A non-name explaining that he's not really D

Scott is so damned good, rendering the final number with a gifted actor's clarity, she made me realize how absolutely wrong it is, as a stopping place in this muddled, compromised narrative. Her investment in the circular rumination as a final epiphany, as a personal re-declaration of her I Want, is so persuasively offered, it points up how the show has no real ending. Scott approaches it like Jackie's "Before the Parade Passes By," and finds herself where she started. 

Just looking at the curtain call footage reveals a different take. She has a distinctive carriage, suggests a different navigation of the space, and unlike the show's star, has always manifest an effortless sophistication, in every role. I will be curious to hear how it played. I was 8th row center and never ceased to see Chenoweth as Jackie rather than Jackie. I'm guessing that Scott disappears more readily and fully. Which likely helps the show's cohesion.

This should come as a surprise to no one who checks advance sales. The winter on B'way can be brutal for even a modest success. But you have to arrive with word of mouth. And sustain it. There was never a path thru Jan - March for this poorly received piece. And this once again underscores: A Critics Pick in the Times used in every ad cannot buck the general consensus. I cannot get past how anyone presumed the high nut could've been made in the days ahead. But people do believe track&

My two companions and I all thought the homoerotic element in JJ and Sidney was front and center with this cast's interpretation, if not always illustrated in the staging (an unfair ask, since nailing the plot is tricky enough with this piece with 2 weeks of rehearsal; subtext would have to be mined in performance).  The emotional incest angle certainly makes JJ a bit of a damaged puppy, and "For Susan," a scary stalker paean, nails how pervasive the obsession has beco

I was there Saturday, and the score was so stunningly executed, the sharp staging made a persuasive case. I found it part Loesser - the lush stuff between Susan and Dallas  but also part Cy Coleman, the edgier midcentury urbanity. A friend felt the engendered emotion was slightly oppositional to the musical's goals: when the melodic lines underscore earnest intention in characters, satire and brittle sheen in the story can disappear. Of course, that's often true in