Musical theater can create stars in virtually no time at all. Consider the remarkable rise of Jasmine Amy Rogers, who scored a Tony nomination last year for her Broadway debut in the flawed but lamentably short-lived Boop!, then followed that achievement by playing a button-cute savant in the current Off Broadway revival of The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee. Now she’s returned to the Jazz Age of Betty Boop to play the sultry and “sexually ambitious” vaudeville performer Queenie in the Encores! revival of The Wild Party, Michael John LaChiusa’s adaptation of a 100-year-old poem about the debaucherous denizens of Manhattan in the Roaring Twenties.
Rogers is sensational in a role that’s about as far from Betty or Olive as it’s possible to get. She bumps and grinds in her lacy, backless little red dress at an impromptu party organized with her temperamental lover Burrs (Jordan Donica). She can be raw and crass one moment, a sharp-elbowed player in exchanges with her frenemy, Kate (Adrienne Warren) — and then reveal genuine vulnerability in quieter moments with a young player named Black (Jelani Aladdin). She also, of course, sings like a dream and delivers LaChiusa’s jazz-inflected score with clear-toned power and bravado.
The original 2000 Broadway production of The Wild Party — which premiered the same season as Andrew Lippa’s Off Broadway adaptation of the same Joseph Moncure March poem — closed after two months despite earning seven Tony nominations, including for Toni Collette and Mandy Patinkin as the mismatched lead couple. Lili-Anne Brown, who directs the new Encores! production, smartly reconceives the leads as two Black performers who find themselves bending to the prejudices of the time to get ahead. This is not as much of a stretch as you might thing.
More than once, the script describes Queenie as a blonde whose face is a “tinted mask of snow” — an apt description of a fair-skinned Black woman who adds some powder to sell her ability to “pass,” and bills Burrs a “blackface comedian” — a role that was assumed not only by white performers like Al Jolson but also by Black entertainers such as Bert Williams. The casting seems like a truer reflection of the intentions of LaChiusa and George C. Wolfe’s original book — and adds new depths to the characters, particularly Burrs’ long simmering bitterness and tendency toward snap acts of violence. Donica puts the villain in vaudevillian with his heavy-lidded scowl and deeply resonant bass-baritone voice.
Unlike Lippa’s The Wild Party, which focuses more tightly on the central love triangle, the LaChiusa version is a true ensemble piece that not only introduces us to a diverse cast of 15 — but democratically doles out solos or duets to virtually all of them, with admittedly mixed results. Meghan Murphy is a hoot as the brassy stripper Madelaine True, who arrives at the soiree with her waifish, drug-addled girlfriend (Betsy Morgan) — the latter spends an entire scene in an oversize trunk where only her dancer’s legs are exposed, making fluttery upside-down pliés and relevés. Lesli Margherita brings a foghorn of a voice to the struggling actress Mae as she tries to keep an eye on both her ex-boxing champ of a husband (Evan Tyrone Martin) and her teenage sister (Maya Rowe, looking far too old for the role) whose yearning to just be grown up already is put to the test by the end of the night.
Wesley J. Barnes and Joseph Anthony Byrd flash a fractious fraternal chemistry as a song-and-dance duo modeled on Fayard and Harold Nicholas, harmonizing and shuffling to Katie Spelman’s period-perfect choreography in Linda Cho’s stylishly sophisticated costumes. They also deliver a bouncy song that seems to summarize the high-low crossover nature of the era as presented in this show: “Uptown is lookin’ more like downtown which is lookin more like uptown everyday,” they sing. “Black folks are soundin’ more like white folks who are soundin’ more like black folks in every way!”
And Tonya Pinkins, who played the frenemy Kate in the original 2000 production, puts the grand in grande dame as the living-legend performer Dolores Montoya. She’s a woman who carries herself with a certain hauteur, but is not above dispensing wise advice to Queenie or to using every trick in her pocketbook to lobby for a role in a new Broadway show to be mounted by two upstart Jewish producers (KJ Hippensteel and Andrew Kober) whose night out slumming results themselves leads to a mostly merry old time. Meanwhile, Claybourne Elder makes the most of “ambisextrous” nepo baby Jackie, whose perpetual quest for more leads him to take things way, way too far.
Once the bathtub gin has been dispensed, though, everybody is a little worse for wear. LaChiusa’s script also sags in the middle section, amid all the lush couplings, and then hurries through a series of tragedies and near-tragedies as the characters wake up to the reality of their lost night. Just as you’re tempted to check your watch, Rogers’ Queenie reappears — as if anticipating when we might need our glass refilled. She perks up any room she’s in, and elevates every number — from the rollicking “Welcome to My Party” to her sassy duet with Warren’s Kate, “Best Friend,” to the reflective romantic duet with Aladdin’s Black, “People Like Us.” She’s truly the life, and soul, of this Wild Party. ★★★★☆
THE WILD PARTY
Encores! at New York City Center, Off Broadway
Running time: 2 hours (with no intermission)
Tickets on sale through March 29 for $45 to $185