America has always been a land of capitalist contradiction. In one breath, we glorify the exploits of the rich and famous and aspire to their lives. In the next, we mock their eccentricities and deride their garish excesses. Do we want to eat the rich or become them? That conflict lies at the heart of the starry new world premiere musical, “The Queen of Versailles,” which sashays into the Emerson Colonial Theatre for a pre-Broadway run from July 16 to Aug. 25. Stoking the show’s buzz is the anticipated reunion of two luminaries behind musical colossus “Wicked” — Emmy and Tony award-winning actress Kristin Chenoweth (“Pushing Daisies,” “Glee”) and celebrated composer Stephen Schwartz (“Godspell,” “Pippin”).
Inspired by the award-winning 2012 documentary of the same name, “Queen of Versailles” tells the riches-to-rags (and back to riches) story of a Florida family building the largest private home in America, modeled after France’s Palace of Versailles, just as the housing bubble bursts and the 2008 financial crisis nearly bankrupts them. The charismatic center of the story is scene-stealing Jackie Siegel (Chenoweth), a whiplash-inducing combination of “Real Housewives” chutzpah, disarming warmth and optimism, and blithe naïveté worthy of a sitcom. Her cranky-but-swaggering husband, David (played by F. Murray Abraham), 30 years her senior, is the billionaire “time-share king” and founder of Westgate Resorts.
The idea of adapting Lauren Greenfield’s documentary into a musical struck playwright Lindsey Ferrentino when she first watched it a decade ago. She’d been reading news accounts of David Siegel buying up property in her hometown of Cocoa Beach, Fla. The source material, she says, seemed to sing. “The characters were larger than life and operatic in both their personas and the scale of their ambition,” says Ferrentino, who wrote the musical’s book. “I became obsessed.”
In a midtown Manhattan studio, Chenoweth and the cast are rehearsing a rousing Act Two number in which David has managed to bring his company back from the brink of bankruptcy and the family is ready to let the good times roll again. As the actors descend two sets of moving staircases and raise champagne flutes into the air, they belt out lyrics of unbridled hubris, “Who says you can’t own the sky?/Higher than ever, we’re gonna fly!”
“I think there’s a warning about the perils of the American dream, that it can be an addiction,” says the show’s director Michael Arden (“Parade”). “If we’re taught from an early age that we should always be trying to climb the ladder, to scale the mountain, when is it enough? There’s a sense that we’ve become addicted to dissatisfaction.”
In the first act, the Siegels face the fallout of the financial crisis. The second act focuses on the story of their comeback, an experience of devastating grief, and their dream to finish building their mega-mansion. “I really responded to Lauren [Greenfield]’s take on the family,” Ferrentino says. “She’s both critical and humanizing in equal measure.”
As a former model and beauty pageant contestant, Jackie has her cartoonish qualities — her slinky leopard print clothing, her gaggle of small dogs — and she can come across as shallow, with her predilection for couture fashion, conspicuous consumption, and high-flying extravagance. But she’s no dummy. She earned a computer engineering degree and has raised eight kids.
While Chenoweth has played her share of villains, she says Jackie isn’t one of them. “She’s a complicated person. And you know what? So am I, and I can relate to that,” says the actress, who’s also a producer on the show. “People think about me, ‘Oh, she wakes up happy, and she toots glitter, and there’s a rainbow over her head.’ But I can lose my temper. I can be frustrated. … I can be too sensitive. I’m sure at points in my life I’ve hurt people, and I didn’t realize.”
Audiences will get to glimpse Jackie’s blind spots, including her seeming obliviousness about her wealth and privilege and her single-minded ambitions. Still, when she first met Jackie, Chenoweth was surprised by her kindness and generosity. “I was expecting to see a self-absorbed person, maybe someone a little cocky. But she was none of that.” While she hopes to remain true to Jackie’s spirit, the actress insists that the character is her singular creation: “I’m not imitating her.”
The show explores Jackie’s origin story — the big dreams she harbored growing up near Binghamton, N.Y., and her steadfast determination to rise past her family’s modest station. The creators focus particular attention on the relationship between Jackie and daughter Victoria, and the friendship between Victoria and her cousin Jonquil, who comes to live with them.
Woven throughout are sequences depicting the royal court of Versailles, with historical figures like Louis XIV and Marie Antoinette popping up. Arden says he came up with the device “to show a bit of a contrast and commonality between then and now. I thought, wouldn’t it be amazing to jump back in time … and have characters kind of communicate with each other across hundreds of years? Because history repeats itself.”
Indeed, there’s a spiky tension between the anguish that many Americans experienced when the housing bubble burst and the Siegels’ own misfortune. To that end, the show’s creators want to shine the spotlight on the family’s household staff, including their driver and a character inspired by the Filipino nanny and housekeeper featured in the documentary.
“You have to have that counterpoint to the Siegels’ excess, because it’s the people that make this dream possible for Jackie,” Ferrentino says. “But they all have their own version of the American dream.”
The music, Schwartz says, is almost “two scores that coexist” — melodic Broadway pop, with touchstones pulled from an array of eras, and classical-inspired music for the court of Versailles scenes. He was intrigued, he says, by “how that sound clashes with, but ultimately melds into, the contemporary pop sound.”
Writing Jackie’s song “Caviar Dreams” helped Schwartz unlock the score. It flashes back to her memories of growing up in a middle-class family and watching Robin Leach host “Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous” while dreaming of escape from her small town and living the high life that she saw on television. Schwartz incorporated Leach’s famous sign-off, “Champagne Wishes and Caviar Dreams,” into the lyrics.
In the end, the show’s creators wonder if we’re not all that different from these seemingly outlandish characters. Chenoweth cautions that we might behave the same way in their circumstances. “When I first got my very first paycheck that meant anything, I promptly went out and got a two-seater Mercedes convertible. And my father said, ‘Don’t do that. Don’t be that cliche. Save that money.’ But I said, ‘I’m getting that car,’” she recalls. “We ask ourselves how we’d act, and we’d all like to think that we would do things differently, but I’m not so sure.”
THE QUEEN OF VERSAILLES
Music and lyrics by Stephen Schwartz, book by Lindsey Ferrentino, directed by Michael Arden. At the Emerson Colonial Theatre, July 16-Aug. 25. Tickets from $39. www.emersoncolonialtheatre.com