Music and Lyrics by Michael John LaChiusaBook by Michael John LaChiusa and George C. WolfeBased on the poem by Joseph Moncure March
Manhattan decadence in the 1920's provides the backdrop for this tough musical fable. Queenie, a vaudeville chorine, hosts the blow-out of the title with her vicious lover, a black-face minstrel. The guests are a vivid collection of the unruly and the undone: Queenie's conniving rival; a cocaine-sniffing bisexual playboy; a washed-up boxer; a Black brother act; a diva of indeterminate age and infinite life experience; the fresh-off-the-farm ingénue whose naïveté quickly evaporates; a lesbian actress and her comatose girlfriend; and the bargain basement Valentino who catches Queenie's roving eye. The jazz- and gin-soaked party rages to a mounting sense of threat as artifice and illusion are stripped away. When midnight debauchery leads to tragedy at dawn, the high-flying characters land with a sobering thud, reminding us that no party lasts forever.
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Michael John LaChiusa – composer, lyricist and librettist – established himself as a powerful presence on the American musical theatre scene after winning Off-Broadway’s 1993 Obie Award for his musicals First Lady Suite and Hello Again. Six years later, LaChiusa was represent ...
George C. Wolfe directed Caroline, or Change (nominated for six 2004 Tony Awards, including Best Musical and Best Direction) and directed and co-wrote The Wild Party (nominated for seven 2000 Tony Awards, including Best Musical and Best Book). He won the Tony Award for his di ...
Joseph Moncure March (1899-1977) wrote his daring, electrically charged poem "The Wild Party" in 1926, and saw it published two years later in a limited edition that became something of a success de scandal that was banned in Boston. The noted writer and editor Louis Untermey ...
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