The Wild Story Behind The Wild Party: From Banned Jazz-Age Poem to Broadway Cult Musical

As we barrel through our own roaring twenties, Michael John LaChiusa and George C. Wolfe’s prohibition era musical The Wild Party returns to the Big Apple from March 18–29 through New York City Center’s Encores! series. The production stars Tony nominee Jasmine Amy Rogers as Queenie, a blonde vaudeville chorine with a taste for danger and debauchery. Shacked up with her violent lover Burrs (Jordan Donica), the couple throws an impromptu party that devolves into madness. Amid the night's chaos, Queenie finds herself drawn toward a mysterious man called Black (Jelani Alladin), the suitor of her sharp-tongued frenemy Kate (Adrienne Warren).

The Wild Party originally premiered on Broadway in 2000 with Wolfe at the helm. Toni Collette made her Broadway debut as Queenie alonside Mandy Patinkin as Burrs. Tony winner Tonya Pinkins co-starred as Kate and the legendary Eartha Kitt brought her feline “I’m Still Here” atittude to the role of Dolores Montoya, a fading stage siren. Pinkins returns to The Wild Party in the Encores! production, this time as Dolores.

Based on a 1928 narrative poem by Joseph Moncure March, The Wild Party sought to depict the fractured ethos of America during a time of momentous change; at turns scintillating and sinister, savage and sobering. In a strange twist of fate, another musical based on March’s masterwork was being staged concurrently off-Broadway. Join us as we travel down the rabbit hole for a tale of gin, skin, sin, creative serendipity and the enduring power of March’s prose. Here and there will be the interjection of LaChiusa himself, who graced us with an interview for additional insights on The Wild Party’s wild journey to Broadway.

March Madness
As a student at Amherst College, Joseph Moncure March had been a protégé of the poet Robert Frost. Upon graduating, March held stints as the managing editor for The Telephone Review and The New Yorker, but left the latter in 1926 to pursue his own literary ambitions. It was during this time that he wrote The Wild Party, though its content was considered too scandalous to be published until 1928. The sprawling tale of bathtub gin and drug-fueled hedonism caused a sensation, prompting it to get banned in Boston. March—who found moderate success as a Hollywood screenwriter in the '30s and '40s—published a sanitized revision of The Wild Party in 1968, electing to excise most of the poem’s references to race. A poorly received Merchant Ivory Productions adaptation of The Wild Party was released in 1975 with Raquel Welch as Queenie. Two years later, March died in a Los Angeles retirement home. An uncensored version of The Wild Party was published in The New Yorker in 1994 with accompanying illustrations by Art Spiegelman. In the introduction to this edition, Spiegelman describes March’s work as “a hard-boiled, jazz-age tragedy told in syncopated rhyming couplets” with “the mnemonic tenacity, if not the wholesomeness, of a nursery rhyme.” According to Spiegelman, The Wild Party was cited by beat generation forefather William S. Burroughs as “the book that made me want to become a writer.”

Going Public
LaChiusa discovered March’s text after receiving a copy of the Spiegelman edition for his birthday. “I read it and I went, ‘Oh no, not for me.’ I put it on the bookshelf and there it sat for a number of years," he told Broadway.com. "I kept walking by that shelf and it just kept going, ‘Do me, do me.’ I picked it up many years later, I read it again and I went, ‘Oh, this now sings to me. There's music to this.'" Prior to having this realization, LaChiusa had established a relationship with The Public Theater as an audition accompanist during the reign of its founder, Joseph Papp. Wolfe succeeded JoAnne Akalaitis as the Public’s artistic director in 1993 and went on to produce LaChiusa’s chamber musical First Lady Suite the same year. When he received an artist residency at the Public, LaChiusa began working on the beginnings of The Wild Party.

Speaking further on the appeal of the material, LaChiusa says, “I was fascinated with the opening section of the poem: 'Queenie was a blonde and her age stood still and she danced twice a day in the Vaudeville. Grey eyes, lips like coals aglow. Her face was a tinted mask of snow.' ‘A mask of snow’ really stuck with me. A lot of things came from the idea that we all wear a certain mask to get through our lives. It could be a racial mask, it could be a sexual mask, it could be a gender mask. That idea prevailed.”

Broadway showman Tommy Tune was briefly involved and directed an early workshop. However, during The Wild Party’s two-year development period at the Public, Wolfe took the reins as director and co-librettist. LaChiusa tailored material with Patinkin and Kitt in mind, as the two performers were among the earliest cast members to be attached to the project. The creative team used Ann Douglas’ sociologically-minded tome Terrible Honesty: Mongrel Manhattan in the 1920s as their primary point of reference. “[Douglas] writes about this remarkable mixture of highbrow and lowbrow culture that was happening here in New York. Uptown meeting downtown. Black meeting white. All these cross pollinations of art, music, photography, dance. It was something that George brought to the table and helped make our beacon, our north star,” LaChiusa says.

While The Wild Party ended up clocking in at just under two hours, it almost went all night. “At one point we had a wonderfully fun notion of telling the story in real time. There was enough material that ended up on the cutting room floor that would fill a good six hours. People could come to the theater and camp out, drink, eat, sleep, wake up and the show would still be going on,” says LaChiusa. Though this idea did not come to fruition, LaChiusa and Wolfe opted to forgo an intermission as a gesture toward a “real time” experience.

By the late '90s, March’s writing was in the public domain, so there was no overruling input from an author’s estate on who had the authority to adapt his poem. This may have accounted for the coincidence that occurred when Andrew Lippa, another up-and-coming composer, began to work on his own adaptation. While his first off-Broadway show John & Jen was running in 1995, Lippa came upon The Wild Party in a bookstore and quickly recognized that the text was ripe for dramatization. Though the two composers became aware that they were both working from March’s material through the grapevine, neither anticipated that by the time they reached the finish line, their respective adaptations would be produced during the same theater season.

A Tale of Two Wild Parties
Lippa and LaChiusa’s respective Wild Party stagings were both announced as 1999 came to a close, causing a media stir from the jump. The producers of the LaChiusa-Wolfe version elected to have their show premiere on Broadway, without an initial run at any of the Public’s off-Broadway spaces. There had been plans for the show to open a season earlier, but the creative team felt the piece needed more work before it was to be received en masse. Further complicating matters was the departure of newly-minted Broadway star Vanessa Williams, who had been tapped to play Queenie, but left the production due to her pregnancy.

Williams was swiftly replaced by Australian actress Toni Collette at the behest of producer Scott Rudin. Collette was on the come-up after splashy roles in Muriel’s Wedding, Emma and The Sixth Sense, the latter of which would earn her an Oscar nomination. Before her rise to fame, Collette had appeared in a handful of musicals in her native country, including a turn as Petra in a Sydney Opera House production of A Little Night Music. As a result of this casting turnover, previews were further delayed, causing the LaChiusa iteration of The Wild Party to begin previews a month after the Lippa production had already opened.

All of this was chronicled in a New York Times article by Robin Pogrebin. “Both sets of producers find themselves part of what the League of American Theaters and Producers says appears to be a first for New York theater: two new musicals inspired by the same source material coming to the stage in the same season,” wrote Pogrebin, who noted that this was also, by all accounts, the first time two original works with the same title would be running simultaneously.

As Collette and company geared up to take on the Great White Way, Lippa’s version opened off-Broadway in February 2000 at Manhattan Theatre Club. Julia Murney led the cast as Queenie under the direction of Gabriel Barre, with Brian d’Arcy James as Burrs. Pre-Wicked, post-Rent Idina Menzel and Taye Diggs played Kate and Black, respectively. As it happened, the two musicals ended up being quite different. Lippa takes a streamlined approach to March’s sprawling story, focusing largely on the central love triangle. His score veers more contemporary, while LaChiusa blends jazz and vaudeville pastiche with dissonant melodies, evoking the patchwork poetry of March’s writing style.

In spite of their auspicious proximity to one another, LaChiusa maintains a decidedly neutral stance on the double Wild Party situation. “It's a media invention. It happened and that's the way it is. There was no competition,” he stresses, adding: “If you love something and you're in a relationship with that something, you want it to be as good as it can be and you keep working at it because you love it. You put the blinders on—you have to—and then keep going forward. You don't pay attention to the other shit.”

Broadway Gone Wild!
The Wild Party began previews on Broadway in March 2000 at the Virginia Theatre (now the August Wilson Theatre). Rounding out the ensemble cast was Yancey Arias as Black, Nathan Lee Graham and Michael McElroy as Oscar and Phil, the incestuous Brothers D'Armano, Stuart Zagnit and Adam Grupper as a pair of Jewish theater producers, Marc Kudisch as an “ambisextrous” rich kid, Brooke Sunny Moriber as a pigtailed naif, Norm Lewis as a Black prizeboxer, Leah Hocking as his white girlfriend, Jane Summerhays as a lesbian stripper and Sally Murphy as her morphine-addled valentine. No, No, Nanette this was not.

The show had been significantly altered when it officially opened in April, with half-an-hour of material cut during its preview period. Collette, Kitt and Wolfe appeared on The Charlie Rose Show to promote The Wild Party, though much of the interview involved Ben Brantley’s lukewarm New York Times review. Responding to Brantley’s prickly sentiments, Wolfe called foul play. “There were certain dynamics that were a part of the review that shouldn't be a part of the review—like how much the production cost and whether or not the Public Theater should be doing a production like this. He's supposed to come see the play and review the play.”

The New York Times was not the only publication stirring up bad press for the production. Before the show opened, a New York Post story by notorious theater columnist Michael Riedel lodged allegations of erratic behavior at Patinkin, writing that the revered Tony winner had been “prone to strange emotional outbursts.” Though Wolfe did not confirm nor deny such antics, he told Ridel that “the parameters of this material are so volatile, it has taken everybody—and I mean everybody—some time to learn what they are,” adding that he would “relish the opportunity” to work with Patinkin again.

Collette, for her part, has remained positive about her experience. In a 2023 interview with Vogue, she said, “It was everything that I dreamed of doing as a teenager. I mean, I got to live in New York and be the lead in a Broadway musical for f**k’s sake! It was also a new piece so it was exciting to work on something that was constantly evolving up until opening night.” Reminiscing on her time with Kitt, Collette shared, “We would eat hard-boiled eggs and just chat about all kinds of stuff. She was extremely grounded and normal for someone so glamorous...She was a force of nature.”

LaChiusa wasn’t privy to any uncouth antics but acknowledged that egos are bound to collide in the process of making art. “Every single one of them was just a joy individually, but I wouldn't go to a party with them all.”

When It Ends
For all the media fanfare and talk of competition, both Wild Party productions had relatively short runs. The Manhattan Theatre Club staging closed in April 2000 and the Broadway company took their final bow two months later. In spite of receiving seven Tony nominations—including Best Musical and nods for Collette, Patinkin and Kitt—the production went home empty-handed, dashing any hopes of a surge in ticket sales. LaChiuisa partially attributes the show’s premature closing to the dawn of online chat rooms. “It was right at the cusp of people being able to write anonymously what they felt online. I think there was an awful lot of the negativity that was out there and also this new device called the internet that was fascinating to deal with.”

In the years since, the show has developed a cult following, with the cast recording ensuring an afterlife for generations to come. The legend of the two Wild Parties remains a much tread-upon entry in theater history and there still is a great deal of debate among fans over which version is the definitive interpretation. LaChiuisa’s Wild Party had its West Coast premiere in 2005, with Valarie Pettiford starring as Queenie in a pared-down Los Angeles staging. More recently, London audiences saw Frances Ruffelle, John Owen-Jones and Donna Mckechnie dance the Black Bottom at the Other Palace Theatre in 2017.

Nearly a quarter of a century later, The Wild Party returns to the New York stage, ripe for reappraisal and culturally potent as ever. Director Lili-Anne Brown has cited the Harlem Renaissance and the racially integrated salons of Black celebutante A'Lelia Walker as particular points of inspiration for this production. With a Black woman playing Queenie, the “mask of snow” takes on new meaning, further emphasizing the show’s themes of assimilation and survival. LaChiuisa sings the praises of the newly-assembled cast: “They're all wonderful, just absolutely superb. I wish them the best of luck because it is a hard motherf**ker.”

The idiosyncratic composer has continued to forge his own path, writing works inspired by the likes of Amy Carter and Annie Edson Taylor (the first person to survive a trip over Niagara Falls in a barrel, naturally). Still, The Wild Party stands out in his diverse body of work as a brazen interrogation of societal taboos and the masks that we inhabit. “You can live, dangerous as it is and as vulnerable as it is, without the need for the mask of snow. That's a radical statement for its time. I think it still is. How brave can you be to live without the mask and face the dawn?”

Get tickets to The Wild Party!