The Queen of Versailles
Opening Night: November 9, 2025
Theater: St James Theatre
Website: queenofversaillesmusical.com
From computer engineer to Mrs. Florida to billionairess, Jackie Siegel sees herself as the embodiment of the American Dream. Now, as the wife of David “The Timeshare King” Siegel and mother of their eight children, she invites us to behold their most grandiose venture yet: building the largest private home in America — a $100 million house in Orlando, Florida, big enough for her dreams and inspired by the Palace of Versailles. But with the Great Recession of 2008 looming, Jackie and David’s dreams begin to crumble, along with their lavish lifestyle.
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November 9, 2025
And Chenoweth is a wonder, sounding a little bit country whenever Jackie is most herself, as in “Each and Every Day,” a love song to the infant Victoria; taking her high notes out for a spin in “The Royal We,” a duet with Marie Antoinette (Cassondra James); and convincing us for a moment, in a turn-on-a-dime song called “Grow the Light,” that Jackie has recalibrated her priorities.
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November 9, 2025
Saddled with an unmemorable score by Stephen Schwartz (Wicked, Pippin) and a confused book by Lindsey Ferrentino (Amy and the Orphans), Versailles glides by as bland bio-musical for much of its excessive runtime, the show’s perspective on Siegel meandering confusedly between misplaced sympathy and perverse fascination. That is until both the text and director Michael Arden’s staging (crisp up to this point, if sleepy) jolt suddenly to life in the story’s final section, as the overall tone shifts abruptly into bitter rage.
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November 9, 2025
This A-list team has been able to create some genuinely arresting moments, but they are fleeting in a busy show that still doesn’t quite know what story it wants to tell. It’s like a house that continues to expand, the plaster seams of each new addition hideously apparent.
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November 9, 2025
There is a two-hour-and-40-minute luxury-car crash happening at the St. James Theatre. If I were the litigious type, I’d be trying to figure out how to sue for whiplash. Instead, here I am staggering homewards, still trying to twist my head back into position after The Queen of Versailles. If you’re morbidly curious about the experience, you could try for tickets to the new musical by Stephen Schwartz and Lindsey Ferrentino, with Kristin Chenoweth glittering relentlessly at its center. Or you could save the money and have someone slap you back and forth with a large salmon.
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November 9, 2025
The performances, including a megatallented ensemble, are also excellent. As expected, Chenoweth is a force, and though Jackie isn’t really a “likable” figure, the Emmy Award winner draws out aspects of her personality that offer glimmers of sympathy for this toxicly positive billionaire woman.
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November 9, 2025
Like the 90,000–square-foot, $100-million palace that the Siegels are determined to build for themselves in Orlando, The Queen of Versailles is nothing if not ambitious. But like that same palace, it also feels misguided and very much still under construction.
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November 9, 2025
I hoped the tag-team of Chenoweth and Arden would have magic to do. No such luck. The actress is a theatrical force, as everybody knows, but Simone Biles can’t do a back handspring on a toothpick, either. With skin-deep material to work with, Chenoweth transparently leans into broad yuks like she’s serving donuts for dinner. If only her long-anticipated return could be returned.
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Much like the ill-fated Tammy Faye from last year, Versailles (directed by Michael Arden) toggles between different modus operandi — in this case, campy comedic sendup, surface level social commentary on income inequality, dark family drama, and French historical farce — and does none of them particularly well. The result often feels like tonal whiplash as the production attempts to scratch several itches without truly satisfying any.
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November 9, 2025
But The Queen of Versailles isn’t camp. It’s cheap tat, queasy spectacle, grubby glitz. It doesn’t burrow beneath its surface wealth to ask anything of substance.
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Never mind Glinda. Here, Chenoweth drives the new musical from Stephen Schwartz and Lindsey Ferrentino with a singular combo of raw determination and a beguilingly empathetic commitment to veracity. Chenoweth, with the help of the director Michael Arden, gets Jackie Siegel exactly right. The star refuses the temptation to ironically detach herself from the pile-driving, poor-born woman who watches “Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous,” marries rich and old, and then tries to build Versailles in Central Florida, only to find in the end that it’s no fun alone. Instead, Chenoweth just plays her as a complex human. Like the rest of us.
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“The Queen of Versailles” is designed to bring out all of Chenoweth’s Broadway shine. She never looks less than perfectly photoshopped, but the production ultimately overtaxes her strengths. New musicals are impossible dreams, and this is a whopper of a show, daunting in scale and jaw-dropping in ambition. If only Chenoweth’s dazzling star power didn’t have to do so much of the heavy lifting.
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Make no mistake, diminutive Tony-winning dynamo Chenoweth works overtime. In short skirts and plunging tops, she showcases her comic chops while fully deploying her voice: big belt, soaring soprano, and warm, mellow middle tones. Like a timeshare broker, she’s up there selling her character and the show.
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Director Michael Arden, who has tightened things up considerably since a 2024 Boston tryout, controls the pacing and focus with his usual confidence such that audiences may not even register the material’s ambivalence. Me, I was content to revel in Schwartz’s score, perhaps the most heartfelt, varied and robust of his career; in the variety and inventiveness of the production’s scenography; and above all in seeing a genuine Broadway star at the peak of her powers. Chenoweth embraces all her character’s contradictions as if they didn’t exist, translating her own belief in herself into Jackie’s. Unforgettable, the both of ‘em.
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Significantly, there’s nothing wrong with the cast Chenoweth heads like Lady Liberty raising her lamp. Though Abraham disappears for such long periods of time he’s often all but forgotten, he’s his imposing self when present. Others contributing strongly (many members taking on multiple roles) include Melody Butiu as a steadfast Siegel household staffer, Cassondra James as a regal Marie Antoinette, and Stephen DeRosa and Isabel Keating as Jackie’s concerned parents.
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November 9, 2025
But the new show from “Wicked” composer Stephen Schwartz and playwright Lindsey Ferrentino is both overdone and undercooked: Rather than decide whether to romanticize or satirize its subjects, the musical ventures a gaudy and confused mix of both without a coherent point of view.
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Chenoweth, who was born to be in a spangly dress and center stage on Broadway, is perfect for the role, an always-welcome jolt of in-on-it theatricality, but is let down by dialogue that’s not as funny as it could be and with a character too unfocused. Despite an out-of-town tryout in Boston, “The Queen of Versailles” still needs the stage filled with construction workers hammering in yellow vests. It’s not quite completed.
READ THE REVIEWNovember 9, 2025
The production is impressively designed and wonderfully acted; the show has a pleasant enough new score by a high-profile composer who’s on a roll (his 1976 musical “The Baker’s Wife” is opening later this week Off-Broadway, and “Wicked: For Good” is being released later this month.) But it doesn’t adequately answer for me Sondheim’s essential question: Why should this be a musical?
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