A relentlessly dark, though glittering, musical drama of 1920s decadence that ran scarcely more than 100 performances on Broadway in 2000, The Wild Party returns for a brief visit to New York City Center, where a truly thrilling concert staging of the work bowed on Wednesday.
Expect to see more of a full-fledged Broadway attraction than simply a concert. As the onstage orchestra (led by guest music director Daryl Waters) blazes away atop a platform situated above the action, director Lili-Anne Brown’s production looks all dressed up in Roaring ’20s duds designed by Linda Cho; meanwhile, the action transpires in a seedy uptown Manhattan apartment designed by Arnel Sancianco in dusky reds with several doors for the story’s dramatic entrances and furtive exits. A terrific 15-member ensemble ably executes their demanding roles sans the scripts usually deployed during such Encores! showings. The production, the musicianship, and the performances of The Wild Party register among the best of Encores! revivals (and I’ve seen plenty).
Despite such excellence in performance and the superior quality of the work itself, The Wild Party is an adults-only event not everyone will appreciate, let alone enjoy. It does not offer a pleasant time for patrons who favor happy-go-lucky musical comedies, and the increasingly nasty story that ends in murder is a reason why the original did not linger long on Broadway. Drawn from an epic poem by Harlem Renaissance author Joseph Moncure March, The Wild Party observes a bunch of mostly second-rate vaudeville entertainers getting blotto on bootleg gin late one night while getting crazy in all sorts of lusty and lowdown ways until dawn breaks to reveal certain revelers beyond busted.
Crafted by songwriter Michael John LaChiusa and co-librettist George C. Wolfe, the script aptly fleshes out March’s characters by tightly mingling fleeting snatches of their talk amid LaChiusa’s typically smart, propulsive score. The wit and allure of the sensual music and lyrics elevates the story’s sordid, undeniably entertaining doings. One of his finest, LaChiusa’s score inventively reflects the varied styles and sounds of the era’s Jazz Age music along with the vaudeville acts these showbiz folk performed, while continually driving and heightening the dramas erupting among them. Although the musical is not entirely sung-through, most other moments are underscored, and Bruce Coughlin’s orchestrations effectively run icy or steamy with the drama. Under Waters’ direction, the Encores! orchestra lends the music a midnight shimmer.
Evidently inspired by their material and Brown’s direction, every member of the top-notch company provides sharp individual performances yet mesh as an ensemble. So sweet and spunky as Betty Boop last season, Jasmine Amy Rogers fearlessly gets down and kinda dirty as Queenie, an aging peroxide-blond chorine whose chilly facade hides a lonely heart unexpectedly touched by a stranger named Black, sleekly embodied by Jelani Alladin. Their rueful “People Like Us” duet is among the musical’s high points. Queenie’s abusive lover, a blackface comedian whose malicious nature tends to spoil the party, is given a murderous edginess by Jordan Donica. A regal presence in a role Eartha Kitt created is Tonya Pinkins, who played a different character in the original, but here presents a formidable Sophie Tucker–like entertainer.
Adrienne Warren confidently saunters through the festivities as Queenie’s plainspoken frenemy; Claybourne Elder elegantly breezes along as a slumming playboy; Meghan Murphy is the ever-raucous Miss Madelaine True, who shows up with a zonked-out chum (amusingly played by Betsy Morgan with apparently no bones in her body); and Lesli Margherita is surprisingly poignant as an ex-chorus babe. An imminent deadline prevents complimentary notes about the remaining members of the company.
Brown’s picturesque, well-paced production—the show runs about two hours and there is no intermission—is enhanced considerably by Katie Spelman’s choreography, which easily blends vintage theatrical patterns and social dancing with abstract and individual movements as needed; people are almost always moving in the background even as the various characters come into focus through the moody lighting designed by Justin Townsend. From the witty, old-fashioned olio curtain in orange and black that greets the audience as they take their seats to the musical’s bleary, bleak, and bluesy conclusion, expect a seductive staging of a remarkable work of modern musical theater.
The Wild Party opened March 18, 2026, at City Center and runs through March 29. Tickets and information: nycitycenter.org
