By Debra Cash

This, my friends, is what a capital D Diva looks like.

The Queen of Versailles Music and lyrics by Stephen Schwartz, book by Lindsey Ferrentino, based on Lauren Greenfield’s documentary film The Queen of Versailles and the life stories of Jackie and David Siegel. Directed by Michael Arden. At the Emerson Colonial Theatre through August 25.

Kristin Chenoweth and F. Murray Abraham in The Queen of Versailles. Photo: Matthew Murphy

Vehicle, vee-i-kuhl (noun)

1. a medium of communication, expression, or display.
2. a play, screenplay, or the like, having a role suited to the talents of and often written for a specific performer.
3. a means of accomplishing a purpose.

The Queen of Versailles is a spangled vehicle for Kristin Chenoweth. With a repeated reference to her character’s dreams of becoming “American royalty,” there’s not a moment on stage when Chenoweth’s status as Broadway royalty isn’t emphasized, underlined, and celebrated. Even if you didn’t know her from her turn as Glinda in Wicked 20 years ago, or her countless television (Glee) and concert performances, you’d get a shiver down your spine when she throws her head back in song, her closeup projected two stories tall across the curtain that rings down Act One.

This, my friends, is what a capital D Diva looks like.

And this is what a potential Diva aspires to. When Jackie Siegel, née Mallery, wanted a “bigger life” than her life in Endwell, New York (the real name of her hometown, a place near Binghamton), she earned an engineering degree, reasoning that being an engineer would be a whole lot more interesting and lucrative than working in the IBM secretarial pool. She left that behind to be a lingerie model. While in an unpleasant first marriage, she entered and won a beauty pageant as Mrs. Florida.

Becoming the third, trophy wife of billionaire “Timeshare King” David Siegel (F. Murray Abraham, giving a stolid performance that doesn’t require him to do much beyond twinkling his eyes in complicity), was the next step up. While Lindsey Ferrentino’s book for the musical leans into the idea that these are two needy people who recognize each other as escapees from dim working-class backgrounds and together dream of redemptive glitz, their pairing was likely simpler than that. As Jackie’s daughter Victoria from her first marriage (the forthright, poignant Nina White) sings, “pretty wins.”

Indeed, Chenowith is pretty in pink. All 4′-11″ of her struts around on high heels and lavish girly costumes accessorized with a live teacup Pomeranian, designed with pitch-perfect ostentation by Christian Cowan. (Where the real Jackie has breast implants that look like you could pop them with a pin, Chenowith is pressed together, padded up and pushed forward in a close-enough approximation.)

Dazzled by a trip to France (conveyed through cinematic projections and shifting panels that accordion time), the Siegels dedicate themselves to building the largest and most expensive single-family home in America, a 90,000-square-foot Orlando mansion with a bowling alley and David’s personal Benihana restaurant. Their Versailles is envisioned as a replica of the palace where Marie Antoinette laid down her head before she lost it. This gives the musical reason to juxtapose the saga of the Siegels with flashbacks to the era before and during the French Revolution, complete with a foppish King Louis XIV (Pablo David Laucerica) who resembles Hamilton’s “you’ll be back” King George III, and Cassondra James in a frothy cameo as a cosplaying Marie Antoinette.

While both the Siegels and the historic French royals share tone-deaf flamboyance, Schwartz and Ferrentino reach, unsuccessfully, for relevant political commentary. The presence of Filipina nanny Sophia (the affecting Melody Butiu,) who literally lives in a cast-off children’s playhouse as she wistfully dreams of seeing her own children, drives home the sheer unfairness of people coexisting in the same (enormous) space but inhabiting distinctly different circumstances. Nonetheless, French Revolution costumery notwithstanding, the writers can’t square how they celebrate the way Jackie wills herself to fulfill her “champagne wishes and caviar dreams” with a tossed-off critique of income inequality.

The big bad wolf knocking down Jackie’s house is the 2008 recession. David Siegel’s investors call in their loans. He has to lay off his predatory sales staff and comes close to losing his signature properties. (Where the documentary is clear that his business is built on convincing gullible people to buy something they can’t afford, in the musical the cravenness of Westgate Resorts’ business model is a mere passing note.) It’s hard to care when David retreats to his aerie on a multipurpose rolling scaffold and Jackie’s obsessive shopping sprees are downgraded from Gucci to Walmart. Conspicuous consumption is still conspicuous, no matter the price point.

Financial costs are quantifiable, but the human costs are harder to measure. Jackie’s niece Jonquil (tough girl Tatum Grace Hopkins, a young actor with charisma and timing to spare) is taken into the family after a stint on the streets. Her incredulity at the fairy tale luxury that surrounds her is a lot of fun. Later, a devastating family loss causes a minute — and only a minute — of heartache that, true to form, the Siegels manage to turn into a money-making proposition.

The Siegel family in The Queen of Versailles. Photo: Matthew Murphy

Jackie Siegel is a bundle of contradictions that Chenoweth intermittently — but only intermittently — tries to bring into focus. Her giddy cluelessness, with that Betty Boop speaking voice, is a cover for the sheer terror of not being and never having enough.

In 2012, Before The Queen of Versailles documentary premiered at Sundance — where it won the directing award — David Siegel sued the filmmakers for defamation. He argued that Lauren Greenfield made it look like his business had tanked when, in the course of things, he had managed to hold on. Given all that, it’s peculiar that the musical leans into the documentary-making subplot, with preshot primping, speeches made to the audience as if to the camera, and an artful use of livestream projections. While most of Michael Arden’s direction is snappy to the point of dizziness, especially in Act One, (this is a guy who dyed his hair bright pink for opening night at the Colonial), all the reality show energy gets tiresome.

Schwartz the tunesmith has composed a score that seems to come prepackaged. There are French Baroque flourishes in the duetting trills of “The Royal We” and unexpectedly rib-tickling cowboy-themed slapstick in “The Ballad of the Timeshare King,” but musically, The Queen of Versailles declines to offer a melody you’ll remember.

But in some sense it doesn’t matter. With the immortalization of a middling but elaborately furnished Broadway musical, Jackie Siegel can relish her enhanced, Barbielicious celebrity and may make enough extra money to finally finish her palace. Kristin Chenoweth will sell out Broadway houses as long as she’s still standing.

And the rest of us? Well, we can just eat cake.

Debra Cash, a Founding Contributor to the Arts Fuse is a member of its Board.