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[0:00] Jeff Malone: Welcome to Half Hour with Jeff and Richie, the podcast where we explore the latest shows we see, sharing our insights and opinions on the performances, storylines, and everything in between. In today's episode, we're discussing the New York City Center Encores! production of The Wild Party, playing at New York City Center in New York City. Whether you cannot catch the show in person or you want to expand your thoughts after seeing it, this episode is for you. And as always, we want to inform you that this episode will contain spoilers, so if you're ready to dive into this production, stick around with us. I'm Jeff.

[0:28] Richie Grasso: And I'm Richie, and we're thrilled to be your hosts for this episode. But before we start the conversation about The Wild Party, here are a few words from our advertisers. Welcome, everyone, to a new episode of Half Hour with Jeff and Richie. Today, we're discussing The Wild Party. Queenie is throwing a party, and you're invited! Join an assortment of New York City's most colorful characters for a night like no other in the dark underbelly of the city at the end of the 1920s. Michael John LaChiusa of The Gardens of Anuncia and George C. Wolfe of Jelly's Last Jam bring Joseph Moncure March's notorious narrative poem to life in this vivid, jazz-infused musical adaptation. What happens when a night of debauchery leads to a morning of sobering truths?

Nominated for seven Tony Awards in its original run, this musical, directed by two-time Helen Hayes Award winner Lillian Brown, is full of irreverence, exuberant madness, and joyful defiance. All right, so let's kick it off right now by getting into the story, plot, concept, theme, and music of this piece.

[1:18] Jeff Malone: So I always like to give people a little bit of history lessons on some of these things because I'm always fascinated by many things in this industry. This story is very fascinating to me. So this is a really famous poem, The Wild Party from the 1920s, that gets banned like everywhere because it's like extremely out there for the time. It's talking about a lot of excessive things of this party and for the time to publish that, right? So years go by, and the poem is like a really long narrative poem. I think when we think poems, we think like short little paragraphs, right? This is pretty long. We then jump to the 1999 to the 2000 Tony Awards season on Broadway, and all of a sudden, we have two versions of The Wild Party coming out at the same time, one for Broadway, one for Off-Broadway.

Michael John LaChiusa's goes to Broadway. That's the one we're talking about here. Andrew Lippa did the Off-Broadway one. And if you talk to any musical theater fan, they'll make sure they tell you which one they like better because everyone has an opinion on—Which do you like better? Well, we'll talk about that a little later, but I wanted to say it's fascinating to me that two completely different composers would want to write a musical about the same source material in the same year, and one goes to Broadway and one doesn't, right? It sounds a little bit like maybe one of them knew, and they both rushed together to Broadway.

[2:36] Richie Grasso: Well, the only thing I've seen similar lately, and there's definitely other stories like this, but The Great Gatsby is a similar one where we've had two, because that was because the rights had kind of come out, and we had one that was a little more of a squeaky cleaner version for Broadway, and there's apparently a lot more of a darker one that never went into public domain.

[2:51] Jeff Malone: Yeah, that's what I meant, public domain. So, did The Wild Party go into public domain in the 90s? I don't really know. I'm assuming now it is, but I don't really know at the time. But I guess it does lay the roots for a musical when you're talking about the jazz age and the 1920s, and we don't have a ton of documentation of the 1920s from a photo video perspective. We have some, but it's definitely like we hear about it, the Roaring Twenties, The Prohibition, and all this stuff, but you wonder like, well, what was really going on? And this is an example of like, oh, I think this show kind of goes deep and dark in some of the wild, for lack of a better word, things that have happened at a party in the 1920s, specifically this one.

And I think when the poem starts, I believe the poem starts with the first line, Queenie was a blonde, and I think that's why we get that big opening number. It's kind of smart to make the opening number about her being a blonde. And was someone a blonde in the 1920s a big deal? Maybe people dyeing their hair blonde or being blondes, that was probably a really big deal at the time, right? So that's why we have this whole number about it. I think that's fascinating.

[3:54] Richie Grasso: So I just wanted to go through a little bit about the concept and the story here. We're now seeing this version, we're talking about the Michael John LaChiusa was the Broadway version, and Ertha Kitt was in that, and so now we're talking about this City Center Revival of that one.

[4:08] Jeff Malone: Yeah, so for an overall concept here, I love this idea of taking this poem and putting a whole production around this piece. I look at this and I say, this is basically completely sung through, and it is a full jazz-infused score here. I think it is probably one of the best scores I've heard in a really long time in terms of like when this show came out compared to what has been on Broadway, and I really was listening to it from that lens here. And obviously this is at Encore, so it's beautiful. We have a full orchestra up there that is playing this score, and it just sounds amazing. And when I look at something like this, I'm like, it's so interesting that you see this poem and you say, I could write a full musical to this, and it just worked in my opinion.

It totally works. I wouldn't say every single song in the score is extremely memorable. However, that didn't bother me at all because every song was put in the right spot to give the right energy. And I thought that it was very, very good. A lot of times when we hear jazz scores, we think of Kander and Ebb. That's kind of the go-to for Broadway, in my mind anyway. And so to hear a different composer with really heavy orchestration in a good way, the jazz infusion of this was really, really smart.

[5:30] Richie Grasso: I think the other thing which is interesting is this is a show kind of with, I don't want to say no plot because there's certainly a plot, but there's not an extremely extensive plot where you need to be following every single character's twist and turn. And you kind of just are sitting in this room with them, observing the snowball effect of the night, right? And of course, Queenie wants to have this party. She has this wild party with him. Of course, spoiler alert, at the end, death is involved. Someone gets killed, right? And there's marital issues and relationship issues. And all these people that come in are industry workers of the time. If anything, I think it's such a light on maybe how some people in the 1920s lived.

There's a few great lines when she said, Jasmine B. Rogers' character, which we're going to talk about her in a second, when she says, I didn't know six o'clock happened twice in the same day. Because she goes to bed at two or three in the morning and sleeps till two or three in the afternoon. So she misses six a.m. every day, but she knows six p.m. And so I think that was like a great one-liner, right? And I think the lyrics go to that. And there's different ages and races and genders of people all in this party, all mingling together. But they're all there, mostly, not all characters, but a lot of the characters are from the same aura of life. And so I think it's just, hey, it's a wild party and it's in this apartment, go.

And I think that's all it needed. And it doesn't feel like confusing. Wait, is there supposed to be more of a plot? Or like, what am I missing? No, you kind of just ride with them. You just keep going.

[6:54] Jeff Malone: I don't know if you felt this either, but there's this sense of like, we don't get off the moving train. We keep going and you keep going and you keep going. And as an audience member, you're like, okay, we're buckled in. I don't jump out of this world of this show until this show tells me. I think that's kind of cool from my perspective.

[7:14] Richie Grasso: Well, I think that's the whole point here. In the writing here, it's taking you on the journey of how this turned into the wild party. It didn't start out wild. It started out slightly sophisticated, I would say, even from what they're drinking in the party that they come in. It's like they have their cocktail, their specialty cocktail. And then as the night unfolds, it gets a little bit more risque and wild. And it's like, okay, now we're drinking gin. And they're like, nothing good happens basically when you're drinking gin. So I look at something like that and I say, okay, this is the journey that they're taking you on here. Even through the music, they take you on that journey and they say, we're going to start off slow and then we're going to really start letting this unfold throughout the whole piece here.

[8:37] Jeff Malone: And what I think is nice that it kind of touches on is that we always kind of look at the 1920s as like slightly a maybe safer side of things. But I think what this show kind of says to us is that like there was a lot of this going on and it's not the squeaky clean like flapper era, like that we all know it only as. And I think this is like what lends itself into the side of things like no, the hunger for this lifestyle was always there and it's continued on through decades. And it's fascinating to see how the music moves that plot along. And it's a room full of entertainers and who wants to be the next entertainer amongst their friends here? Oh, I'm going to sing a song now. Go to the piano.

Let's keep drinking. Let's keep singing. And then it just goes and there's that moment about midway through the show, you know, there's a one act show. There's no intermission. You get to the middle and the lights change after midnight. And the second we got to the after midnight section, it was like, whoa, we are now moving through a different part of the night here. And things got much darker and deeper. And it was fascinating to see it unfold on stage.

[9:48] Richie Grasso: And from a concept side of things as well, it's like it has this whole vaudeville undertone here. Like it's set up in this vaudevillian style that you're supposed to watch this party happen as, which I think is also really cool.

[10:04] Jeff Malone: Which is very, very cool. You know, entertainers at the time, film was just kind of getting started, right? Of course there was film, but I mean, it wasn't what it is now. Broadway wasn't what it was now. I mean, we didn't really, we were just, we definitely had follies and variety shows and things, but this was just a time of transition for the country too. At the turn of the century and then into the twenties, there was just a lot of change happening. And I think it was just so cool to see that time period from this lens.

[10:37] Richie Grasso: Right. And when you look at a book like this, this musical has so many different characters, do you think the show gives enough time for each kind of character within this piece to expand?

[10:10] Jeff Malone: If I had to guess, I would think the creators on this were trying to give you the perception of what if you went to a party and you only saw that person for five minutes, but you saw that person for 30 minutes, but that person came in and out of the room 75 times, but that person you didn't talk to or even see until three o'clock in the morning. When you go to a party, there's different energies with different people, and sometimes you could stand for an hour and talk to someone, and then someone gets upset. Oh, there's a problem, and we go, oh, I got to go to the restroom, and then you don't see them again for two hours. That unease of the party is so mirrored of the real-life scenario maybe of a party, and so then it's like, who came late?

Adrian Warren's character came so late, and what happened there? Did the energy of the room shift when she got there? It was just commentary on that. I thought that was cool. Which I think is a great kind of segue into our next section in this podcast, because I think what Lillian Brown does here so nice is that you can pick a character that you want to watch throughout the whole night, follow them only, because they are continuously acting throughout this whole musical. But before we do that, we're going to take a quick break.

[11:19] Richie Grasso: Okay, and we're back. So just as I was saying before we took the break here, I want to get into the direction here from Lillian Brown, because I thought that it was exceptional for the encore stage. I think that there was so much happening throughout this piece that I thought that she did really well as a director here, and it's starting off by really staging these actors on this stage so well. They did not stop throughout the whole piece. You really, really could have followed any one of them and followed their whole story and journey throughout this whole car crash that was happening at this wild party.

[11:50] Jeff Malone: Totally, and I feel like Lillian Brown totally does... I don't know her very well as a director, but seeing this, I'm fascinated to see more of her direction in future things. What was nice is here's an apartment and there's four different rooms in the main entryway, and you, like you said, just follow characters throughout. Very rarely do people go off stage. Even there were times when I see someone just go to the restroom and wash their hands and come back and then talk and sit at the piano. Sometimes people weren't talking to anyone, and it's like there was no phones to go on. There was no disconnect. You had to kind of be at this party, engaged the whole time. So the interactions with people, who hates who, who likes who, what, it was very clear.

And sometimes with direction, I've seen things where there's a lot going on. I'm like, whoa, there's too much pulled focus. I don't know where to look, and now I'm confused. But for this, it didn't matter like that because you were able to look at a scene and watch some dialogue happening, and then right behind them, it was just subtle enough to be like, oh, that person likes that person, I think. Oh, interesting. I wonder if we'll see. And then an hour later, I was like, oh, yep, there we go. So it was just light enough that your eyes could be like a ping pong match all across that stage.

[13:00] Richie Grasso: Right. It wasn't distracting, which could easily be distracting. But for me, it wasn't. I look at this as, okay, you're at a party. So no one else stops at a party. They're constantly doing something. So even when someone's singing, it's not that they're going to stop and listen. No, they're really doing what they would be doing in that performance. And I look at that and I say, oh, okay. Sally is a great character in this show because she almost was a scene stealer in so many different moments because she is falling over. She's talking to this one. Her legs are up out of a box at one point. And I'm like, hello, this is true direction happening on the stage. And even with that in the mix of choreography that Katie Spellman did here, I think that it was really, really exceptional together.

[13:52] Jeff Malone: Really amazing. And it talks about design. I thought this was lit really well. I thought the scenic design for a concert. Remember, we're watching concert staging. I don't think I saw one binder up there being held. The orchestra being seen and visible is always important in a city center show. I think that's the root of what we do. And I love seeing the orchestra up there. But it was almost like they were looming over the scene, that the music kind of sat as the pivotal character throughout this. And I love that the apartment was kind of, in theory, it was just this open room, but there were some doors that led you into different rooms, but we got to see everything. And it wasn't too avant-garde.

It was just like, oh, we're just going to kind of just show you this apartment and this is what's going to happen. I liked when Queenie went up to the second floor with the other character and they sang and they kind of took them out of the apartment for a minute. It shows them on the fire escape that would be outside of their window. I look at that and I say, yeah, I agree with that. I think this apartment design worked really well. You could see everything that was happening in that space. And then when you talk about some of the actor performances here, what would you say are some that really stood out to you as great performances?

[15:02] Richie Grasso: Well, I mean, I have an extreme hot take here, right? A Broadway hot take because I think that this is three for three for me with Jasmine Amy Rogers. She is a star, star, star on every stage that's happening for her. We saw her in Boop, star. We saw her in Spelling Bee, star. And now we've seen her in The Wild Party, star. Three for three, amazing. Three completely different roles. And to think we just saw her do Olive in Spelling Bee a couple months ago and now all of a sudden she's in this completely different role. She can really change and morph into a character and is brilliant. I hope we see a lot more of her for sure. Really, really, really huge fan of hers. I loved seeing Jordan Donica in this.

We saw him in The Lerner and Lowe in Camelot singing the beautiful ballads and I was like, wow, this is just a leading man. And to see him in this role now in a completely different way, carrying the story with her, he was engaging, sings so well, menacing and scary. I mean, a little bit of everything. He is very, very, very good. And that was very well cast.

[16:03] Jeff Malone: I mean, first of all, the whole cast was amazing. I think vocally, they're all powerhouses up on this stage. Another, Megan Murphy was a standout for me. Maya Roe was a standout for me. Adrian Warren was a standout. I think there's such talent that's happening on this stage and they all knew how to give everyone their moment. And when they had their moment, they all shined. And I can't continue on without talking about Tanya Pinkins, who was just absolutely incredible. And when I think of Tanya Pinkins, I say, wow, she's done a lot of Broadway and to see her up there, I couldn't help but also not to compare her to Eartha Kitt because two very different people, but I couldn't help but think, wow, what would it have been like to have been in the late 90s, early 2000s to see Eartha Kitt do this?

It was probably one of the last things Eartha Kitt did, but it's usually like a seasoned performer who showed up to the party and the younger people don't really like her as much or they have sassy things to say to her. But she has those couple stand and sing moments and she wasn't excluded from this. She was part of those scenes. She was in there doing things with people in the other scenes and then she comes out and sings. I was like, okay, Tanya Pinkins. Which is like such a full circle moment for her because she was in this show. And then to now be in it again is a major deal. So getting to see Eartha Kitt do this and now-

[17:21] Richie Grasso: She gets to do that.

[17:22] Jeff Malone: Right. So it's like, wow, full circle. Yep. Yep. I also thought Leslie Margareta was also really funny. She's always so funny. I mean, come on, always. Jelani Alladin, really, really strong too. This was very well cast. I always feel like City Center Encores gets it so right with its casting for the most part. They put these great performers in. It's a low commitment. It's only a few weeks, but it's in between shows for contracts for people and you usually get some really, really great names and it's an awesome full staged experience. And when you go back to some of the design here too, it was Linda Cho did the costumes.

[17:55] Richie Grasso: Which is amazing. Her costumes are always amazing. The lighting design by Justin Townsend, like you said, I think taking us on that journey through lighting, giving us that moment when the switch happened and this whole scene was happening on the stage that was provocative and messy and gray. And that was one of those real moments where you were really watching what was happening on that stage. And you said, oh, this was a wild party.

[18:27] Jeff Malone: Yes, exactly. And I will also say, I didn't mention earlier, Claiborne Elder, who's also very, very strong in this too. His character goes through all different rooms with all different people too. It kind of feels like you're at Sleep No More in a way where you're following certain characters through these rooms, but in the same way, you're just sitting stationary and you're watching. And I will say that after midnight scene, when it all got pretty wild, if you saw it, I think you know what I'm talking about. The lights changed and you're talking about excessive alcohol use, excessive drug use, sexuality across the spectrum of different rooms of people. You're watching this just unfold. And you're like, wow, this is fascinating.

Are we supposed to feel uncomfortable as an audience member because they're all spiraling out and we're just sitting here watching it? Sure. I think that's what theater can kind of make you feel different things. And I think you're sitting there like maybe not uncomfortable per se, but just like, oh, this is okay. Yeah. This night is not stopping. And we're sitting here in this dark theater, just observing it. It's just a fascinating concept.

[19:23] Richie Grasso: Oh, I definitely think that this was meant to be uncomfortable theater, especially when it came out. It was supposed to make you feel uncomfortable that this was happening and that you kind of could do nothing to stop it but watch.

[19:35] Jeff Malone: Right. Right. And then when they're all sleeping at one point, they all just crash and it's like three or four in the morning. And you're like, wow, like the whole party ended. And then it ends really tragically. And the emotions are really high at the end. And it's just what a night that was in this one plot.

[19:54] Richie Grasso: Right. But I love this idea that you just brought up about the whole Sleep No More, because I look at that and I say, oh, this is something that you kind of would want to walk through and see this whole moment happening in this wild party. And I kind of do think it lends itself to be set up like that. Like you kind of would be walking throughout the house and these little vaudeville style. They tried with the immersive Great Gatsby. They've been doing a lot of immersive theater walking through and masquerade right now. Right. It's definitely.

[20:20] Jeff Malone: The Wild Party Roars at Encores!

[30:00] Jeff Malone: Well, that does wrap up our discussion for this episode.

[30:02] Richie Grasso: We hope you enjoyed our deep dive into The Wild Party.

[30:04] Jeff Malone: And remember, we want to hear from you.

[30:06] Richie Grasso: Continue the conversation with us on Instagram and TikTok at Half Hour Podcast.

[30:10] Jeff Malone: And drop us a comment on Spotify and let us know your thoughts on The Wild Party.

[30:14] Richie Grasso: And let us know which is your favorite Wild Party.

[30:17] Jeff Malone: Yes, let us know. There's two different versions out there.

[30:19] Richie Grasso: Please also leave us a review. Your reviews mean so much to us.

[30:22] Jeff Malone: And remember to subscribe to our channel for all past and future episodes.

[30:25] Richie Grasso: Until next time, I'm Jeff.

[30:27] Richie Grasso: And I'm Richie, saying ta-ta for now.

[30:29] Jeff Malone: Bye.