The Wild Party (New York City Center Encores!)

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In the hands of Michael John LaChiusa (music, lyrics and book) and George C. Wolfe (book), the feral, syncopated verse of Joseph Moncure March’s Prohibition-era poem is not so much adapted as reforged—heated, hammered, and hurled forward as a kind of theatrical locomotive. Their Wild Party arrives like a runaway train of jazz, gin, and envy, its momentum at once intoxicating and annihilating. It careens down the rails with a velocity that promises, even as it seduces, an inevitable and exquisitely catastrophic derailment.

The musical’s original Broadway run, in the spring of 2000, lasted just a hair over 100 performances, with a solid 36 of them previews —a brief flare in a season already crowded by a competing adaptation of the same source with book, music and lyrics by Andrew Lippa. Both were cast with star power. LaChiusa’s Broadway cast boasted Toni Collette and Mandy Patinkin as Queenie and Burrs, with Tonya Pinkins and Yancey Arias as Kate and Black, and the legendary Eartha Kitt purring as Dolores. Lippa’s Manhattan Theatre Club version starred Julia Murney, Brian d’Arcy James, Idina Menzel and Taye Diggs in the four leads.

Clearly avid theatregoers didn’t have to choose which cast they were going to see…they did well seeing them both! The culture in 2000, basking in an illusion of permanence, was perhaps ill-equipped to apprehend a startlingly dangerous vision of excess and sensuality as anesthesia. And not just one, but two The Wild Party spectacles proposed a world in which the roar of pleasure exists chiefly to muffle a gathering howl of despair. In our present decade—another ’20s, likewise jittery, likewise unmoored—that proposition somehow lands with unnerving clarity.

The premise is deceptively simple. Queenie, a vaudevillian of brittle charm, a voluptuous Jasmine Amy Rogers in a major star turn, wakes on a Sunday afternoon with a vague dissatisfaction that curdles almost instantly into violence when her lover, Burrs, the seething volatile powerhouse of Jordan Donica, responds to her request for coffee with a flash of rage. A knife is drawn; a line is crossed. It can’t go without mentioning that Burrs makes his entrance by springing from a trunk in blackface—an image as jarring today as it must have been when March first imagined. And so, naturally, they decide to have “a wild party”. What follows is less a gathering than a controlled detonation, a social ecosystem in which appetites—sexual, chemical, emotional—collide and metastasize.

The guest list assembles like a catalogue of appetites. The stripper Miss Madelaine True, the vivacious Meghan Murphy, appears with a date, the shellshocked Betsy Morgan as Sally, so dissociated she seems already half-ghost; the droll KJ Hippensteel and Andrew Kober as Gold and Goldberg, are a pair of eager producers hovering at the margins, intoxicated by proximity to glamour; and a showstopping Tonya Pinkins as Dolores Montoya, a seasoned performer prowling the room in search of her next benefactor, a role that fit the sex kitten Eartha Kitt like a glove.

Jackie, a louche playboy, a sexy ambisexual Claybourne Elder, arrives trailing cocaine and provocation, while a pair of vaudevillian “brothers,” the lithe Wesley J. Barnes and Joseph Anthony Byrd, as Oscar and Phil D’Armano respectively, perform their routines with a polish that barely conceals the fault lines of long intimacy. There is Eddie, a prizefighter with a blunt moral code played by Evan Tyrone Martin, and his wife Mae, an enthralling Lesli Margherita as a former chorine whose wit cuts as sharply as her survival instinct; the latter’s decision to bring along her adolescent sister Nadine, Maya Rowe as archetypal jailbait, lends the evening one of its more quietly horrifying undercurrents. Each entrance sharpens the atmosphere, the room thickening with want.

Yet it is the arrival of Queenie’s rival—the resplendent, predatory Adrienne Warren as Kate, accompanied by a man whose composure reads as both refuge and temptation, suave ladykiller Jelani Alladin as Black—that shifts the evening’s center of gravity. The chemistry between Queenie and this elegant stranger is immediate and unmistakable. From that moment on, the party tilts unmistakably toward catastrophe. Liquor and cocaine do not so much loosen inhibitions as dissolve them, and the production tracks, with almost anthropological precision, the way desire mutates under pressure: into cruelty, into desperation, into violence. There’s little irony as booze and “snow” seep steadily into the bloodstream of a party; opportunity presents itself with dangerous inevitability.

Director Lili-Anne Brown renders this descent with a meticulous sense of orchestration. Scenes overlap and interpenetrate, as if the apartment itself were a kind of terrarium for human impulse, each corner harboring its own drama. Brown treats the gathering not simply as a party but as a living glittering display case of appetites and resentments, where every glance conceals a negotiation and every flirtation carries the potential for rupture. Rivalries simmer, alliances shift, and forbidden desires drift through the air like perfume.

Arnel Sancianco’s ingenious lavish design situates us within a space that feels at once expansive and claustrophobic—a “third act passion set” whose visual depth allows multiple narratives to unfold simultaneously, the eye ricocheting from one intrigue to another. Linda Cho’s breathtaking costumes shimmer with period allure, only to be gradually subsumed by Justin Townsend’s perceptive lighting scheme that darkens, smears, and finally implicates the audience in the gathering murk. Katie Spelman’s choreography, initially buoyant with vaudevillian snap, unravels into a writhing mass of limbs and torsos, bodies no longer dancing so much as sensually colliding.

At the center of this maelstrom are Queenie and Burrs, whose relationship supplies the evening’s most volatile fuel. Burrs is rendered as a figure of unnerving contradiction: outwardly rakish, inwardly corroded by a cavernous insecurity. His charm flickers like a faulty filament, liable to short-circuit at any moment into menace. When in his “aria” “How Many Women in the World” he reflects on the sheer number of women he has bedded, the sentiment lands less as boast than as incantation—a frantic attempt to stabilize a self perpetually on the brink of eruption. Desire, indeed, fuels every corner of this drama—though nowhere more frighteningly than in Burrs himself.

Queenie, by contrast, emerges as the production’s most poignant enigma. She is, on the surface, the party’s glittering nucleus, a woman who has learned to wield detachment as both shield and performance. Yet beneath that lacquered cynicism pulses a stubborn, almost embarrassing desire for genuine connection. In her encounter with the evening’s most promising stranger, the music briefly suspends its cynicism, allowing something like yearning to surface. Her duet with Black, “People Like Us,” provides the musical’s emotional core, a lament for souls who treat lovers like temporary medicine—taken in desperate hope of curing wounds that may, in fact, be incurable. The lyric has the bruised candor of a modern dating manifesto, delivered with the wistful awareness that connection may be the one indulgence the party cannot truly provide. Lovers, she suggests, are taken “like pills”—a line that, in this staging, lands with a mordant modernity, as if the Jazz Age had somehow anticipated the algorithmic intimacies of our own era.

Elsewhere, Tonya Pinkins’ veteran performer claims the evening’s apocalyptic summit with a late-breaking number, “When It Ends,” that reframes the party not as aberration but as prelude. Sung with a feline precision, it casts a long, shuddering shadow over the proceedings, suggesting that the end, when it comes, will be both inevitable and perversely deserved.

Musically, the production achieves a rare equilibrium between clarity and seduction. Each lyric lands with surgical precision, even as the orchestra surges and sighs beneath it—a tapestry of brass and woodwinds that evokes the era without embalming it. The score, long admired in certain circles and neglected in others, reveals itself here as something closer to a lost classic: a work of formidable ambition, unafraid of ugliness, and attuned to the uneasy marriage of pleasure and despair that defines both its period and, perhaps, our own.

The score itself receives sumptuous treatment from the orchestra at New York City Center Encores!. Alex Neumann’s meticulous sound design ensures that every lyric lands with crystalline clarity, even as the brass and woodwinds of Bruce Coughlin’s orchestrations surge with decadent vitality. Under the baton of Daryl Waters, the ensemble transforms the evening into a sprawling symphony of Jazz Age hedonism—lush, propulsive, and faintly sinister.

Encores! has long prided itself on giving classic scores their most eloquent hearing, and here the company accomplishes precisely that. Hearing The Wild Party once again, one cannot help but feel that LaChiusa’s creation has been quietly waiting for the cultural moment that could fully appreciate its particular brand of intoxicated despair.

One leaves the theatre not with the tidy satisfaction of resolution but with the unsettled awareness of having witnessed something more volatile: a portrait of excess as both symptom and strategy, a party that dares you to enjoy it even as it tightens the vise, as a portrait of pleasure pursued to the edge of annihilation. The music lingers, the images recur, and the nervous system, like the characters’, takes its time returning to baseline.

The Wild Party (through March 29, 2026)

New York City Center Encores!

New York City Center, 131 West 55th Street, in Manhattan

For tickets, visit www.https://nycitycenter.org

Running time: two hours without an intermission