28 August 2024

The “traitor trees,” my friend Betsy’s tag for forest denizens turning prematurely autumnal, have begun to appear here in Madbury.  Halloween candy is already displayed at the local Market Basket, and Durham traffic is snarled with the annual conjunction of road work and the return of UNH students to campus.  Today’s forecast high is 84^o, but the low predicted for tonight is 54^o; one day’s weather mimics this liminal late summer season.

I, too, have a foot in two places, packing for a two-day yoga retreat on Star Island off the coast of Portsmouth on the same day as I’m visiting my orthopedist for further investigation of what’s going on with my ischial tuberosity and possible lumbar stenosis.  I’m getting Euflexxa injections to my left knee and worrying about all those outdoor chores I have yet to perform even as each day grows appreciably shorter.  And having just finished Daniel Mason’s mesmerizing novel North Woods, the story of a single house in the New England woods told through the lives of those who inhabit it across the centuries, I’m feeling more obligated than ever to maintain our Gnawwood for whoever comes next.  I feel like a tween again, momentarily fixed between late middle and a much-diminished old age, decidedly “not for sissies,” as Bette Davis opined. 

Last Sunday in Boston I saw the closing performance of a new musical trying to find its legs before a Broadway run, Stephen Schwartz and Lindsey Ferrentino’s The Queen of Versailles, starring the unsinkable Kristin Chenoweth and F. Murray Abraham as Jackie and David “King of the Timeshare” Siegel, the billionaire former CEO of Westgate Resorts.  Based on Lauren Greenfield’s real-life 2021 documentary of the same name, The Queen of Versailles tells the true rags-to-riches-to-bust-to-back-to-riches story of Jackie Siegel’s undaunted pursuit of “champagne riches and caviar dreams” at the expense of all that truly matters.  Inspired by a trip to the real Versailles, the Siegels set out to build an even grander replica in Orlando, Florida, their still unfinished palace of a home boasting the biggest of anything and everything, including (according to the musical) a life-size Benihana in the basement. Why? “Because they can.”

These crass nouveau riche “American Royalty” spare no expense until the 2008 crash—from which, thanks to the implied credit-default-swap machinations of the Timeshare King—they emerge more than solvent after Jackie parlays the fame brought her by the Greenfield documentary into a lucrative famous-for-being-famous film and reality show career.   The Schwartz/Ferrentino musical turns Jackie’s story into a Citizen Kane/Great Gatsby-esque metaphor for what’s wrong with America via repeated appearances of Marie Antoinette and Louis XIV, whose resonant history lessons elude Jackie, though, we hope, not the audience.

Even in its final try-out performance, Chenoweth’s curtain speech made clear that the musical is still a work in progress.  That afternoon’s run took 3 hours, including one extended 20-minute intermission, clearly necessary to change the three-level “unfinished Versailles” set to the completed “Grand Entrance at Versailles” set with its gleaming marble staircase and sparkling chandeliers worthy of the Metropolitan Opera—or the lavish Emerson Colonial Theatre, whose lobby was itself inspired by the real Versailles’s Hall of Mirrors.  Chenoweth revealed that their opening night performance ran 3 hours 50 minutes, and thanked Boston audiences for their patience.  So, The Queen of Versailles is itself in a liminal state of becoming.  Chenoweth’s talent and stamina are astonishing:  she’s rarely offstage for the entire show save for a multitude of quick changes.  The matinee audience clearly loved her and the glitz of the production, but I’m not sure they “got” it, or heard the Trumpian echoes of conspicuous consumption and golden toilets.  The women sitting around me in the orchestra did not know who F. Murray Abraham was, so NOT a sophisticated bunch.  But the show deserves success on the Great White Way, and I hope will get it.

Well.  This nearly 72-year-old tween watching a production still in flux in a liminal season has been trying to seize each day:  lunching on the Latitudes deck in New Castle overlooking the Wentworth marina on a perfect summer’s day, and strolling through Boston’s Public Garden after the show.

I’ve been working on the Strafford County Democratic Committee’s candidate fundraiser upcoming after the New Hampshire Primary on 10 September, hoping to keep aloft the ebullience that the Democratic Convention in Chicago brought last week.  Michele Obama really rocked!

But our democracy’s in a very worrisome transitional space, too.

Here’s to the triumph of our better angels.