In late 2025, as wealth inequality reaches historic levels and millions struggle with housing costs, “The Queen of Versailles” arrives on Broadway at the St. James Theatre to ask: wouldn’t it be fun to watch billionaires build a 90,000-square-foot mansion? The musical, based on Lauren Greenfield’s 2012 documentary about timeshare mogul David Siegel and his wife Jackie constructing their own Palace of Versailles in Orlando, could have been a scathing critique of American excess, a meditation on the 2008 financial crisis that humbled the Siegels mid-construction, or even a complex character study of what drives such outrageous ambition. Instead, Stephen Schwartz, Lindsey Ferrentino, and director Michael Arden have created something far more troubling: a show that simply presents obscene wealth without perspective, judgment, or insight—a documentary-style spectacle that mistakes footage for drama and confuses screen time with character development.

The evening opens with Jackie addressing the documentary cameras directly—”Oh my gosh, you guys! I can’t believe you’re making a documentary movie about me. Which is it? Camera A?”—as camera operators and boom operators remain onstage throughout. This framing device, with characters constantly narrating their lives to an unseen crew, becomes an evasion rather than an innovation. The show never interrogates what it presents; it simply presents. Jackie and David remain stubbornly flat, collections of acquisitive impulses rather than people with interior lives. We never get a genuine private scene between them—even their proposal happens in front of wedding guests, and their one potentially intimate moment ends with David dismissing Jackie as “some old hag.” When their daughter Victoria dies of an overdose, we don’t witness Jackie grieve privately; instead, Sofia the nanny and Ray the driver narrate what happened to reporters. Unlike Gatsby’s incandescent yearning, the Joads’ hard-won dignity, or the aching friendship between George and Lennie, the Siegels just exist—acquisitive, shallow, and sealed off from genuine human connection. The show never achieves the weight of genuine American drama; it remains stubbornly at the level of reality television, all surface and no soul.

Schwartz’s score deliberately eschews Broadway convention, and the experiment backfires spectacularly. Rather than duets, trios, or ensemble numbers that might build relationships or advance narrative, we get a parade of solo numbers delivered in isolation. Song titles tell the story: “Keep On Thrustin'” (as tone-deaf as it sounds), “Because I Can” and “Because We Can” (lazy variations on the same idea), “Show ‘Em You’re The Queen” (which means exactly what you think it means). Jackie and David never share a genuine duet—their only song together is “Trust Me,” a proposal-by-transaction rather than a love song. “The Ballad of the Timeshare King” features Gary with a guitar literally narrating David’s biography while David stands there, biography as show-and-tell rather than revelation. This might work if the formal experiment served some larger purpose—illuminating the emotional isolation of lives devoted to accumulation, perhaps—but the songs simply stop the thin narrative without replacing it with substance or insight. Characters sing at us without revealing themselves or reaching toward each other. The one song that threatens genuine emotion, “Caviar Dreams,” works because it captures Jackie’s youthful yearning, but Schwartz never returns to that emotional territory. The lyrics throughout lack Schwartz’s usual wit and wordplay, settling instead for the obvious.

Ferrentino’s book descends into the genuinely sophomoric. Jackie’s wedding toast: “Only in America can you become a wife, a billionaire, and a Jew all in one day!” David explains why he wants a Benihana in his house: “I don’t like to wait in line.” When Victoria’s diary song reaches for meaning, it lands on “Fuck this book of random” as its climax. Most damning, Victoria literally voices the show’s central question aloud—”When is it enough? How do we know when it’s enough?”—and receives no answer, just gets bulldozed past by the next production number. Characters state their motivations baldly, clunky exposition passes for dialogue, and the show never achieves thematic clarity. It can’t decide if it’s cautionary tale, celebration, or lament. The 2008 financial crash becomes just another plot point happening to people we don’t care about. Arden’s direction feels oddly rudderless for such an accomplished director—nobody appears to be minding the store. Scenes drift, pacing lurches, staging never makes the wealth dramatically interesting. Ayodele Casel and Yalango-Grant/Cree Grant’s choreography remains pedestrian throughout. Derek McLane’s scenic design and Christian Cowan’s costumes are genuinely impressive, and Dane Laffrey’s video design creates spectacle, but they can’t paper over the creative bankruptcy at the show’s core.

The cast works valiantly with intractable material. Kristin Chenoweth and F. Murray Abraham are consummate professionals delivering utterly committed performances—but they’re not magicians. Chenoweth tries to create genuine emotion in “Each and Every Day,” Jackie’s song to her daughter, and Abraham attempts to locate something other than mercenary calculation in David’s transactional “Trust Me,” but the material gives them nothing to build on. They can’t compensate for characters this thinly drawn, and critics shouldn’t genuflect before celebrity casting when the material itself is bankrupt. The entire ensemble brings authentic craft and makes choices that would register if the show gave them actual people to play rather than wealth-accumulation machines. They deserve better—and more importantly, so do audiences.

The show’s January 4 closing—barely two months after its November 9 opening—surprises no one. Some stories resist musicalization, and a documentary about wealthy people building a house appears to be one of them. Without moral perspective, without characters who earn our emotional investment, without formal innovation that justifies broken conventions, the evening just sits there—expensive, elaborately designed, professionally performed, utterly beside the point. In a year when Broadway has given us genuinely ambitious work grappling with what it means to be American, “The Queen of Versailles” offers only spectacle without insight, a palace with no one home. What were they thinking? Perhaps that’s the wrong question. Perhaps they simply weren’t thinking at all.