Theatre in Review: House of McQueen (The Mansion at Hudson Yards)House of McQueen is, in many ways, a beautifully designed production, evoking the glamour and tumult of its title character's life and times: Jason Ardizzone-West's sleek minimalist box set serves as a canvas for Brad Peterson's images of catwalks, gay clubs, tartan plaids, and silkscreened Paris landmarks including the Arc de Triomphe, Eiffel Tower, and Notre Dame. When a style reporter -- first a savage critic of couturier Alexander McQueen's work and, later, a sycophant -- weighs in, a slick news show logo creeps across the upstage screen. When McQueen appears on a TV chat show with his mother, we see multiple live feeds of the event. Meanwhile, Robert Wierzel deploys restless, colorful beams; launches light-curtain effects from strip units on the upstage deck, and creates striking tableaux with classic sidelight looks. Both departments collaborate with sound designer G Clausen to unsettlingly simulate the jolts of electroshock therapy. Not for one second is one left without something provocative to look at, often underscored with a catchy EDM beat. The production's director, Sam Helfrich, has been smart in his choice of colleagues. But, all too often, the design tries to substitute for what the playwright, Darrah Cloud, has failed to do. When a very young McQueen witnesses his sister, Janet, being assaulted by her boyfriend (later her husband), the scene, over before it gets started, consists of a freeze followed by a colorful blast of light, a video splash of blood, and a blackout. When Isabella Blow, McQueen's rather predatory muse, decides to end it all, she walks upstage, faces away from the audience, and is erased in a lighting-video blinder cue. The play opens confusingly with McQueen fooling around with such objects as a sword and a belt; only gradually do the scrolling words on the upstage wall reveal that he is Googling various suicide methods. (Anyone in the audience who doesn't know the denouement of his sad story gets tipped off in the first five minutes.) Aligned with a workable, coherent script, these touches might be brilliantly illuminating; here, they're operating in a vacuum. Cloud's script is an aimless, scattered series of brief episodes, leaping across time in no discernible pattern. The play touches on most of the key points made in the lucid, surprisingly moving 2018 documentary McQueen: his intense relationship with his mother; his troubled connection to the needy, imperious Blow; his insistence on fashion as art, resulting in a series of scandalous, high-concept collections filled with bleak, violent imagery and unwearable clothes; and his disastrous personal life, including a frustrating affair with a married man and an extralegal, flash-in-the-pan wedding to passing boyfriend. But if you aren't familiar with the details of McQueen's life, you may spend the evening in a state of bewilderment. The action is crowded with events desperately in need of a throughline. People from various stages of the designer's life come and go, often in squadrons, eyeballing the action or simply crowding the stage. (Sometimes they line up like models before a show; at least that's neater.) Scene after scene passes without a meaningful sign-off. One feels the running order could be reshuffled without materially altering the overall effect. A lengthy second-act sequence, featuring the entire cast, patterned after a dance marathon, is a bold idea; too bad it is so chaotically written and staged that the point of it is lost. The stage is loaded with characters -- many actors are triple- and quadruple-cast -- but few make an impression. The Bridgerton star Luke Newton, looking very much like McQueen, gives him a cheeky quality that explains how he successfully storms many a glamorous citadel dressed in his signature jeans-and-oversized T-shirt combination. Still, he never fully convinces as the possessor of a ruthless talent and feverish vision capable of overturning an industry. As his mother, the Broadway musical veteran Emily Skinner passes through cheerfully, occasionally striking a touching note. Steel yourself for Catherine LeFrere as Isabella Blow ("B for Bitch, L for Lick me, O for orgasm, and W for wanker.") She's a road-company Oscar Wilde, given to dispensing sophomoric epigrams that land with a thud: "The entire population explosion would end if we just taught girls how to masturbate properly." Or "You run through boyfriends like I run through hose!" Or, talking about her emotional state, "Nothing a little Jungian analysis can't fix. By the way, the root word of analysis is anal." Giving McQueen the once-over, she says, "I hope you don't pride yourself on the originality of your wit." She should talk. Most surprisingly, the show struggles to suggest why McQueen was such a polarizing (and, for some, electrifying) figure. "You make violence look so beautiful," sighs Isabella, but that's hard to judge based on the scanty evidence. Kaye Voyce's costumes are highly effective in terms of quickly defining characters from many countries and walks of life, but we get very little sense of McQueen's often deliberately ugly style. Cloud tries to link it to a history of violence, which includes his sister's rape, sexual abuse as a child at the hands of his brother-in-law, and a hard-to-credit sequence in which he gets beaten up by a sinister gang of Savile Row tailors. But this remains one of the least informative bio plays to come our way in some time. The production is being staged at the Mansion at Hudson Yards, a new venue with comfortable seating and a lobby that currently features an exhibition of McQueen designs. One is free to peruse them before and after the show, and if you go, I suggest you do. But when a production needs such supplementary visual aids, something is off. Despite all the flash and color onstage, House of McQueen doesn't know what to make of its protagonist. As a result, neither do we. --David Barbour 
|
