“The Wild Party” starts with a jump scare. One moment, we’re sitting innocently at New York City Center, waiting for this Encores! production to begin, when MRAAWRH!!, an entire horn section launches itself at us, the trumpets yowling an alley-cat scream. That orchestral sting is a warning. Let your guard down around this thing, and it’ll go for your throat.
If you’d asked me why we’ve never seen a revival of this tricky, often gorgeous show, written by the composer and lyricist Michael John LaChiusa and co-written with its original director, George C. Wolfe, I would have chalked it up to the bizarre circumstances of its premiere. In 2000, the city hosted two different musical adaptations of “The Wild Party,” Joseph Moncure March’s 1928 poem about a debauched Jazz Age bash.
LaChiusa and Wolfe took their version to Broadway; Andrew Lippa’s iteration went to Manhattan Theater Club. Both wound up being enthusiasts’ darlings without the kind of success that turns them into classics. Maybe the two Parties cannibalized each other’s audiences; maybe people shied away from such a vicious demimonde. But now, having seen the Party for myself, I wonder if people were somehow frightened of the music? I loved it, but it does make for a discomfiting evening.
LaChiusa’s hot-jazz score unspools like a fabulous nightmare. He seems to have stolen from everyone: Tin Pan Alley types like Walter Donaldson, barrelhouse greats like Jelly Roll Morton and even modernists like Kurt Weill. Period-perfect hotcha numbers shimmy along until they abruptly arrest themselves; notes turn blue, and then slide past blueness into dissonance. The drums are always agitated. If this was what the 1920s sounded like, how did anyone survive? I kept thinking I was having a heart attack.
There were other reasons to feel queasy at City Center, too. Certain original structural issues — “The Wild Party” runs two hours without an intermission — have been left in place, for instance. But the assembled cast is incredible, and the show fits elegantly around Jasmine Amy Rogers, who adjusts her pixie sweetness from “Boop! The Musical” into a toxic, elfin mischief.
Lyrically, “The Wild Party” begins with the March poem’s first line: “Queenie was a blonde, and her age stood still/And she danced twice a day in vaudeville.” Men leer as they sing about this paragon of sexual availability, but when Rogers enters, she’s indifferent to them: Her face is placid under her makeup, what the song calls her “tinted mask of snow.” (This production indicates a reason for Queenie’s mask — she may be “passing” as white.)
Queenie seems cool, but she’s secretly terrorized by her lover, Burrs (Jordan Donica), a blackface clown in the same vaudeville show in which Queenie dances. (They’re both defined by makeup; hers is powder, his is cork.)
This troubled couple throws the titular party, inviting all their pals: Queenie’s friend Kate (the divine Adrienne Warren) and Kate’s escort, Black (Jelani Alladin); the boxer Eddie (Evan Tyrone Martin) and his wife, Mae (Lesli Margherita), who brings her 14-year-old sister, Nadine (Maya Rowe, singing the note of the night). It’s not clear who invited the majestic past-her-prime star Dolores, played here by Tonya Pinkins, who was LaChiusa and Wolfe’s original Kate 26 years ago, but she prowls through anyway, snarling as if people were stepping on her tail.
There are many more guests at this increasingly bacchanalian shebang besides, which is the defining — and fixable — trouble of LaChiusa and Wolfe’s treatment. We dive into so many partygoers’ lives that the fictional exhaustion of the party starts to wear thin in real life. A hectic atmosphere can stale.
Rather than delivering a typical Encores!-style concert version, this production’s director, Lili-Anne Brown, mostly offers a full staging, which has its dangers. You can sense the speed of assembly, for instance, particularly in the rather awkward way everyone passes around their empty plastic cocktail glasses.
As much as March’s poem itself, LaChiusa’s music is influenced by Art Spiegelman’s illustrations for the 1994 edition — black-crayoned faces wobbling in shadow, canted at weird angles. It’s strange, therefore, that so much of this production is conducted in a full, uniform illumination. Does anyone throw a party and keep every fixture on full? Brown has the lighting designer Justin Townsend keep things bright for more than half the show, which a) is a buzzkill and b) means Brown needs to occupy a dozen folks with fiddly “party business,” since we can see them.
What we can hear, though, thanks to the guest musical director Daryl Waters (and the orchestrator, Bruce Coughlin), is almost always exciting. And the last 40 minutes consist of a series of showstoppers. Pinkins shouts out a Brechtian number about survival, and Donica, in a role that he expands to fill, goes explosively, spectacularly mad. Rogers has been a relatively careful Queenie until she starts to fall for Black, and her voice, perfectly suited to the pop sound of her climactic duet with Alladin, achieves an exquisite sighing quality.
LaChiusa and Wolfe do best when they are leaning into the poem’s horror of alcohol. Even before someone brandishes a gun, the bathtub gin melts away everything good: lovers lose one another, a girl loses her innocence, a man loses his mind. It seems so easy to lose things, you just wet your whistle and blow. This beautiful, excruciating music too has been lost for a generation, hampered by the musical’s bleak vision, or perhaps weighed down by its overstuffed middle. Now that it’s found again, I do wonder what’s next. I’d normally say the musical needs more time in the light — but really, I hope that the next time, it finds itself in the equally thrilling dark.
The Wild Party Through March 29 at New York City Center, Manhattan; nycitycenter.org. Running time: 2 hours.
Helen Shaw is the chief theater critic for The Times.
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