The makers of Broadway musical The Queen of Versailles obviously hope their climactic visual reveal—a finished wing of Jackie Siegel’s ostentatious mega-mansion in the suburbs of Orlando, Florida, named after the famous French palace—will wow the audience.

Gold-trimmed everything, sweeping staircases, gleamingly symmetrical proportions and rendering: this bit of the house, in real life still under construction after over 20 years, is revealed in all its questionable splendor after nearly three hours of grimly ugly musical theater, and the shell of the set being shrouded in dustsheets.

The audience, ours at least, wasn’t wowed. The palatial final vista feels as cold and empty, and as cheap-feeling and gaudily underwhelming, as the show itself—with Kristin Chenoweth as Jackie in a final

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