When the cameras rolled, Jacqueline Siegel glided through the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s period rooms like she owned them — poised, polished and attuned to the quiet performance of being watched. She paused before an embellished wooden table once owned by Marie Antoinette, running her eyes along its glossy surface, before letting a smile break through. “I wish this museum was a store,” she said, half joking, half dreaming.
Off-camera, the shimmer dulled as the 59-year-old former pageant winner’s shoulders drooped ever so slightly. The self-styled “Queen of Versailles,” who was immortalized in a 2012 documentary about her family’s stalled effort to build a replica of the French palace in the Orlando suburbs, was suddenly less a performer and more a person. She admitted to being nervous about the photo shoot, more than she had predicted after a decade chasing the spotlight of reality television.
The documentary had shown the beauty queen in the half-finished ballrooms and boudoirs of her mansion, planning for the day when she could add a Benihana restaurant and ice rink to its sprawling blueprint. But after her billionaire husband, David, spent millions on construction, the 2008 financial crisis forced him into a fight for the survival of his timeshare empire. The family retained control of the house and have spent the intervening years crawling toward the finish line of construction.
Siegel’s excesses and tragedies are being restaged at the St. James Theater on Broadway this fall (previews are set to start on Oct. 8) in a new musical with songs by the “Wicked” composer Stephen Schwartz and a book by Lindsey Ferrentino. Kristin Chenoweth will step into Siegel’s stilettos to re-enact the most infamous tableaux: a dead pet lizard, the mansion filled with dog poop. (F. Murray Abraham will play her husband.) But the show also digs deeper, tracing Siegel’s working-class origins and the 2015 opioid overdose that killed her daughter Victoria.
“We have talked about it as a cautionary tale from Day 1,” Ferrentino said she has told Siegel, explaining how the blond glamazon exemplifies the pernicious “more is more” mentality at a time of rising income inequality. “The desire for more includes a desire for more attention — and a desire to tell your story,” Ferrentino said.