Queenie was a blond, and her age stood still / And she danced twice a day in vaudeville … Joseph Moncure March’s scandalous telenovela in verse The Wild Party was first published in 1928, just before vaudeville and the stock market fell off a cliff. Rediscovered in the 1960s by the Beat Generation, March’s hard-edged tale of sex, jazz, and drugs broke through in a big way in 1994, when Art Spiegelman illustrated a new edition for Pantheon Books. It didn’t take an Albert Einstein to scent a knockout musical, and not one but two composer-lyricists on the fast track got cracking. On February 17, 2000, Julia Murney, Brian D’Arcy James, Idina Menzel, and Taye Diggs tore up the Manhattan Theatre Club in Andrew Lippa’s The Wild Party. Directed by Scott Ellis, that was the Off Broadway version. On April 13, Toni Collette, Mandy Patinkin, Eartha Kitt, and Norm Lewis took their shot at Broadway’s Virginia Theatre, directed by George C. Wolfe. Predictably, the shows poisoned the well for each other. Both were terrific, and both flopped. LaChiusa’s was in late previews when Lippa’s played its 54th and last performance; but LaChiusa’s total of 68 performances wasn’t much better. In 2015, the incomparable Sutton Foster and Steven Pasquale led an Encores! revival of Lippa’s score in all its splendor. This season, it’s LaChiusa’s turn. Jasmine Amy Rogers, who broke the mold as the eponymous Betty of Boop! The Musical, is the new Queenie. —Matthew Gurewitsch