THE WILD PARTY is a musical with a book by Michael John LaChiusa and George C. Wolfe and music and lyrics by LaChiusa. Based on the 1928 Joseph Moncure March poem of the same name, the show is about the masks that people wear culturally and the removal of those masks over the course of a party. The 2000 Broadway production was originally presented as a series of vaudeville sketches, with signs at the beginning and the end that announced the next scene with a show card propped on an easel at the side of the stage. In this UT Department of Theatre and Dance production, that device has been abandoned. The piece, in this incarnation, uses a vaudeville straw hat act to bookend the production at open and close. The remainder of the show, for the most part, is the actual party and I found the device to be most effective putting more heart into the piece than the original concept did.
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