Review: MADAME CLICQUOT Bubbles with Possibility at Pittsburgh CLO

When it comes to creating a new musical and putting it in front of an audience, there are three things a creator or producer has to know definitively, and you can trust me, I've written and premiered my fair share of musicals: what the musical wants to be; what audiences will want it to be; and to what extent they need to harmonize these two versions of the show together. A famous example of a show that didn't harmonize that vision was The Secret Garden, whose creators liked it best as a supernatural Gothic melodrama, but found audiences were more attached to the family-friendly coming of age subplot. Those writers have waffled back and forth on the show's two extremes for decades, with some revivals or tours going dark, and others cutting the Gothic aspects entirely, ghosts and all. Thankfully, creators Lisette Glodowski and Richard C. Walter have figured out not only what they want Madame Cliquot to be, but what the audience will best respond to. Even on a preview night, their new musical was as settled, stable and self-assured as if it were the First National Tour, not a world premiere and pre-Broadway tryout. (Pre-Broadway tryouts... remember those? God, it feels good even to type it, like a sign that the regional theatre world is still alive and thriving, and that the Great White Way hasn't been completely corporatized.)

The French Revolution is upon us, and well-educated young woman Barbe-Nicole (Victoria Frings) has survived, along with her aristocratic family, by remaining quiet and useful in the textile business. Her new fiancee, Francois Clicquot (Christian Thompson), wants to pivot away from textiles and into the wine business; feeling shut out by their fathers and by France's restrictive stances on gender, Barbe-Nicole goes all in as well. Together with charismatic business manager Louis Bohne (Paolo Montalban, of Disney fame), they attempt to conquer the Champagne region, France, and Europe itself with their revolutionary sparkling wine... but there's a problem. Jean-Remy Moet (Jonathan Christopher) has a stronghold on the market due to his close personal friendship with Napoelon (Nick Laughlin), and Napoleon is INSANE.

Full disclosure, I am not a drinker. In fact, I'm doing "that whole sober thing" (I'd say I'm straight-edge, but that often comes with some connotations of judgment or anti-substance belief that I don't identify with). That said, even I have heard of Cliquot and Moet, and of course of Napoleon Bonaparte. What I didn't know was their story, the relationship between the companies, and the saga of the French Revolution and Napoleonic Wars that followed. (If you're a literary buff and/or a musical theatre fan, you can view this musical as a side story to the plots of Great Expectations, Les Miserables and then War and Peace/Great Comet of 1812.) Under the leadership of director/choreographer Laurie Glodowski, writers Glodowski and Walter have wisely differentiated themselves from the recognizable tropes and sounds of the other period-piece musicals: there are fairly few shadows of Les Mis in this show. What we have instead is an affable, often light and frothy, fusion of Frank Wildhorn and Lin-Manuel Miranda: the former's soaring pop ballads, duets and gossipy chorus numbers mixed with the latter's love of rhythmic wordiness, time-lapse montages and ruler-as-country-and-era synechdochy. (The recurring gag of Napoleon's descent into megalomaniacal self-delusion essentially takes Hamilton's King George and turns it up to eleven.) Toss in a hefty dash of Bridgerton's tone and aesthetic, and you have a formula for success.

Victoria Frings brings heart, warmth and drive to the ambitious Barbe-Nicole. Her vocal range is impressive across the leading lady's challenging material. This is not just a performance that sells tickets, it's a performance that sells cast recordings and sheet music; sitting in the audience, I heard not one but two future audition-book standards. Christian Thompson's gentle, Disney-prince energy balances Frings's fire and drive perfectly, with the two of them building an easily viable friends-to-lovers dynamic. Throw in some fire with Paolo Montalban's more passionate and effusive Louis, and you have a wonderful trio that flirts with, but never entirely commits to, a full love-triangle subplot. 

The main trio have moments of comedy, but they also exist as a more directly dramatic foil to the overtly comedic world in which they function. (If you think there's no room for a French Revolution comedy, don't worry: the tone here is one of subtle irony and musical theatre froth, not anything too broad.) Kylie Edwards repeatedly steals the show as Barbe-Nicole's flamboyant sister Clementine, who wants a life of high glamor and romance. You don't often see the second banana get an I Want song, but Clementine's "Anything More Grand" is an amazing comic and vocal showcase. Our two villains, Napoleon and Moet, are played with wonderful comedic flair and scenery-chewing by Nick Laughlin and Jonathan Christopher. Here, it feels like creators Glodowski and Walter have taken the old theatrical trope of queer-coding its villains and pushed it to a new extreme: as soon as the fiery extremist Napoleon steps out of the public eye into his own chambers, he reverts to a mincing, sighing old queen of the Glenn Shadix variety. Once, this would have felt like an outdated and possibly even offensive trope, but today, it feels instead like a rather pointed and apt political jab.

I mentioned above how nice it is to see musical world premieres again, but even more, it's nice to see a BIG musical being supported and pushed forward: Madame Clicquot boasts a fourteen-piece orchestra and a cast of thirty-three, including a guest dance soloist from the Tamburitzans. This would be a big show even on Broadway, and with a little luck it'll get there sooner rather than later. But to say we saw it here in Pittsburgh first, and that the days of out-of-town tryouts are back, with our city as one of the leading exporters? Now that's something worth popping a bottle of champagne for.