Alexander McQueen’s Bio-play Has Neither Style Nor Substance

A gloriously grotesque aluminum corset in the shape of an alien spine; a pair of pearlescent antlers draped in embroidered lace; stiletto heels, bulbous, scaly, and spiky, like armadillos balancing on their heads and tails; wraithlike models with black contact lenses or silver prosthetic jaws, or covered in feathers, chain mail, spray paint, or the shells of razor clams … These might be some of the images that spring to mind when you think of the fashion designer Lee Alexander McQueen, known to the world by his second two names and lost to it when he took his own life in 2010 at the age of 40. They are also among the near-endless array of gestures from his oeuvre that spur more excitement, more agitation, more pure feeling in their contemplation alone than does House of McQueen, the flat soufflé of a play now endeavoring to pay homage to its namesake at the Mansion, a nightclub-ish new performance space amid the glass towers of Hudson Yards.

Bio-plays are tough, and it’s an extra-tall order to dramatize a figure of as much complexity, ambition, and tragedy as McQueen. In his lifetime he blazed brief and blinding, like a haute couture Kurt Cobain. After books and documentaries and one of the most-visited Met exhibitions of all time, he’s practically canonized — Our Lady of Savage Beauty. The playwright Darrah Cloud’s work couldn’t have been easy. And still, poor Lee. Both the artist and the man deserve better. Several times during Cloud’s play — which is repetitive, engineless, and at times borderline incoherent — I found myself thinking of the 2018 Freddie Mercury biopic, Bohemian Rhapsody. It’s much more solid (and more fun) than House of McQueen, but the two share the unfortunate distinction of being highly formulaic odes to formula-demolishing geniuses. What might a piece of theater about McQueen with his own electric sense of theatricality, his own soaring aspirations and embrace of danger and strangeness, have looked like?

Director Sam Helfrich’s surprisingly bland production leaves us still wondering. Indeed, the real shock of House of McQueen is how anodyne it feels — particularly because it comes in the wake of a mini-exhibition of real McQueen pieces that the production has managed to borrow, providing a preshow thrill in a small room next to the bar. Is the trip to the Mansion worth it for them alone? Maybe. But then we’ve got to get on with the show, and given its subject’s dedication to beauty, even and especially when found in the darkest and “most disgusting places,” it’s baffling to see so little of it and to feel so little darkness onstage. Kay Voyce’s costumes make a handful of literal approaches to the designer’s own creations: Helfrich has provided no guiding metaphor or sense of abstraction to allow her to dance with one of the great sorcerers of clothing rather than simply duplicating him. Jason Ardizzone-West’s set is a predictable slick white box, its blank surfaces submissive to the constant barrage of Brad Peterson’s video projections. Though there are a few poignant moments with little Lee (I saw Matthew Eby, who shares the role with Cody Braverman) as he draws projected pixels on the walls like Harold with his purple crayon, the imagery that floods the space is too often glossy and generic — screen savers rather than startling evocations of McQueen’s imagination or unexpected uses of the video form. I don’t know if it’s a legal thing or a production choice, but the snippets from McQueen’s runway shows are so few and far between, and incorporated into the projections in such uninspiring ways, that they’re hardly enough to whet the palate: We get a single stunning hors d’oeuvre on an Ikea plate.

Meanwhile, the ensemble, led earnestly by Luke Newton of Bridgerton fame, has no solid ground to stand on. In Cloud’s flimsy script, characters are either laughably flat—“Go outside and play, goddamn it! … C’mon, Joyce. We’re late,” thunders Lee’s mean-and-otherwise-featureless dad (Denis Lambert) — or so woolly around the edges that they feel like holograms. I’m honestly not sure who the slinky, Galliano-clad figure played by Spencer R. Petro is even supposed to be, other than a walking collection of world-weary clichés and awkward narrative glue. She tends to show up whenever the protagonist needs to be shunted between scenes, calling him “darling” and dispensing rhinestones of wisdom. Without the show program, I wouldn’t have known that her name is “BB,” which, okay … but who is that, and why should we care?

Cloud is clearly attempting to spin the dreamy threads of a memory play: House of McQueen begins at the end, as Newton’s Lee is contemplating suicide, then hops back to the beginning (then paddles about aimlessly in time like a fly in soup). But Tennessee Williams didn’t say anything about remembrance of things past necessarily rendering people into cardboard and circumstance into stereotype. While the teenage McQueen really did cut his teeth (and hundreds of pockets and collars) apprenticing with a master tailor on Savile Row, it’s pretty tired stuff to make a scene out of two thuggish fellow tailors (played by Tim Creavin and Fady Demian) kicking his teeth in while taunting him as “McQueer.” Or to shoehorn the voices that were affronted by his 1995 collection “Highland Rape” into the mouth of his older sister, Janet (Jonina Thorsteinsdottir). “Aren’t there any pretty dresses?” this Janet gripes, before accusing her brother of “making things ugly” and “makin’ up stories” when he implies that they both suffered abuse at the hands of her husband, Terence (Joe Joseph). They both did, and even a cursory dip into the real Janet’s testimony reveals in her more sympathy and nuance than ever break the surface in Cloud’s play.

The relationships of House of McQueen’s hero to his mother (Emily Skinner) and his early disciple, patron, and confidante, the great fashion-world fairy godmother Isabella Blow (Catherine LeFrere), are sketched with similar thinness. We get that they both adore him, that they are the twin formative forces in his journey, and that losing them will wound him in ways that won’t heal. But we don’t actually feel the weight of any of that freighted intimacy as we listen to Cloud’s trite dialogue or watch Helfrich’s actors stumble their way through scene after rudderless scene like so many polite houseguests groping for the bathroom light switch. Newton, who’s pretty uncanny to look at with his buzzed head and baggy jeans, is doing valiant work, but he’s also got to heft around the bigger part of the ungainly script. At one point, as he sat monologuing a voice message left for his friend Simon (also Demian), the text felt so garbled that I was genuinely impressed he’d been able to memorize it. Despite specifying various antics with pills, a belt-as-noose, and a gun, Cloud has given him no real demons to explore. She’s even saddled him with a Dr. Seuss–ish refrain, as the aspiring Lee repeats in various weirdly cutesy scenarios to people looking down their nose at him, “I want to learn everything, everything, everything.” (Later on, it’s funny in all the wrong ways when the older, burned-out McQueen brings it back around, lamenting to the heavens: “I got so tired of risking everything, everything, everything …”)

There are countless ways — to quote another departed genius, David Rakoff — “to broadcast creativity” in a play about an artist. Chipper doggerel feels like a particularly strange choice coming out of the mouth of a man who really did tell a friend that he was contemplating shooting himself at the climax of one of his runway shows. That haunting fact shows up in House of McQueen, but for some reason, Cloud and Helfrich turn the moment into a burlesque. “If I ever kill myself, it will be on a runway,” Newton’s Lee declares with a histrionic flourish. It’s all titillating drag-queen palaver — no skull underneath the makeup. The house might have been built for him, but Alexander McQueen is not at home.

House of McQueen is at the Mansion at Hudson Yards.