"Grey Gardens" on Broadway

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"Grey Gardens" has just opened on Broadway followinga sold-out Off-Broadway run last spring, and features two amazing performances by Christine Ebersole and Mary Louise Wilson ...

Sometimes a Nightingale Emerges


Sara Krulwich/The New York Times

Christine Ebersole, left, as Little Edie Beale and Mary Louise Wilson as Edith Bouvier Beale in "Grey Gardens".

www.nytimes.com
By BEN BRANTLEY
November 3, 2006

Photos by Joan Marcus
Top: Christine Ebersole as Edie,
Below: Mary Louise Wilson as Edith in "Grey Gardens".

THEATER REVIEW | 'GREY GARDENS'

“Da-da-da-da-dum.”

Not exactly a phrase that gleams with Shakespearean eloquence, is it? But once you’ve heard Christine Ebersole sing it — and believe me, this is an experience no passionate theatergoer should miss — “da-da-da-da-dum” is guaranteed to enter your personal memory bank of cherished quotations, the kind you summon when you’re feeling down and thwarted and need to smile.

These inspirational syllables are delivered at the beginning of the second act of “Grey Gardens,” the musical that opened last night like a full-blown, petal-dropping peony at the Walter Kerr Theater, after an Off Broadway run earlier this year at Playwrights Horizons. And when Ms. Ebersole, portraying the middle-aged, time-warped debutante called Little Edie Beale, delivers her das and dums, any doubts that this show belongs on Broadway are sent packing.
Ms. Ebersole at this point is wearing clothes that suggest her character’s approach to getting dressed is rolling in a laundry basket and seeing what sticks. She sings in defense of her sartorial style, which she describes with some vigor as “the revolutionary costume for today.”

But it’s the throwaway “da-da-da-da-dum,” which ends each verse in a nasal postscript, that instantly identifies Little Edie as a complex character, with a timid girl’s uncertainty and distractibility beneath the exhibitionist’s bravado. As small a musical moment as it is, it wraps itself intimately around the audience, offering a passport into one woman’s mind. That Little Edie does indeed belong on big Broadway did not feel like a sure proposition when it was announced that the show would be transferring. Adapted from the 1975 Maysles brothers’ documentary of the same title — which portrayed Little Edie and her octogenarian mother, cousins of Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, living in reclusive, Collyer-brothers-like squalor in East Hampton — the Off Broadway production had the feverish, sulfuric air of a work pitched at those who revel in watching glamorous battling women gone grotesquely to seed.

But while “Grey Gardens” — adapted by Doug Wright (book), Scott Frankel (music) and Michael Korie (lyrics), and directed by Michael Greif — was as crammed with the potential for camp as a Maria Montez film festival, there was always a sense of something humane and delicate beneath the moth-eaten drag.

The faults of “Grey Gardens” remain the same on Broadway, including an entire first act that never really takes flight, but they seem smaller. In cutting some songs and introducing new ones, and in rewriting and rearranging some of the script, the creative team has expanded the warmer empathy that could always be detected beneath all the fancy dropped names and nudging references to the fates of famous characters. The focus is now more cleanly on an unending, paralyzingly ambivalent struggle between a mother and a daughter.

The scaling up of Allen Moyer’s set, which portrays the Beale homestead in its days of both glory and decrepitude, dilutes the claustrophobic prurience of the Off Broadway production. (Peter Kaczorowski’s lighting and Wendall K. Harrington’s projection design also assume greater impact in conjuring interior landscapes.) Let loose on the wide-open spaces of a Broadway stage, Little Edie and her mother have a chance to grow to near heroic proportions. Paradoxically, they also feel more accessibly human.

The first act is still too long for its function as an explanatory preface to the second. The self-defined aesthete and society matron Edith Bouvier Beale (Ms. Ebersole) is giving a party to announce the engagement of her daughter, Little Edie (Erin Davie), to Joseph Kennedy Jr. (Matt Cavenaugh).

Also on hand are Mrs. Beale’s beloved accompanist and pet homosexual, George Gould Strong ( Bob Stillman); her disapproving, old-guard father, J. V. Bouvier (that most solid of pros, John McMartin); Brooks , the family retainer (Michael Potts); and two little visiting cousins named Jackie (Sarah Hyland) and Lee (Kelsey Fowler). Soap operaish complications and clashes of wills, reminiscent of high-society period dramas like “Dinner at Eight,” wreck both the party and Little Edie’s matrimonial prospects.

Photo by Joan Marcus
Sarah Hyland as Jackie Bouvier, Christine Ebersole as Edith Bouvier Beale,
Kelsey Fowler as Lee Bouvier and Bob Stillman as Gould in "Grey Gardens", Act I.

The double-edged interdependency of the two Edies is established in psychological broad strokes that, while hardly subtle, neatly set up the conflicts of the act to come. Ms. Davie brings a welcome beleaguered feistiness to her role. But though more credible than Sara Gettelfinger, who created the part Off Broadway, she mostly registers as a pretty cipher in search of a defining shape. It is inconceivable that she could grow up to be the Little Edie of the second act.

Still, pity the young actress who has to hold her own against Ms. Ebersole, who turns the first act into a personal tour de force. Dressed in the kind of at-home morning wear that wouldn’t look out place in a ballroom (the ubiquitous William Ivey Long did the costumes), Ms. Ebersole works her way through a catalog of period-pastiche numbers (including a hilarious minstrel-show paean to hominy grits) in a coloratura that captures exactly both long-gone musical genres and the particular egotism of the woman singing them.

It is the stunted filial product of such egotism who steps to the edge of the stage at the beginning of the second act. Here, mind-bogglingly, is Ms. Ebersole again, playing her own daughter. The shining soprano has been pinched into stridency by Long Island lockjaw. But every so often a nightingale emerges, fleetingly and forlornly, from within the raven’s harshness.

Sara Krulwich/The New York Times
Christine Ebersole, right, as Little Edie Beale in “Grey Gardens”, Act II.

The second act of “Grey Gardens” hews closely to the documentary, as Ms. Ebersole and Ms. Wilson re-create squabbles and reminiscences enacted by their real-life prototypes, occasionally joined by Jerry, the sweet-natured young neighborhood slacker who drops by with groceries (Mr. Cavenaugh again, and first-rate).

The Beale cultists regard such scenes as sacred ritual. The rest of us are free to appreciate the fine-grained psychological portraiture that the actresses provide via song, lending shading and substance that Mr. Frankel’s and Mr. Korie’s numbers don’t necessarily possess on their own.

Ms. Wilson casually turns “The Cake I Had” into a stinging study of the kind of willfully positive denial that makes old age bearable. And her song to Jerry about the corn she cooks on a hot plate becomes a strangely affecting ode to small pleasures and the vestiges of one woman’s misplaced maternal instincts.

The wit, exact detail and, above all, compassion with which Ms. Ebersole infuses each of her numbers as Little Edie are ravishing. Even dancing like a drunken U.S.O. entertainer from World War II, flapping flags as if they were flyswatters, this Edie is never merely ridiculous. And when her voice goes pure and girlish for the show’s most conventionally pretty numbers, she becomes the frightened, resentful and perversely hopeful child that persists in everyone, longing for parental approval and the sanctuary of a real home.

There is another phrase, by the way, in addition to the immortal “da-da-da-da-dum,” that I can’t get out of my head. This one is two words, “Oh, God,” and Ms. Ebersole sings them in her climactic number, “Another Winter in a Summer Town,” with a layering of despair, rebellion and surrender that becomes a heartbreaking epitaph for an entire life. Watching this performance is the best argument I can think of for the survival of the American musical.

Photo by Joan Marcus
Christine Ebersole as Little Edie

GREY GARDENS

Book by Doug Wright; music by Scott Frankel; lyrics by Michael Korie; based on the film by David Maysles, Albert Maysles, Ellen Hovde, Muffie Meyer and Susan Froemke; directed by Michael Greif; musical staging by Jeff Calhoun. Sets by Allen Moyer; costumes by William Ivey Long; lighting by Peter Kaczorowski; sound by Brian Ronan; projection design by Wendall K. Harrington; hair and wig design by Paul Huntley; orchestrations, Bruce Coughlin; music director, Lawrence Yurman; music coordinator, John Miller; executive producer, Beth Williams; general management, Alan Wasser and Allan Williams; production stage manager, Judith Schoenfeld; production manager, Juniper Street Productions. Presented by East of Doheny, Staunch Entertainment, Randall L. Wreghitt/Mort Swinsky, Michael Alden and Edwin W. Schloss in association with Playwrights Horizons. At the Walter Kerr Theater, 219 West 48th Street, Manhattan; (212) 239-6200. Running time: 2 hours, 30 minutes.

WITH: Christine Ebersole (Little Edie Beale / Edith Bouvier Beale), Mary Louise Wilson (Edith Bouvier Beale) , Matt Cavenaugh (Joseph Patrick Kennedy Jr./Jerry), Erin Davie (Young Little Edie Beale), Kelsey Fowler (Lee Bouvier), Sarah Hyland (Jacqueline Bouvier), Michael Potts (Brooks Sr./Brooks Jr.), Bob Stillman (George Gould Strong) and John McMartin (J. V. Bouvier/Norman Vincent Peale).

Copyright 2006 The New York Times Company

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"LITTLE" EDIE BEALE: 1917 - 2002



http://members.tripod.com/~anxietyny/goddessedie.html

The following is an article written for Gay Wired on January 17, 2002.

"Little" Edie Beale of Grey Gardens fame and a member of the Bouvier family that included Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy, was found dead in her apartment in Bal Harbour, Fla., on January 14. At the time of this writing, a source close to Ms. Beale claims that the cause of death was either a stroke or a heart attack. Conflicting reports have estimated her to have been between 84 and 86 years old.

Edie and her mother, "Big" Edith Beale, were the subjects of the 1976 Maysles Brothers documentary Grey Gardens, a cinema verite film which recorded the lives of the two women in their dilapidated 28-room East Hampton estate. The movie chronicled the many colorful squabbles and intimacies of the eccentric mother-and-daughter duo and has survived the following decades as a cult classic, with Little Edie serving as the film's fractured philosopher guru and outsider fashion icon.

Little Edie's over-the-top eye for wardrobe was one of her most immediately noticed characteristics. In the opening scenes of Grey Gardens, audiences were introduced to Little Edie clad in a clingy brown turtleneck, a pair of sun pants pinned around her waist as a makeshift skirt and what could only be identified as a sheer nun's wimple on her head. Casually explaining what she called her "costume for the day," Little Edie said to the filmmakers, "I have to make these things up. Mother wanted me to come out in a kimono and we had quite a fight."

In the greater pop culture lexicon, the film and its subjects have enjoyed an occasional tip of the hat, but rarely enjoyed mainstream recognition. Among the scattered references in past years, singer/songwriter Rufus Wainwright included a musical tribute to Little Edie on his last album, Poses; Madonna's Sex book photographer Steven Meisel shot a fashion pictorial for Italian Vogue in 1999, featuring an image on the magazine's cover of a model decked out in Edie's signature "revolutionary costume" of a sweater wrapped around her head, tacked in place by an ornate brooch.

An even funkier tribute saw the lives of the Beale women mixed with Chekhov's Three Sisters in the off-off-Broadway play Clear/Cut Catastrophe, which played briefly in New York City and featured Justin Bond of "Kiki and Herb" fame portraying Little Edie.

Other than occasional tributes such as these, Grey Gardens continues to quietly exist as an intimate gem for film lovers to discover and share. While falling short of mainstream pop culture's ever-fickle radar, the film has recently been re-released on video and DVD as part of the celebrated Criterion Collection film series. The DVD version of the film includes audio footage of Little Edie chatting with Interview magazine in 1976 and a recorded phone conversation between Little Edie and Albert Maysles recorded soon after the most recent presidential election, in which the staunchly devoted Democrat asks, "Do you think Al Gore still has a chance? In four years, maybe?"

Soon after the movie's initial 1976 theatrical release by Portrait Films, "Big" Edith Beale passed away at the age of 80 and Little Edie vacated the decaying estate of Grey Gardens. In 1978, Little Edie briefly pursued a career as a cabaret performer with a New York-based show in which she sang standards like "As Time Goes By" and her mother's favorite, "Tea For Two."

The show also featured a question-and-answer session for fans curious about life after Grey Gardens and the world according to Edie. (When asked about her views on premarital sex, she responded simply, "It's economical.")

Despite the praise of fans, critical pans put a quick end to Little Edie's cabaret career. She ultimately retreated to Bal Harbour, where she lived comfortably among her memorabilia and poetry. Little Edie is quoted as saying that when her mother was on her deathbed, she said there was nothing more to say because everything she wanted to tell the world was said in the Maysles' film. "To my mother and me," said Little Edie in one interview, "Grey Gardens is a breakthrough to something beautiful and precious called life."

Although Little Edie maintained several mail and phone correspondences with friends and fans, she refused to be photographed and only rarely agreed to interviews. In what may be her last interview with a national publication, Edie spoke with Hilton Als of The New Yorker in 1998 about a limited theatrical re-release of Grey Gardens . She used the opportunity more for espousing her political views than for discussing the film, though she confirmed to Als that, yes, she still wore the self-described "costumes" of her Grey Gardens days.

"Living as she lived," Als later wrote, "an independent woman whose acts were infused -- not to say suffused -- by the presence of her late mother. Little Edie had spent most of her adult life with her mother; now she parted the warm, salty waves surrounding her Florida home alone."

According to sources close to Edie Beale, arrangements will be handled by her niece, Michelle Beale. Edie is said to be cremated and her wish was that she not be buried next to her mother in East Hampton. A private church ceremony will be held, probably in Florida, arranged by the Bouvier nephews, followed by a memorial next summer at the Hamptons.

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Notes on Grey Gardens

- Hilton Als
www.criterionco.com

In 1998, I interviewed “Little” Edie Beale, the surviving star of Grey Gardens, one of the Maysles’ numerous masterworks (Gimme Shelter, Meet Marlon Brando, and With Love From Truman are equal in technical and emotional innovation). Miss Beale, speaking by telephone from her home somewhere in Florida, said she spent her days swimming and occasionally seeing friends. She was still attiring herself in a singular manner (her self-described “costumes” are the visual corollary of her extraordinary speech), living as she had always lived: as an independent woman whose thoughts and actions were infused—not to say suffused—by the presence of her late mother, “Big” Edie Beale. Little Edie had spent most of her adult life with her mother; now she parted the warm, salty waves surrounding her Florida home alone.

In Miss Beale’s speech, one heard the Social Register that had excised the Beales from its pages long ago: long “a”s, a certain formality in addressing her interlocutor. There was also, in her voice, certain impatience with the demands of being ladylike. I recall, during the interview, being at a loss as to what I could or should ask Miss Beale. One felt—understandably—that one intimately knew her and her mother from the Maysles’ film. At any rate, Miss Beale had agreed to talk to me largely because Albert Maysles had asked her to do so; the piece was to appear sometime around the theatrical re-release of the documentary film she had starred in some twenty years before. During our talk, I asked Miss Beale several questions; my questions betrayed the awkward directness of a fan. I recall asking her if she liked women. “No!” she said emphatically. And, giggling softly, she said: “Women want the same things I want.” For Miss Beale, the world was her mother and therefore a mirror: she may not “like” other women, but she was them; other women were not distinguishable from her mother—and herself.

Such singularity of being is rare. It is also rare that it should be recorded so beautifully, and with such grace, since it is not unusual for artists to feel diminished by subjects they cannot invent, especially real life characters whose lives exceed anyone’s wildest imaginings. Odd to say, but this resentment can be especially true of documentary filmmakers, the weak ones at least, who too often compete with their subjects, insisting that their intrepid journalistic eye is the story we should be engaged by, not the people they’re “covering.” Grey Gardens is the visual evidence of Albert and David Maysles’ unique brilliance as portraitists, actively engaged by subjects who do not so much as sit for them (the Beales have too much energy, wit, and imagination to be passive subjects) as help them shape the film by exposing their emotional trajectory. That is the film’s ostensible narrative. Its haunting subtext is this: the truth is best presented through metaphor. The Beales are themselves, born into a particular class at a particular time. But they are also the selves they’ve created: a singer, a dancer, whose florid self-presentation cannot be eclipsed by hard times, bad times—so-called real life. Certainly the Maysles are interested in recording the Beales’ very real life—the ruined house crawling with cats and fleas, the paper bird in the rusty gilded cage, the mother and daughter quarrelling—but those are the film’s most superficial elements. What draws the viewer in are the stories around what we cannot see: Miss Beale lamenting the loss of a scarf. The suitors turned away. Mrs. Beale’s infatuation with a man whose minor musical talent is better remembered than heard. Money spent. The dream of New York on summer nights filled with jackhammers and the moon. Regrets and recriminations: the language of lovers, the fabric of family life. The Maysles’ interest in the ephemeral, the passing of time in a sea of leaves, tells us that masks are all we have; people would not know who they are or what to say without them. Time is cruel, but we can overcome it a bit by insisting on self-expression (at any cost, since it generally does cost something: a conventional life and the conventional wisdom that goes with it).

The Maysles’ deeply felt approach to these extraordinary women makes most other documentaries by their peers seem foolish, an embarrassment disguised as the truth. As embarrassing as asking Miss Beale impertinent questions on the telephone for journalism’s sake. What was there for her to say? The Maysles had provided her and her mother with a platform where they spoke and sang and shouted and saw so memorably and intimately, so long ago.

Hilton Als is a staff writer at The New Yorker magazine. He is the author of The Women, an extended essay, and one of the authors of Without Sanctuary, a book about lynching in America.