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Peeping in while a toxic, co-dependent relationship between a mother and her daughter spins itself into a whirlwind, wrecking both of their lives and the estate they live on, could be an absorbing evening of intimate drama. But a big Broadway musical? Grey Gardens took a stab at it in 2006 with an oddly-shaped, exquisitely manicured script by Doug Wright (who has given us Quills and I Am My Own Wife on his own) and a string of pleasant, sometimes cleverly self-effacing songs by Scott Frankel and Michael Korie.
The spicy spite of a lifelong love-hate between this mother and daughter no doubt gains an irresistible cachet for some when they're Bouviers and the daughter's famous cousins, Jacqueline Bouvier and Lee Radziwell, can be woven tenuously into the storyline. Beginning with the 1974 cinema verite landmark film by the Maysles Brothers, showing Edith Bouvier Beale and "Little" Edie Beale amid the squalor of their rundown 28-room mansion, Wright does even more. He creates a hushed-up back story to precede that Chapter 2 decrepitude, weaving in JFK's elder brother Joseph Patrick Kennedy, Jr., as the fiance impelled to jilt Little Edie because of her mother's vicious meddling.
On Broadway, I found the whole enterprise overblown and overpraised. Not only did the admiration for this bagatelle seem predicated on a worship of all things Kennedy; the hype heaped on Christine Ebersole, for her portrayal of mother Edith in Act 1 and Little Edie in Act 2, seemed to partake of the same idiocy that delivers Oscars to actors and actresses who submit to the noble martyrdom of deglamorizing themselves. Or perhaps all the hype, by the time I witnessed Ebersole, had convinced the star that she could stop bothering to earn it.
No matter what the cause, I'll say this: the Queen City Theatre Company version of Grey Gardens
is better than the Broadway show I saw, largely because Alyson Lowe puts far more heart into the two Edies than Ebersole. Far more. In Act 1, we can see far more of the mom's love for her daughter mixed in with the hateful jealousy, and in Act 2, she's just funnier. The singing voice isn't as ample, particularly at the top, but Lowe zestfully puts over a song with the proper fizz ("The Five-Fifteen"), nonchalant comedy ("The Revolutionary Costume for Today"), or emotion ("Will You?").
The supporting cast is exemplary. Billy Ensley takes on an air of icy reserve as Gould, the composer/accompanist who sponges off Edith, elegantly sipping equal measures of gin and self-disgust. Another longtime blue-chipper, Polly Adkins, is delightfully cranky as Edith in the Prologue and Act 2. Edith's one big moment of softness, "Jerry Likes My Corn," will no doubt evoke memories of Adkins' award-winning 2004 performance as Fraulein Schneider in Cabaret for those who saw it.
Playing "Little" Edie in Act 1 -- and briefly appearing as Lowe's younger self in Act 2 -- Karen Christensen doesn't have all the gifts of Erin Davie, the go-to ingenue who played her on Broadway, but there are ample traces of the incipient recluse as her engagement to Joseph Kennedy unravels. There's also a pleasing hint of the easy virtue lurking in her past as her shyness melts away in the "Peas in a Pod" duet with her mom. Where Matt Cavenaugh seemed just right for Kennedy and more than a smidge too old for Jerry, alias The Marble Faun, director Glenn T. Griffin has taken the opposite route in casting Joe Ehrman-Dupre, perfect for the Faun in Act 2 but a smidge too young as Kennedy.
A couple of the bit roles are also gems. I loved the gusto that Beau Stroupe put into telling off Edith as her father, J.V. "Major" Bouvier, and James Lee Walker II's portrayals of the Brookses are probably his most polished and restrained work to date. Little things are also done well in wig and makeup design by Jeff Capell and Stewart Hough, the simple set design and paintings by Kristian Wedolowski, and the choreography of Alyson Lowe. Music direction by Marty Gregory and costumes by Wedolowski, Griffin, and Amanda Liles mesh beautifully with Griffin's thoughtful direction.
The slight trickle of love that Lowe allows us to see from Edith toward her child -- and her more willful self-deception -- elevate Act 1 beyond the musicalized Lillian Hellman melodrama I saw on Broadway. What also warms the show throughout the evening is its scaling down, particularly in Act 2, when we focus so much more exclusively on Edith and "Little" Edie. The show started off-Broadway, after all, before parading grandly into the Walter Kerr Theatre. So it shouldn't be shocking that the Doug Wright characterizations play better in the smaller Duke Energy Theatre space at Spirit Square: less cold distancing in the patrician Act 1, more intimacy in the decayed Act 2.
Ultimately, I still can't love Grey Gardens or any of its eccentric characters. But this artfully trimmed production gives me plenty to like.
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