Daft, dark and deliciously derelict

BY LINDA WINER | Newsday Staff Writer

November 3, 2006

Christine Ebersole stars as Little Edie Beale in "Grey Gardens". (Newsday/ Ari Mintz)

Edie Bouvier Beale and her mother, Edith, have finally made it to Broadway - and what a welcome addition they are. That their big break comes long after these world-class eccentrics were alive to bask in stardom is just one of the twisted, tender ironies of their pop-culture infamy.

"Grey Gardens," the musical about the bizarre cousin and aunt of Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy Onassis, has taken over the Walter Kerr Theatre as if to the manor born. This audacious interpolation of the 1975 cult-hit documentary has transferred from Playwrights Horizons with all of its original pleasures and several significant new ones.

When the show opened Off-Broadway in March, Michael Greif's incisively high-camp production was celebrated for two thoroughly transfixing performances by Christine Ebersole: in the first act, as socialite Edith in her prime in 1941, and after intermission as middle-aged daughter "Little" Edie in flea-bitten defiance in 1973.

Doug Wright, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of "I Am My Own Wife," had sculpted a book that attempted to trace the two women's devolution from East Hampton aristocrats to the dysfunctional frights that filmmakers Albert and David Maysles found three decades later at the women's condemned Grey Gardens mansion.

Wright's attitude toward the women has always been both affectionate and creepy. But the script lacked emotional coherence and seemed more like two meticulously produced one-acts with amusing new takes on old-style songs. Could we really believe that Edith and Edie, however fierce their desire to be bohemians in a white-glove world, turned into recluses who thrived in a 28-room garbage dump with 52 cats, marauding raccoons and eviction threats from the Suffolk County Board of Health?

The improvements start with an expanded prologue that asks, in tabloid voice-over, "How could American royalty fall so far, so fast?" Young "Little" Edie has been recast with Erin Davie, who not only looks like a younger Ebersole but also brings a febrile quality that suggests she could unravel without much encouragement.

Composer Scott Frankel and lyricist Michael Korie have rearranged a few of their stylish pastiche songs, adding at least one and removing a few others to make the first act almost as entertaining as the second. The first act is done as a 1940s musical, complete with fox trots and marches. It is set on the day of the party celebrating young Edie's putative engagement to Joseph P. Kennedy Jr. The second half is more like a new-old Sondheim musical, if the dark master of uneven phrase lengths and internal rhymes had ever toyed with "Whatever Happened to Baby Jane?"

This unapologetic contribution to crazy-old-lady literature begins in the parlor of the mansion, designed like a live-in Wedgwood dinner service by Allen Moyer. Big Edie (Ebersole), a frustrated singer, controlling mother and neglected wife, is at the piano with her fey, live-in accompanist (Bob Stillman), preparing to entertain the guests and upstage her daughter.

In the original production, Edith's sabotage of her child's romance seemed like pure selfishness. Now we understand that she is also acting in Edie's interest: scaring off the proper, politically ambitious young Kennedy because she wants to save her high-spirited, Broadway-dreaming daughter from her own stifling fate.

John McMartin, that old smoothie, is both dashing and destructive as Edith's conservative father. Delightful young Sarah Hyland and Kelsey Fowler watch and mimic the grown-ups as Jackie Bouvier and her sister, Lee.

After intermission, we are smack in the riveting nightmare world of the Maysles' documentary. The wonderful Mary-Louise Wilson, as the elderly Edith, looks like a dried-apple doll and shrieks gleefully that, at least, she "ate the cake I had." To her failed child, she crows, "Is it my fault that your cake fell flat/that you're unmarried, bald and fat?" She flirtatiously cooks for Jerry (Matt Cavenaugh, who is also persuasively priggish as Joe Kennedy), a devoted stray teen in with flea collars on his pant cuffs.

Ghosts from the first act appear on the old staircase, and sing an eerie, inspirational Norman Vincent Peale song about "choosing to be happy."

But all eyes come back to Little Edie, a fast-talking, proud loser with a fashion eye for girdles, leopard-prints, safety pins and turbans made of sweaters - grandly designed by William Ivey Long. Ebersole, who finds more voices in her head than most of us have friends, shreds our hearts with the lament, "Another Winter in a Summer Town." Lest she get bathetic, she is proudly ridiculous in a harrowingly uncoordinated marching song.

"All I needed was an audience," she tells Jerry. She has one now.

GREY GARDENS. Book by Doug Wright, music by Scott Frankel, lyrics by Michael Korie. Directed by Michael Greif with musical staging by Jeff Calhoun. Walter Kerr Theatre, 291 W. 48th St. Tickets $86.25-$111.25. Call 212-239-6200. Seen at Tuesday preview.