Grey Gardens Turn Green

"It's very difficult to keep the line between the past and the present-know what I mean?"

Uttered by Edie Beale in the 1976 cult classic documentary Grey Gardens, and known to current audiences as the opening sound bite of the Rufus Wainwright song of the same name, the line sounds a bit odd. The syntax is off, the accent (a strange, sort of affected, New York-WASP drawl) is jarring, and the logic is a little deceiving. Yes, Little Edie, it is difficult to "keep the line," but do we really have to? Doesn't the line keep itself?

The epic Grey Gardens story follows Edie Beale and her mother, Edith Bouvier Beale, the real-life mother-daughter duo famous for both their cousin, Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy Onassis, and the eccentric antics that took place in their titular, dilapidated, East Hampton mansion. The high-camp film has now been adapted into an even higher-camp musical, with music by Scott Frankel, lyrics by Michael Korie, and book by Doug Wright (Pulitzer, Tony, and Drama Desk award winner for I Am My Own Wife). Directed by Michael Greif (Rent), the musical transports us to a world where that line is always hazy. Though the acts take place in distinct and separate eras, the inevitable, devastating arcs of the characters loom large over the pristine white walls of the mansion in 1941, and the ghosts of the past haunt the Grey Gardens of the '70s.

In the first act, we meet Edith (Christine Ebersole) as she prepares the house for the engagement party of her daughter Edie (Sara Gettelfinger) to Joe Kennedy, Jr. (Matt Cavenaugh). The fates of the three characters are immediately known: the two women will go crazy, the marriage will never happen, and Joe Kennedy will die before he makes it to the White House. Then we meet Edie's cousins Jackie and Lee, and the audience chuckles appropriately at Jackie's crush on Joe because we know where she will end up, too.

Though the first act drags on two or three songs too long, it is successful in setting up the brimming potential of young Edie, the potential that will be shattered once the second-act curtain comes up. The hearty pastiche of the first-act songs, including the raucously inappropriate send-up of a minstrel routine, "Hominy Grits," are the songs of a bygone era. When Edie and Joe sing "Better Fall Out of Love" as they skip outside on the terrace, it is like watching Judy Garland and Mickey Rooney. We know where they end up, too-dead and fat, respectively.

That we see the fate of the characters in the second act-as, in reality, we see the fate of all characters-makes the show about as perfect as any musical written today can be. Critics continually sound musical theater's death knell, claiming that our current culture's emphasis on verisimilitude deems musicals irrelevant and, even worse, kitschy. Grey Gardens simultaneously embraces the inherent surrealism of the musical form and revels in the reality of its over-the-top characters. The musical inhabits a place much like the mansion itself: the decaying arena where greatness once lived, now populated with only those psychotic enough to hang on.

The New York Times thinks this is all just a bit too gay. In his review of the production, Ben Brantley misses the mark when he protests that the "show often coasts on the allure of loudly dropped names and the gay-bait thrills of women in extreme states of glamour and grotesqueness." Whether or not the subject matter appeals to a gay audience (and who cares, anyway?), the musical never coasts. Its self-aware camp and its "extreme states" revive the musical form and reinstate its artistic integrity.

Ebersole plays the aged Edie in the second act, and her performance is a revelation. In her second-act opener, "The Revolutionary Costume for Today," Ebersole invites the audience into Edie's frighteningly fractured world and never lets them leave. As her mother (the character she played in the first act), Mary Louise Wilson (Cabaret) tosses off numbers like "Jerry Likes My Corn" with ease reserved for a bed-ridden and senile old woman.

It is fitting to the cult spirit of both the Bouvier-Beales and the film that the musical's limited run ends on April 23, seen by relatively few people. It is unfortunate, though, for those who missed the renewal of a genre whose struggle to keep the line between the past and the present has rarely been more thrilling.