Grey Gardens is a hothouse musical extravaganza inspired by a 1975 film documentary of the same name. It chronicles the Whatever-Happened-to-Baby-Jane relationship of Jackie Kennedy’s aunt, Edith Bouvier, and Bouvier’s daughter “Little Edie.”
If flamboyant purveyors of musical theater weren’t eternally
obsessed with massive, self-loving female gargoyles (see
Hello, Dolly!), and if it weren’t for musical
audiences’ undying fascination with the way parents annihilate and
enslave their offspring (see Gypsy), and if musical craftsmen
weren’t continuously figuring out new ways to deconstruct and
reformulate past glories (see The Drowsy Chaperone), and if
director and Baldwin-Wallace professor Victoria Bussert hadn’t
partnered up with inventive choreographer Martin Céspedes in her
quest to set up even higher pedestals to display her latest batch of
student prodigies, then Grey Gardens wouldn’t be wafting its
exotic perfumes through Beck’s Studio Theatre. And, in consequence,
those “sensitive” theatergoers who thrive on rare fruits would be
suffering from malnutrition.
In his indispensable movie guide, Leonard Maltin says of the
documentary: “Fascinating for voyeurs, but would have had more depth if
we had been given a better picture of mother and daughter in their
youth.” Picking up on this sage advice, bookwriter Doug Wright, in
collaboration with composer Scott Frankel and lyricist Michael Korie,
has wisely prefaced the film’s later picture of decay with earlier
fictional material depicting how these two lives went wildly off-track.
The notion makes for a uniquely original piece, with a first act in the
style of a Philip Barry social comedy with a pseudo Cole Porter score
and a second act that’s a Brechtian dark satire of tragicomic
disintegration.
Mixing her talented students with old pros, Bussert has been
extremely canny in her casting. In a grueling double role, first as the
younger mother and later as the middle-aged daughter, Maryann Nagel
does meritorious battle with a brilliant but challenging score. It’s
her unflagging comic grandeur and pathos that make her the clear winner
in perhaps the finest performance of her long career. As the aged
mother of the second act, Lenne Snively has the endearing grotesque
eccentricity of a Charles Addams creation. Jillian Kates Bumpas
remarkably recalls the golden Life magazine debutantes of yore
— a feat of legerdermain that perfectly mirrors the eerie charm
of the entire production.
This article appears in Dec 17-23, 2008.