NY Sun is Mixed:
"Grey Gardens" may have moved from the cramped quarters of off-Broadway to roomier digs, but no house is spacious enough to keep Edith Bouvier Beale and her daughter, "Little" Edie, out of each other's thinning hair. If a 28-room, cat- and raccoon-infested Hamptons mansion wasn't big enough for this unforgettable tandem, what chance does Broadway have?
Working from the superb 1975 documentary by the Maysles brothers documentary that immortalized these two iconic, possibly mentally ill recluses (who happened to also be Jacqueline Kennedy's aunt and cousin) in 1975, composer Scott Frankel, lyricist Michael Korie and book writer Doug Wright have furnished Edie and Edith with a haunting, tuneful rumination on fading glamour, fraying nerves, and the transitory but vital rewards of self-deception.
They are hardly the typical ingredients for a Broadway musical, and "Grey Gardens" is almost never typical. Even when its ambitions outstrip its execution, it succeeds in its central, seemingly paradoxical goal: to create a grownup show about two women for whom growing up is unimaginable.
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The net result of the extensive Act I revisions in terms of quality is negligible. A toothless new duet for Edie and Joe called "Goin' Places" substitutes razzmatazz for the deft one-upsmanship that punctuated the original song in its place, and the Major has an ineffectual new song that addresses the Bouvier women's emphasis on marrying well. But the streamlined book adds a welcome bit of ambiguity to Edith's motives, and "The Girl Who Has Everything," an introductory ballad that both honors and condemns Little Edie ("The crowds and the clamor / Aroused by her glamour / Will fade like the echo of a chime"), marks a pronounced improvement over its predecessor.
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The recasting of the younger Edie also pays off.Sara Gettelfinger, who created the role off-Broadway, conveyed a robust, almost brittle self-assurance that curdled only after great provocation. Ms. Davie, by contrast, brings a weaker, more tremulous strain to the role; this Edie suspects ruination is perpetually lurking around the corner. She seems to know almost as much about her cloistered future as we do, and the realization is poignant to watch. Ms. Gettelfinger's portrayal may have provided bigger fireworks, but the current portrayal works better as a beacon of what lies ahead.
The shambling fabulosity of Little Edie, however, remains unbowed once we meet her in Act II, in the form of Ms. Ebersole. Edie's do-it-yourself fashion sense is as maniacally outre as ever: "Re-invent the objet trouvé./ Make a poncho from a duvet. / Then you can be / With Cousin Lee / On Mister Blackwell's list," she sings in the memorable "The Revolutionary Costume for Today." (Costume designer William Ivey Long's riotous embellishments could start a revolution of their own.)
"Grey Gardens," while fizzy and fun in Act I, gets its emotional heft from the subsequent descent into decrepitude. This stems in part from Mr. Wright's shrewd adaptation of the film — his new material rests very comfortably alongside the swaths of dialogue lifted verbatim — but far more from the glorious performances of Ms. Ebersole and Ms. Wilson, who make up the finest onstage pair musical theatre has seen in years.
Never mind their uncanny portrayals of the Beales or the fact that Ms. Ebersole's transformation into the blinking, paranoid Edie immediately follows her flawlessly chic take on the 1941 Edith. While Ms. Ebersole has certainly deserved the extensive praise she's received, Ms. Wilson matches her line for line and note for note in Act II. Their confrontations pulse with a punchdrunk weariness that one rarely finds in a Broadway play, let alone in a musical; the fact that the two women also sing marvelously seems almost like a bonus.
Unfortunately, the second act's structural flaws, most notably an overreliance on the ensemble, have yet to be addressed.Ghostly Bouviers and Kennedys still lurk around the mansion to lend harmonic support throughout Act II, which remains a grave mistake. Tossing a chorus into, say, Edie's dazzlingly arrhythmic "military dance" — a scene that the film captured with one fixed camera shot — grievously undermines the oppressive sense of solitude that pervades every one of those 28 rooms. And Messrs. Frankel and Korie's 1973 material, while often pleasing to the ear (the ballad "Another Winter in a Summer Town" is particularly strong), lacks the stylistic cohesion of their '40s period pastiche."
http://www.nysun.com/article/42841
"What a story........ everything but the bloodhounds snappin' at her rear end." -- Birdie
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