NEWS
Review: ‘Grey Gardens’ Is Revived in Its Real Setting, the Hamptons
By Laura Collins-Hughes
August 18, 2015
SAG HARBOR, N.Y. — Here in the manicured Hamptons, where affluence parades in the summer months, “Grey Gardens” counts as a local story: the Camelot relatives — Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis’s elderly aunt and middle-aged cousin — whose spectacularly mangy living conditions, in their wreck of an East Hampton mansion, grabbed headlines in the 1970s. The neighbors, naturally, had complained.
So there’s a doubleness to seeing the musical at Bay Street Theater, in this prim enclave of towns and villages where the eccentric Edith Bouvier Beale and her unhinged daughter, Little Edie Beale, failed so flagrantly to fit in. “They can get you in East Hampton for wearing red shoes on a Thursday,” Little Edie (Rachel York) grouses, and the audience laughs in recognition, never mind the jillion cats and assorted raccoons bunking in Grey Gardens, their tumbledown home.
SAG HARBOR, N.Y. — Here in the manicured Hamptons, where affluence parades in the summer months, “Grey Gardens” counts as a local story: the Camelot relatives — Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis’s elderly aunt and middle-aged cousin — whose spectacularly mangy living conditions, in their wreck of an East Hampton mansion, grabbed headlines in the 1970s. The neighbors, naturally, had complained.
So there’s a doubleness to seeing the musical at Bay Street Theater, in this prim enclave of towns and villages where the eccentric Edith Bouvier Beale and her unhinged daughter, Little Edie Beale, failed so flagrantly to fit in. “They can get you in East Hampton for wearing red shoes on a Thursday,” Little Edie (Rachel York) grouses, and the audience laughs in recognition, never mind the jillion cats and assorted raccoons bunking in Grey Gardens, their tumbledown home.
But the potent emotional undertow of this production, directed by Michael Wilson, has nothing to do with geographical proximity and everything to do with the formidable Betty Buckley, whose determinedly cheerful, thoroughly heart-bruising Edith will win you over, pull you under and cast you out to sea.
Based on David and Albert Maysles’s 1975 cult documentary, “Grey Gardens,” the musical — with a book by Doug Wright, music by Scott Frankel and lyrics by Michael Korie — teases us in a prologue with a glimpse of Edith, circa 1973, in all her dotty decrepitude. Then she disappears until Act II.
As on Broadway, where Christine Ebersole won a Tony Award for best actress in 2007 for the twin roles of midcentury Edith and middle-aged Edie — while Mary Louise Wilson got the featured-actress trophy as late-century Edith — this is mostly a younger woman’s show.
The first act, set in 1941, gives us an Edith (Ms. York) who is glamorous, tuneful and forever banging against the bars of her gilded cage, which keeps her in East Hampton when what she really wants is a stage. Edie (Sarah Hunt), an eligible debutante engaged to Joseph Patrick Kennedy Jr. (Matt Doyle), is mortified by her mother’s extroverted behavior, but Edith’s young Bouvier nieces, Jacqueline (Gracie Beardsley) and Lee (Dakota Quackenbush), adore her.
Ms. York does a fine job of tracing a through line from this Edith to the willfully myopic woman she will become decades later, with Grey Gardens decaying around her. More problematic is the groundwork laid for Little Edie, who comes across in Act I as a model of propriety, with not even a hint of wildness. Ms. Hunt has a splendid voice, and she is pleasant to watch, but she does not help us fathom how this Edie transforms into the deluded, self-dramatizing creature who so beguiled the Maysles brothers.
The two parts Ms. York plays add up to a giant job, and at Sunday’s matinee, her voice sometimes sounded frayed — which detracted not at all from the slightly boho elegance of her outrageous young Edith or the tethered torment of her Little Edie, furious to be stuck at home yet not equipped to survive elsewhere.
Ms. Buckley goes her own way with the elderly Edith, who seems somehow untouched by the surrounding filth. Her long gray hair is wonderfully fluffy (the wigs are by Paul Huntley), and her offbeat outfits (by Ilona Somogyi) so vividly colored that they could star in a detergent commercial. Her cane and halting walk notwithstanding, she radiates vitality.
It’s perfectly clear why Jerry (a delightfully sweet Mr. Doyle), the handsome young man who helps out around the house, would enjoy Edith’s company. When she cooks corn on the cob in her squalid bedroom, he is brave and kind enough to eat it, and that means the world to her.
This is the moment when Ms. Buckley does something hauntingly powerful, turning the song “Jerry Likes My Corn” into a devastating tear-jerker, reminiscent of Stephen Sondheim’s “In Buddy’s Eyes.” It is masterly, and it is why you will emerge from the theater shaken but grateful, wishing only that there were more of Ms. Buckley in the show.
