PTC's "Grey Gardens' (2nd review)

For almost three decades Sweeney Todd held the record for weirdest story of any Broadway musical. Until now.

Grey Gardens supplants the Sondheim opus about a barber who kills people and grinds them into meat pies. This 2006 creation is a musical based on a documentary motion picture by the same name about two recluses— an aging mother and her middle-aged daughter— who live in garbage-ridden squalor. What gave their plight distinction was the fact that the ladies had once belonged to high society.

Playwright Doug Wright, lyricist Michael Korie and composer Scott Frankel dramatized and musicalized the sad story and then, wisely, decided to add a prologue that showed whence these ladies came. Neither half of the show works without the other. The story of the ladies (what's now Act Two) needs a set-up, which is provided by an up-beat glimpse at their social life in 1941, when the daughter was dating Joseph Kennedy Jr., and her mother was planning an engagement party.

Act One is an entertaining variant of The Philadelphia Story, with original music that suits the style of that time. It's an effective juxtaposition, filled with hints about what's to come. Act Two, set in 1973, is a problem because it's downbeat without any hopeful or cathartic end, and because no action occurs.

The actors made the difference

When I first saw Grey Gardens in New York, I enjoyed the first act and was intrigued by the second because the two actors (Mary Louise Wilson as the mother, Christine Ebersole as her daughter) were appealing. This production by the Philadelphia Theatre Company suffers because director Lisa Peterson has Joy Franz as the mother and Hollis Resnik as the daughter preen in such an exaggerated style that they lose our empathy. Here the direction followed the format of the film documentary, where the women talked directly into the camera, so the actors were told to move downstage and play to the audience. But theater is a different medium: They should show us, not tell us what we need to know.

A similar bad choice, again based on the film, is trying to replicate the daughter's odd way of speaking. The real Edie Beale developed a sort of New York City twang that differed from the way her Long Island family and neighbors spoke. But that's never explained. As portrayed by Resnik, Little Edie's words were hard to understand, and some audience members expended time and effort trying to figure out why she sounded so peculiar. Having young Joe Kennedy speak with the accent that the world associates with his family is a correct choice; having Edie use an accent that's known only to viewers of a cult film is not.

To be sure, the director and actors here are merely following the script's instructions. Composer Frankel said that most of his friends knew the documentary so well that they expected the show to adhere to it. This is a case of a creator being so closely involved that he failed to see the large picture objectively.

Begging for laughs

Edie's presentational second act numbers, "The Revolutionary Costume For Today" and "The House We Live In," produce laughs and applause— but only by, in effect, begging for them. Resnik performs them well, and Joy Franz sings sensationally on "The Cake I Had" and her solo, "Jimmy Likes My Corn" "“ although the script doesn't tell us much about their neighbor Jimmy or why we should give a damn what he likes.

This act could be beguiling, maybe even heartbreaking, it were presented subtly, without over-playing.

Homage to the Gershwins

Back in the more pleasurable first act, Kim Carson is an appealing young Edie and the song she sings with her mother (played there by Hollis Resnik), "Peas in a Pod," makes catchy references to pairs of that period, such as Dagwood and Blondie, the Dodgers and Brooklyn, Crosby and Hope. "Hominy Grits" is a wicked satire of mammy songs like "Shortnin' Bread," while other numbers pay adroit homage to George and Ira Gershwin.

"The Girl Who Has Everything" is a poignant ballad, and the best song of all, the one that you're likely to hum on your way out of the theater, is "Will You?" The melody is haunting, and the question about young Edie's future is heartbreaking. Her mother sings, "When lilacs return in spring, will you?" and we know that Edie is so dependent and manipulated that she, in fact, will.

David Zinn provided excellent sets and costumes, and Grey Gardens benefits from fine supporting performances by Todd Almond as the piano-playing Gould, Cole Burden as a Joe Kennedy with a Dick Tracy jawline, John Jellison in the dual roles of grandfather and Norman Vincent Peale, and James Ijames as father-and-son servants. â—†




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