Followup: Christine Ebersole on the Joan Hamburg Show... on MP3

Last week, Christine Ebersole was a guest on the Joan Hamburg radio show, and, now, an MP3 of her interview is available online! Skip through the first half of the MP3 to get to Ebersole's interview.

Source: here, here, and here

Interview with Mary Louise Wilson, the musical's Big Edie (Act 2)

I really didn't know anything about Wilson until I read this. But, like Ebersole, she's a charmer!

Most of her research may be accurate, but that story from Jerry isn't. According to Lois Wright's book and other sources, Jerry wasn't around when Mrs. Beale needed to go to the hospital shortly before her death. I do believe the Wedgwood tea set story... and that's fantastic!

From Broadway.com, by David Drake, on 30 October 2006

Mary Louise Wilson

Glancing at the ceiling of her cozy dressing room in the Walter Kerr Theatre, Mary Louise Wilson says, "I apologize for not having a chandelier. But it's coming! Christine found one on eBay for $99. And so now I'm going to have one too." It's a gesture of mock grandiosity (with a wink toward frugality) that, for someone currently living and breathing the legendary Edith Beale in the musical Grey Gardens, fits her character to a T. Based on the cult 1975 documentary charting the fragmented, isolated lives of the aunt and the first cousin of Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis as they putter about their decrepit 28-room mansion in East Hampton, the musical became a sellout hit at Playwrights Horizons last spring. The current Broadway transfer includes both effervescent original stars, Christine Ebersole and Wilson. And while Ebersole received the lion's share of accolades last season for her astonishing duel interpretations of Big Edie (in Act One) and Little Edie (in Act Two), the dark ebb and flow of her scenes with Wilson as Big Edie in the second act cut an unusually complex emotional path that--in Wilson's subtle yet sure hands--did not go overlooked. Indeed, Wilson was nominated for Drama Desk, Outer Critics Circle and Lortel Awards for her work. Fondly recalled for her Obie Award-winning portrayal of Diana Vreeland in the one-woman tour-de-force Full Gallop (which Wilson co-authored a decade ago), the actress has spent more than 40 years on the New York stage, including such recent Broadway appearances as The Women and her Tony-nominated turn as Fraulein Schneider in Cabaret. An hour before curtain, Wilson sat down to share some frank and hilarious stories about her illustrious career, and how she's wound her way into that big enigma, Big Edie.

Before this project came along, had you ever seen the film Grey Gardens?

I had. And I thought, "Oh, God. It's so depressing." That was my thought: depressing.

And then, when this show came up?

I said, "What?! They're gonna make a musical of it?! Oh, come on!" [Laughs.] But a lot of this is just serendipitous. Christine [Ebersole] had been obsessed with this character for a long time. When they called her, they had no knowledge of that. I was the exact opposite of Christine. Still, I knew that [Big Edie] wasn't going to be a generic old woman. So right away that was interesting: dark and funny. I love that.

Had you ever worked with Christine before?

No. I had met her and I knew who she was. But I think a lot of [the coming together of their casting in Grey Gardens] was something larger than all of us, 'cause Christine and I just click.

For the sake of continuity--because Christine portrays Big Edie in Act One, and then you play her in Act Two--was there much discussion of how to graft the two performances into one?

No.

So, it was more instinctively done?

Yes, instinctively.

And how did you go about inhabiting such a notorious woman?

I feel in a way I'm still trying to get to where she is, 'cause it's a mystery, a real mystery. She keeps things in; she doesn't emote the way I do. Everything isn't on her face. I think she basically has a much more smooth temperament than I do. She really means it when she says, "Well, I had a wonderful life. I had a wonderful marriage. I did what I wanted to do." I just think she believes all that. She's kind of reserved.

Did you watch the film a lot?

A lot. I just tried to absorb her. You start with her speech patterns and her kind of near-sightedness.

Did you ever watch it without sound? Just for behavior?

I did do that. I should do that again. But, you know, you pick up things you don't even realize, watching it over and over again.

Had you ever approached a character so specifically from the outside in?

Yeah, Diana Vreeland [in Full Gallop]. Because so much of Vreeland was in the way she moved and what she did with her hands and everything. I'd always heard that that was the British way of working: First they found the false nose, then the walk, then they would get the internal stuff.

Besides the movie, did you do any other research or reading on Edith Beale?

Oh, tons and tons and tons and tons. But I just got the feeling, overall, that she was oblique and obtuse to a lot of stuff. She let a lot of emotional stuff roll right over her. I don't think that she was a good mother, particularly; she wasn't paying that much attention, really. She was always with her singing, you know.

Speaking of singing, how is it that you can do such beautiful singing while sitting down? Practically lying down?

I don't know [laughs]. I don't understand it. I just do it!

Has anyone from the Beales' past come to the show and told you things about Edith that helped you with the character?

Oh, God, yes, Jerry [the Beales' teenage helper who became a character in the musical]. He drives a cab now. He's been around [the production]. And he's helped a lot, doing a lot of interviews and talking. He told me that there was a point when Big Edie was really sick; the doctor came and wanted to take her to the hospital and she didn't want to go. [Jerry] wouldn't let them take her 'cause he knew they'd never let her come back to the house. And she couldn't leave that house. They had to have that house. I understand that feeling completely. The younger Beales have also been around. They're all just thrilled.

Really?

Oh, yeah. They all remember visiting Big Edie. Like one time [Big Edie] said to one of the girls, "Would you like a tea set? A Wedgwood blue tea set?" And the little girl said, "Yeah!" And Big Edie pointed, "Under the bed." Oh, there are just hundreds of stories like that.

I know the film's cult following can be extreme. When you were playing the show off-Broadway, did you have many encounters with that?

Some. One night we had a bunch of people come dressed like Little Edie. Fortunately we couldn't see [from the stage], as they were in the lobby. But we did have occasions when people were just screaming. Screaming!

Like applauding certain lines?

Oh, yeah! Like when [Little Edie] said, "Staunch!" that was like a 15-minute burst of applause. We had that at the [Broadway] dress rehearsal. But so far it's been more sedate. Usually Christine's song "The Revolutionary Costume for Today" gets some response.

Is that line in your first scene, "It's a God-damned beautiful day, shut up!" from the movie? I laughed so hard at that.

Yeah [laughs]. It's a good line!

In researching your career, I noted that Grey Gardens is your 18th show on Broadway.

Really? Has it been that many?

Yup. And you made your debut in a 1963 musical called Hot Spot.

Yeah, with Judy Holliday. Big bomb. Famous bomb.

I've read that Hot Spot had something like five different directors and...

Oh, I remember coming into the show one day--this is when we were in previews in New York, I think--and there was Stephen Sondheim! He was a dear friend of Mary Rodgers, who was the composer [of Hot Spot].

What was Judy Holliday like?

Amazing. She could take any line you gave her and make it funny. But she did not like the writers and didn't like what was going on. The thing I really remember most, concerning Judy Holliday, was just how unprotected she was. Here she was, this big star, and yet there wasn't anyone around who could help her with the difficulty of the whole experience. Being that it was my first show, I suppose I hadn't expected to see something like that, you know?

How about your next show, Kander & Ebb's musical Flora, the Red Menace, written and directed by George Abbott?

He was 78 years old when we started working on that.

He has this legendary reputation as a dictator-like director. What was your experience?

First of all, if he used an actor once, they never had to audition for him again; he thought actors knew what they were doing. But he would give line readings. People would say, "He's giving us line readings!" But he could put what he wanted in one or two words. Like, I had a crossover, and there was a cowboy who also had a crossover, and Liza Minnelli was sitting on a bench. So the cowboy goes by and Liza says, "Hello, Sarge" (or whatever his name was), and he says "Howdy." And then I go by, and [Abbott] says to me, "Say, 'Howdy'." And I remember Fred [Ebb] and John [Kander] were saying, "What's that about?" Huge laugh! Because the audience knew I had fallen in love with the cowboy because I said "Howdy." George Abbott just knew that kind of shorthand.

With Kander & Ebb, it's fascinating to me that you were there at the beginning of their careers together in 1965 with Flora, and then, more than 30 years later, you were in the triumphant 1998 revival of Cabaret.

Yeah, and I remember I'd gone and seen Cabaret with Fred, originally [in 1966]. He said, "This is our new show. Come see it!"

Had you remained friends throughout those years?

For a while I played poker at Fred Ebb's house [laughs]. But I lost touch after all that time; you know how it is. John [Kander] actually lives near me in the country, so occasionally I'd see him drive by or at the grocery. But Fred... he was the most darling man that ever lived.

I also saw that you made two appearances with Eva Le Gallienne on Broadway, the last being in 1983 in Alice in Wonderland.

A terrible experience, Alice in Wonderland.

So, how was your first with her, The Royal Family in 1976?

Fabulous. We were in the [original] Helen Hayes Theatre. My favorite story about Le Gallienne, and I don't know if this can be printed. But... she's dead, so... I've got to be careful [laughs]. Anyway, Joe Maher and Eva Le Gallienne and I were off stage while Sam Levene had a long, brilliant monologue with Rosemary [Harris]. We would smoke backstage in those days, and Eva would sit in this chair. One night I was pacing around, smoking, and Eva leans in and says to me, "This should be cut." Another time she called me over and said, "I was terrible tonight. Like Helen Hayes." And I said, "Oh..." Then Eva said, "She's not a friend of yours, is she?"

How about Angela Lansbury? I see you played Tessie Tura in the 1974 revival of Gypsy with her and stood by for Rose. Ever go on?

Yes, and it was the most terrifying experience I had ever had in my whole goddamned life. We were at the Shubert in L.A. It was a matinee, and I knew I was going to go on so I had three weeks to get ready. What happened was... I just turned to stone, I was so frightened. There were two big shows out there then, and the audience was full of actors from The King and I. So, I start out deaf and blind. I could see the conductor's face, and all I could remember was, "Some people..." That's it. Then "Some people... could..."

One lyric at a time.

Fortunately, he had a big face and I'm watching him mouth the words, and little by little I start to get bigger and bigger. By the third song, I could hear a little better. They had this runway that went over the orchestra pit, so I could see the people [in the audience] looking at me. And there were all these little girls. Then after the show, all these little Asian girls were in my dressing room holding up Playbills. It was like a dream...

And finally, although she's not of the theater, per se, in Full Gallop you certainly brought her to life onstage: Diana Vreeland. When did you first become aware of her existence?

1953. We were all wearing beige. You had to have beige shoes and a beige purse and everything beige. And navy. There was this picture of her room in House & Garden and everything was paisley and prints and polka dots and plaids all mixed up together. Of course everybody in New York has that now. Or did, for a while; the elk horns and the leopard prints. But [in 1953] we didn't have jet planes bringing fashions over immediately, so French was very foreign. It was like a bit of France coming over here. I had a sister-in-law who worked under Vreeland [at Vogue] and I began hearing some of the hilarious things she said. Like, they were going to do an article about windbreakers that were made of lamé. But apparently it was protested 'cause Wind Breaker was a copyrighted brand name. And Vreeland ran in and said, "Quick! What's another name for breaking wind?!

Oh my God!

She didn't realize what she was saying. The great thing about her is that she was funny consciously but also unconsciously. I was just fascinated with her always, always. And I have to say the thing wouldn't have gotten written without my very good friend [co-author of Full Gallop] Mark Hampton, who was also fascinated with her.

So the two of just started talking, like, maybe she's a show?

Yes. We had all these anecdotes. There's this book where she told all these anecdotes to George Plimpton. So it was literal script, a verbal script. We strung together a lot of anecdotes.

Did you begin by just reading them aloud to one another?

Oh, my God, yes. Nicky Martin, who's down the street directing Butley now [starring Nathan Lane at the Booth Theatre], was a friend from years and years ago. He brought me this book, D.V., as a house guest present. This was in the country, and we sat around reading aloud, falling out of our chairs. Then five years later I started working on it. It's just so odd, because Nicky at that time was not a director. He was teaching acting up at Bennington College, and it just evolved.

In all, how long did it take to develop Full Gallop?

We wrote it and did it in closets and bars and lesbian theaters in Vermont and I don't even know where all for about eight years. And I peddled it around to everybody I knew in show business, and they were all, [flat-voiced] "Huh, yeah... take it to the dramaturg." But finally, finally we got a break. That's a long story, too. A lot of it was luck.

Now that Full Gallop has been produced all over the world--including half a dozen translations--what's been the most satisfying part of having put that show out in the world?

Hmmm... there are a lot of older actresses out there who are looking for something to do. And that, I think, is great--that they're getting to do it.

Maybe it'll happen again with Edith Beale in Grey Gardens.

It's a different thing, really. I don't think in terms of the future that way. But I will say that I have a tremendous affection for her. And right now... she's feeding me.

See Mary Louise Wilson in Grey Gardens at the Walter Kerr Theatre.

Source

Gail Sheehy revisits Grey Gardens and gives an amazing history of Little Edie Beale

Sheehy's encounter with Little Edie back in the 70s was such a fascinating story! Here's the followup.

From New York Mag, on 6 November 2006 (well, it's that issue)

A Return to Grey Gardens

There are still secrets left to tell about Little Edie Beale, including her diary.

When autumn riptides break free and sculpt a deranged shoreline out of the beaches of East Hampton, I often recall one of my last conversations with Little Edie Beale. I imagine seeing her again, the prisoner of Grey Gardens, freed by the postseason to appear in her black net bathing suit, perhaps perform an antic little dance, then streak down from the dunes trailing a long silk scarf and plunge into the embrace of waves. I loved her spirit.

The musical Grey Gardens, which opens this week on Broadway, has triggered even more memories of when I first met the Beale ladies and went on to write the first story about them for this magazine, "The Secret of Grey Gardens." It was the summer of 1971. My family had rented a place across the street from what my then-7-year-old daughter called the Witch House. One Sunday, she found a litter of baby rabbits left in a box in our driveway and begged to take them over there, since it was already home to dozens of cats. This was how I described our visit at the time:

We ducked under the ropes of bittersweet hanging from a pair of twisted catalpa trees and skittered past a 1937 Cadillac brooding in the tangled grasses to find ourselves at the tippy porch steps of Grey Gardens. A hand-lettered sign hung from the door: Do Not Trespass, Police on the Place. Cats crouched all around in the overgrown grass, rattling in their throats, mean and wild. There was no turning back.

"Mother?"

We whirled at the sound of the tremulous voice. A middle-aged woman was coming through the catalpa trees, dressed for church but most oddly: a sweater wrapped around her head and her skirt on upside down. Her face was oddly young, as if suspended in time, faintly freckled and innocent, but painted with thick dark lipstick and heavy eyeliner. It struck me that she looked strangely familiar... like... like who?

"Are you looking for Mother, too?" she asked, more unnerved than we.

My little girl held out the box of bunnies.

"Did you think we care for animals here?" My daughter nodded solemnly. "You see! Children sense it." The woman clapped her hands in delight. "The old people don't like us. They think I'm crazy. The Bouviers don't like me at all, Mother says. But the children understand... "

My little girl said it must be fun to live in a house where you never have to clean up.

"Oh, Mother thinks it's artistic this way, like a Frank Lloyd Wright house. Don't you love the overgrown Louisiana Bayou look?"

My daughter asked if there really were police on the place.

"Not really, but there are boys who come over at night sometimes and try to club the cats to death." I suggested the boys might just be prankish.

"Oh no, they're dangerous. I can tell what's inside a person right away. Mother and I can see behind the masks; we're artists, it's the artist's eye. Jackie has it, too."

"Jackie?"

"I'm Jacqueline Bouvier's first cousin. Mother is her aunt. Did you know that?"

"No, we didn't."

"Oh yes, we're all descended from fourteenth-century French kings. Did you like the Kennedys?"

Now it clicked. The woman before me was a version of Jackie Kennedy coming back from church on a Greek island, but this was Little Edie in the summer of her 54th year.

"You... resemble your cousin," I stammered.

My daughter wanted to know if she knew President Kennedy well. "Jack never liked society girls, he only dated showgirls," she said. "I tried to show him I'd broken with society. I was a dancer. But Jack never gave me a tumble. Then I met Joe Jr. at a Princeton dance, and, oh my!" She swooned. "Joe was the most wonderful person in the world. There will never be another man like him... "

From then on, I was invited into the private world of the Beale ladies, two outcasts of a wealthy and famously dysfunctional branch of the Kennedy dynasty—the Bouvier-Beales—who were being hounded by county health officials threatening to evict them. When Little Edie led me through the decaying house that summer, it was a chilling version of Jackie's famous White House tour. The wood floors of this once-proud mansion were lumped and crusty with old cat feces; the roof punctured with raccoon holes. Mother remained upstairs, summoning the services of her daughter by banging her cane on the floor and calling out in full operatic tremolo: "EeeDIE! Where is my champagne cocktail?"

Little Edie would then perform her secret act of subversion, spooning out cat food and shaping it into a proper mound, garnished with a twist of lemon. She winked at me. "Mother's pâté."

After her death in 2002, Little Edie left a diary, letters, poetry, and stunning photographs, which were recently shared with me by Eva Beale, the wife of Little Edie's nephew, Bouvier Beale Jr., the executor of her estate. Eva Beale is at work on a coffee-table book about the family story that will include much of this material.

The first act of Doug Wright's musical casts Little Edie as the dreamy "It" girl of East Hampton in 1941, preparing for her fictional engagement party to Joe Kennedy Jr. It's a re-creation of Grey Gardens in all its glory, with Mother singing racist show tunes and the butler twirling a silver tray while a knobby-kneed Jackie is entertained by her reactionary grandfather, Major Bouvier. The second act leaps over 30 years to find two dotty divas locked in a devouring bond amid the decay of their estate. What had broken Little Edie's dream? How did she lose all her hair? How did she wind up such a captive of her mother?

Little Edie's papers fill in the blanks between the two acts; they are their own drama of maternal psychological seduction. The diary, written in 1928–29, when Little Edie was a preadolescent, is the family Rosetta stone. It is meant for an audience, as if preserving her story for future publication when she became famous.

The seeds of this tortured tale go back to the Jazz Age, when the Bouvier clan first discovered, beyond "dressy" Southampton, the "simple" summer resort of East Hampton. Major Bouvier, Big Edie's father, used his first wife's fortune to buy Lasata, the family estate by the sea where his progeny could jump their horses over topiary hedges. Little Edie, born in 1917 and the eldest of ten grandchildren, was the family beauty, "surpassing even the dark charm of Jacqueline," according to their cousin John H. Davis, a professor who wrote a book about the Bouviers.

One of three siblings, Little Edie was her mother's crown jewel. Dressed in velvet coats and lace-trimmed socks, she was attached to Mother's hand at all times, accompanying her to ladies' luncheons in East Hampton and on the East Side. And the attachment became even more intense when Mother took her out of Spence. The official reason was some vague respiratory illness, to which Edie refers in her diary only perfunctorily: "I'm so mad, I'm missing the fair" or "Oh, I'm sick again, I have to have a chest X-ray."

Mother kept the child out of school for two years—Little Edie's 11th and 12th years—and brought her daughter to the theater or movies almost every day. A frustrated singer herself, Mother ensured the girl would be as starstruck as she was. And despite the excuse that Little Edie was "too weak" to return to school, she was perfectly well enough to go on a shopping trip to Paris.

"I can't really tell you if I am pretty or what kind of girl I am but... I have long hair, blonde, getting darker, deep blue eyes, a pug nose and a rather decided mouth," Little Edie wrote. "I am by no means fat, but I have a good body and big feet." One line offers a poignant window into the determination behind her blithe spirit. "I only mark the hours that shine."

Mother wanted her to be an authoress, she records. Her earliest dream was to become an actress—"but how?" Eva Beale, who is at pains to emphasize what a loving family it was in the early days, says, "I think it was a safe haven for her always to be with her mother. They had such a wonderful bond that nobody could break through."

Including all of her boyfriends. In a revealing entry, she is racked with guilt for feeling love for a boy: "There are lots of 11-year-old children who think they know the meaning of love, when they honestly haven't any idea," she writes. "I have two great loves in my life. First, I love my mother, which will always go on, never be forgotten or forsaken. Most children think that mother love is a thing taken for granted, isn't it? Second, my buzzing love for a boy, no mere crush, but a true, steady love."

She signs off by swearing her love for Mother will supersede all others. Her letters to Mother always end "With ladles and ladles of kisses, loves & hugs—your ever precious, ever loving and ever darling and kissable Edes."

Little Edie dated Howard Hughes and likely had proposals from Joe Kennedy Jr. and J. Paul Getty, says Eva Beale, but always she sent her suitors away. In a final act of negation, she tore out the faces of her boyfriends from the photographs she saved, so only her image remained, solitary and sad.

Her first chance to separate from her mother came in 1934, when she entered Miss Porter's, the famous finishing school in Farmington, Connecticut. At 17, she modeled for Macy's. But her father, Phelan Beale, was violently opposed to his daughter's being on public display in any way. Phelan worked for his father-in-law, the imperious Major Bouvier, in his Wall Street law firm Bouvier, Caffey and Beale, and he was desperate to preserve their status in the Park Avenue Social Register, which wasn't easy, given Big Edie's behavior. She had always shocked the stiffs at the Maidstone Club by singing operettas and spouting Christian Science and shunning garden parties in favor of what she called "the artistic life."

Although Edie's father congratulated himself for not going under in 1929, he did gradually run out of money. In a sober letter written in 1934, shortly before he divorced her, Phelan directed Big Edie to hide the truth from their daughter. "She will think we're at the poorhouse," he wrote, sounding suicidally depressed. "It will rob all her joy."

In the early seventies, Edie Beale would invite me to meet her at the beach (away from Mother) to hear about her many aborted attempts to escape. I ran away from home three times. First to Palm Beach; everyone thought I'd eloped with Bruce Cabot, the movie actor—I didn't even know him! I never did anything but flirt—you know, the southern belle. My father brought me back. He'd always thought my mother was crazy because she was an artist. Then I went into interpretive dancing and ran away to New York."

She moved into the Barbizon Hotel for proper ladies on the East Side. "On the sly, a friend sent me to Max Gordon [the famous Broadway producer]," she told me. "The minute he saw me, he said, ‘You're a musical comedienne.' I said, ‘That's funny, I did Shakespearean tragedy at Spence.' Max Gordon said the two were very close. I was all set to audition for the Theatre Guild that summer. I modeled for Bach¬rach while I was waiting for the summer to audition. Someone squealed to my father. Do you know, he marched up Madison Avenue and saw my picture and put his fist right through Mr. Bachrach's window!"

She continued to dream of becoming famous for something other than being Jackie's cousin. But the Gordian knot that had always tied her to her mother appears to have locked for good in Little Edie's mid-thirties.

Scandalized by Big Edie's theatrics and running out of money, Phelan had divorced her by telegram, from Mexico, ran off with a young thing, and left his ex-wife in the 28-room house a block from the sea. Major Bouvier constantly wrote to his daughter telling her to quit going to the club and to sell Grey Gardens. Mother refused. When she showed up at her son's wedding dressed like an opera star, Major Bouvier cut her out of his will. Big Edie slumped into depression and blew up with weight. Later, she could no longer afford to send her daughter grocery money in New York, and Little Edie lacked any capacity to support herself.

"Did you ever go for the audition?" I asked, desperate for the end of the story.

"Oh, no. Mother got the cats. That's when she brought me down from New York to take care of them."

There may have been a final fit of rebellion shortly after Little Edie moved back to Grey Gardens, as later described to me by John Davis. Little Edie's hair had begun to fall out in her twenties; the family now ascribes it to a stress-borne illness; hence the constant head-coverings. But cousin John told me about a summer afternoon when he watched Little Edie climb a catalpa tree outside Grey Gardens. She took out a lighter. He begged her not to do it.

She set her hair ablaze. And in that act of self-immolation, she sealed her fate as a prisoner of the love of her mother.

The resolution of the two discards was to become defiant iconoclasts. If they couldn't have a public audience, they would live out the musical in their heads and use each other as their audience. Little Edie amused herself by writing poetry, drawing genius" dress designs, creating scrapbooks, and occasionally sneaking off to a party where she would dance by herself, flying her scarves, like an Isadora Duncan possessed. "They were very brave," says Eva Beale. "They sold off their Tiffany pieces item by item."

Passed over by history, the ladies of Grey Gardens were left to the wreck of their lives until, sweet revenge! In the sixties, they were suddenly being indulged by a nervous White House. Secret Service cars were posted outside. As Davis recalls in his book, the Kennedy inauguration gave Little Edie a chance for her own theatrics. She reminded Joe Kennedy Sr. that she was once almost engaged to his firstborn son. And if Joe's plane hadn't gone down while he was bombing Nazis, "she probably would have married him, and he would have become President instead of Jack and she would have become First Lady instead of Jackie!"

After my story, it was in fact Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis who came to their rescue with a $25,000 check for a cleanup, on the condition the town would let them stay. In 1975, the Maysles brothers persuaded the Beales to vamp for the film that would become a cult classic (hard as it may be to fathom, the house as seen in the documentary was actually tidier than when I'd visited it). The ladies hoped to get money from the deal, says Eva, though they never saw a penny. It did, however, make them famous.

When Big Edie died two years later, no one believed that Little Edie could survive their folie à deux by herself. But her optimism was only part delusional. It also helped her to live another quarter-century on her own. She held out against selling Grey Gardens as a teardown, until, in 1979, Sally Quinn and Ben Bradlee promised to restore it and paid $220,000.

Little Edie called to tell me she was ready to move back to New York, at last. Her exhilaration made her sound 19 again. A brief splash singing in Manhattan cabarets delighted her, no matter how the critics mocked it. She later moved to Bal Harbour, Florida, and swam every day until close to her death at the age of 84.

Had the two prisoners of Grey Gardens not been born in a prefeminist era, I believe they could have become stars. Certainly, that's what Little Edie had in mind when she titled the childhood composition book in which she wrote poetry: Edith Beale, Celebrated Poet, Author and Artist.

Wow! There's a lot here had I didn't know! It's nice to see it all compiled together.

The truth about people I've come to love is hard to read sometimes, but I'm glad to have an even better sense of Edie's life.

Source

Reminder: Christine Ebersole on The View today

Don't forget! Christine Ebersole will be on The View today! In the Hamptons, it airs at 11 a.m. on ABC. Check your local listings to find the airtime in your area. The other guests on the show will be Hugh Jackman and Kate Winslet.

Source: here, here, and here

Christine Ebersole's history

God, I love her. Anyone who buys boots and hats instead of real estate... is probably a good choice to play Little Edie!

From New York Daily News, by Michael Giltz, on 29 October 2006

Christine Ebersole blooms in 'Grey Gardens'

When actress Christine Ebersole was a young girl growing up in Winnetka, Ill., she would sneak off by herself to Sacred Heart Church during lunch break at school.

"I would stop in the Catholic church," says Ebersole, who was raised a Unitarian but sometimes went to the church with her neighbors. "No one would be there and I'd look around and I'd start singing in Latin, just what I remembered from the Mass. It wasn't to show off. It was just to connect."

Now theatergoers are headed to "Grey Gardens" to worship Ebersole. Adapted from the cult 1975 documentary by Albert and David Maysles, the musical, opening Thursday at the Walter Kerr Theater, tells the story of Edith "Big Edie" Beale and her daughter, "Little Edie" Beale, relatives of Jackie O who fell from the heights of society to living in a crumbling, Gothic East Hampton mansion called Grey Gardens, surrounded by cats and raccoons and creeping memories.

In Act I (set in 1941), Ebersole plays the 50-ish Big Edie, who hopes to steal the limelight at her young daughter's engagement party by planning a miniconcert of her own. In Act II (set in 1973), Ebersole becomes Little Edie (with Mary Louise Wilson playing the now 80-ish Big Edie), a droll, paranoiac woman with odd fashion sense who shuffles around the tumble-down estate and battles with her mother.

Ebersole says that in preview performances and in the show's previous hit Off-Broadway incarnation, audiences fell silent watching Little Edie's painful vulnerability.

"To have that experience is so powerful, because everyone's connecting to that part of themselves that understands [how] we're all the same," says Ebersole. "We all identify with the humanity of that."

The 53-year-old actress is clearly feeling like she has come in from the wilderness. As Ebersole, who lives in Maplewood, N.J., reclines on a couch in her dressing room, she talks passionately about politics, delves into childhood memories and recounts missteps alongside accomplishments.

After an early stage triumph in a revival of "Oklahoma!" - followed immediately by a turn in "Camelot" in 1980, as Guenevere opposite Richard Burton and Richard Harris, stage and screen Arthurs - Ebersole was in the second wave of "Saturday Night Live's" Not Ready for Prime-Time Players in 1981, with Eddie Murphy and Joe Piscopo. She lasted one season.

Then she moved to Los Angeles, doing small roles in major films like "Tootsie" (1982) and "Amadeus" (1984), and, after briefly returning to Broadway for the ill-fated "Harrigan & Hart" in 1985, began a run of TV guest spots. She starred in sitcoms that didn't make it (Ted Danson's "Ink") or family movies that didn't bring in families ("Richie Rich," "My Favorite Martian").

In 1999, an agent helpfully told Ebersole she was over the hill.

"Success [on TV] depended on things outside my control. It depended on my Q rating" - a system by which a performer's appeal is tracked - "or my age or my looks. Talent didn't have to figure in. What made me leave L.A. - and my husband and I decided it together - was a faith that I could put my talents to [better] use," she says.

Her faith was rewarded with a role in Gore Vidal's "The Best Man." Then in 2001, she won a Tony for her turn in the hit revival of "42nd Street." A year later, she was nominated for "Dinner at Eight."

When "Grey Gardens" opened Off-Broadway earlier this year, Doug Wright's book, Scott Frankel's score and Michael Korie's lyrics all earned raves, but it was Ebersole who made heads spin. Its arrival on Broadway has been much anticipated, thanks to her. So now instead of being over the hill, she has reached her peak.

"As you get older, the field narrows," she says. "But within the narrowing of that field came the role of a lifetime." And though she feels she returned at the right time, a bit of the Beale sisters seems to haunt her.

"My only regret is that I didn't buy real estate in New York!" she says with a laugh. "I spent all my money on boots and hats. My whole agenda was, spend everything you have. And now ... well, let's just say I'm hoping to get out of debt by Christmas!"

Source

Reminder: Grey Gardens on TCM tonight (29 Oct) at 8:00 p.m. with Christine Ebersole and Mary Louise Wilson as guests

From TCM

The airing of Grey Gardens on TCM will be introduced by Robert Osborne with special guests Christine Ebersole and Mary Louise Wilson from Grey Gardens: The Musical.

You can also send a Grey Gardens e-card through the TCM website.

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The Beales of Grey Gardens - now available for pre-order!

It's available on its own and paired with Grey Gardens.

And we finally see what the DVD covers look like!

The Beales of Grey Gardens
Criterion Collection DVD

Grey Gardens & The Beales of Grey Gardens
Criterion Collection DVD Set

The release date for each movie is 5 December 2006. No guarantee that that won't change again, though...

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Video clip of The Beales of Grey Gardens

There's now a Myspace page for The Beales of Grey Gardens, and it has the first video clip of the movie that I've seen on the Internet:

The Living Moment

Hurrah!

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Christine Ebersole on the radio

Our girl's doing interviews! She's absolutely charming in interviews; I bet her personality alone will prompt people to want to see the musical!

From the Grey Gardens Musical Myspace Blog

Christine Ebersole will be a guest on The Joan Hamburg Show (with guest host Joan Rivers) on WOR Radio tomorrow morning, Friday, October 27th from 10:30AM to 11AM. WOR Radio is located on the dial at 710 AM and can also be heard live online at www.wor710.com.

Joan is a huge fan of the Grey Gardens!

Source

Video interviews with Christine Ebersole and Michael Sucsy

Christine Ebersole is interviewed on film by Gina Glickman for Hamptons.com

Hamptons.com Main Street Series presents an interview with award winning actress Christine Ebersole. You can find this talented lady starring on Broadway in the musical "Grey Gardens". Gina Glickman hosts.

As is Michael Sucsy

Hamptons.com Main Street Series presents an interview with Director Mike Sucsy. Gina Glickman hosts this conversation about his upcoming project, "Grey Gardens" starring Drew Barrymore.

Ebersole is adorable! And it's great to see her express her love of Big Edie and Little Edie.

I'm most impressed that Sucsy had access to Little Edie's diaries and letters and poetry. It's great to hear that Jessica Lange and Drew Barrymore were already fans of the Maysles film. Apparently the film covers quite a length of time in the Beales' lives, with Drew playing Little Edie from age 22 on. The film will be shot in New York City and in East Hampton.

It's great to see that people connected with telling the Edies' stories care about them and show an understanding of their lives. If only the host had done a little research herself...

It would be great if Al Maysles followed through and made a documentary about the making of the feature film.

Thanks to our anonymous contributer for passing this on!

Please also feel free to send me any Grey Gardens-related news.

Source: here and here

Long overdue: Little Edie Paper Dolls!

I can't believe that these haven't been made before. They're wonderful, and an obvious Grey Gardens plaything.

From eBay seller bxtny (Bruce Lennon)

Little Edie

Cut Out Paper Doll with 6 Outfits

Includes:

• Cover page with 9" cut-out paper doll & stand (printed on card stock)
• 3 pages of outfits (6 total)
• All pages are unbound and enclosed in a clear poly sleeve.

Source

Grey Gardens the house and Grey Gardens the musical

From SF Gate, by Michael Kuchwara, on 25 October 2006

Reimagining Grey Gardens on Stage

At one time it was a wreck, out of place in the world of beautifully manicured lawns and perfectly maintained homes in East Hampton, N.Y. Now this house in all its former, ramshackled glory is at the center of "Grey Gardens," a Broadway musical that tells the story of two unique, eccentric women and the mansion in which they once lived.

Its combative residents were Edith Bouvier Beale and her daughter, "Little" Edie Beale, aunt and first cousin of Jacqueline Onassis. Mother and daughter, played by Mary Louise Wilson and Christine Ebersole in the musical, lived in squalor (along with dozens of cats and a few raccoons), surrounded by one of the country's wealthiest resort communities.

The turn-of-the-century Long Island home has been created on the stage of the Walter Kerr Theatre by set designer Allen Moyer. Act 1 of the musical, which has a book by Doug Wright and a score by Scott Frankel and Michael Korie, is set in 1941 when the house was in pristine condition; the second act takes place some three decades later when everything, including the Beales, had deteriorated.

"By modern Hamptons standards, it's a small house," says Moyer, who has designed such Broadway shows as "Twelve Angry Men" and "The Little Dog Laughed," as well as operas and ballets. "There are no huge, massive rooms in it, but it is graciously designed.

"Most of my design work (for the musical) was done before I ever got into the house," says Moyer, who got many of his ideas from details in the celebrated 1975 documentary about the Beales — also called "Grey Gardens" — by the Maysles Brothers.

The designer finally visited Grey Gardens last December, before the musical began an off-Broadway run earlier this year at Playwrights Horizons. "I wanted to make sure I wasn't doing anything wrong," he explains. "The room that most of the movie was filmed in is shockingly small."

One of the things Moyer likes about the house is that its current owners--Ben Bradlee, former executive editor of The Washington Post, and his wife, writer Sally Quinn — are "aware of the fact that they live in a famous house."

For example, when you walk into Grey Gardens, there is a powder room underneath the stairs and on the wall there's a poster from the movie right above the sink, he says.

The couple purchased the house more than 25 years ago, according to Quinn, who knew of the mansion because of its notoriety — the falling-down home where relatives of Onassis and her younger sister, Lee Radziwill, lived.

"I wanted to see it just as sightseer — I had no thought of buying it," Quinn recalls. By then Edith Bouvier Beale was dead and "Little" Edie (who died in 2002 in Miami Beach) had put the place up for sale.

The real estate agent refused to enter the house with her because of the cats and the fleas, Quinn says, adding that when David and Albert Maysles made their movie, they wore flea collars.

"The house was so overgrown with weeds and vines. They were 11 feet high. You could not see the garden. We had to take their word for it that there was a garden wall there. And the smell (in the house) was beyond anything you could imagine."

Yet it didn't deter Quinn, who stared back at raccoons running around the structure, whose back portion was wide open, flapping in the wind; "Little" Edie still lived in the house, which had more than two dozen rooms.

"When I walked into the house, I could see the proportions of the rooms. They were just great. I said, `This is the most beautiful house I have ever seen.' And Edie said, `It's yours. You're meant to have this house.'"

Then Quinn went into the living room and began plunking the keys of a piano, which promptly collapsed. "That's when Edie twirled around and said, `Isn't it (the house) just great. All it needs is a coat of paint,'" Quinn recalls.

"Little" Edie had had a number of offers for Grey Gardens, but she turned them down, according to Quinn, because the prospective buyers wanted to tear down the house. Quinn and her husband bought the house for $220,000 (with all the furniture in it)--and then spent two to three times that to restore the tottering structure.

On the day of the closing, Quinn and her mother were in the sun room at Grey Gardens when she felt the presence of another person.

It was a local resident, an artist named "Lois," who told them, "I've brought you a message from 'Big' Edie (who) wants you to know that she is so happy that you have bought this house and that she is going to watch over this house for you and make sure that everything goes perfectly. You will have no problems at all."

And then, according to Quinn, the woman turned around and disappeared.

Ebersole, who received rave reviews for her performance during the musical's off-Broadway run, has twice visited Grey Gardens."

"The vibe is very serene," the actress says. "It doesn't feel like anything is disturbed or disrupted. It's almost as if the house was restored to its original splendor--and then some. I felt as though it was a 'living' space. You didn't feel like you were walking into a museum."

As Quinn puts it, Grey Gardens is "a happy house, not sad. That moment when I first walked in there, even in its total disrepair, I just felt great vibes. For all their struggles and all the pain and the way they lived, in their minds there was something happy about the two of them, their life."

"In the confines of their life, what they had become, they were unencumbered. In a sense, they were free," Ebersole says.

Source

Christine Ebersole on The View to promote the Grey Gardens musical

According to Playbill, The View hostess Rosie O'Donnell (a huge fan of musicals) has a number of Broadway stars scheduled as guests for the show over the next few weeks.

On 30 October, Christine Ebersole, who plays Big Edie in Act 1 and Little Edie in Act 2 of Grey Gardens the Musical, is scheduled to perform and be interviewed.

Note that on 29 October (the evening before her View appearance), Christine Ebersole will be on TCM (Turner Classic Movies) when the documentary Grey Gardens airs. Robert Osborne will interview both Ebersole and Mary Louise Wilson prior to and concluding the film.

Source: here, here, here, and here

NYT on the Grey Gardens fan phenomenon

It's always fun to get attention!

By Zachary Pincus-Roth, on 22 October 2006, from the New York Times

Devoted Worshipers in a House of Glorious Decay

The composer Scott Frankel was walking down Commercial Street in Provincetown, Mass., when an angry young man approached him. The stranger was a fan of "Grey Gardens"--the 1975 documentary about two eccentric relatives of Jackie Kennedy living in a filthy, raccoon-infested East Hampton mansion--and had heard Mr. Frankel was planning to compose a stage musical version.

"He went on this screaming diatribe about 'How could I? How could I desecrate, dilute, defile and destroy their lives?,' " Mr. Frankel recalled. "I dutifully invited him to a performance, and he's now a convert."

Mr. Frankel and the other creators of the musical "Grey Gardens," which reopens on Broadway Nov. 2 after a successful Off Broadway run, were aware that fans of the mother, Edith Bouvier Beale, called Big Edie, and of her daughter, who had the same name and is called Little Edie, were extremely sensitive. "People who are rabid fans," he said, "are fiercely protective of Little Edie in particular, and her legacy."

The movie "Grey Gardens" attained cult status, in part, by attracting social outsiders who saw its quirky heroines as kindred spirits. The film's following spread through costume parties as Little Edie's outlandish style of dress turned her into a fashion icon. Within gay circles, bootleg VHS copies of the film were passed from person to person. These days, fans pass around DVD's and engage in occasionally heated debates on the "Grey Gardens" Yahoo discussion group, which has received more than 8,000 posts this year. They create videos on YouTube, one of which has images of Little Edie dancing synched up to Madonna's "Hung Up."

Clearly, the musical has already won over some fans. "I was ready to massacre it, but I ended up enjoying it," said the openly gay singer-songwriter Rufus Wainwright, who wrote and performed a song called "Grey Gardens" for his 2001 album, "Poses."

During the show's original run, at Playwrights Horizons, a group of women flew in from Seattle dressed as Little Edie, with pinned brooches or scarves over their heads. A mother and daughter from Raleigh, N.C., both named Carolyn Houy, saw it nine times off Broadway and booked nine Broadway performances. The younger Carolyn raved about everyone involved. "Her voice shimmers like moonlight on the waves of East Hampton," she said of Christine Ebersole, who plays Big Edie in the first act, set in 1941, and Little Edie in the second act, set in 1973. Of Mr. Frankel, she said, "He could have walked with Puccini, Mozart and Verdi."

Ms. Ebersole said that at Playwrights Horizons she was constantly receiving backstage admirers, one of whom had seen the show 13 times. Of such visitors, she said, "a lot of times people will be uncontrollably crying." She added, "My response is to sort of hold them in my arms."

David Hanbury, an actor who says he has seen the film at least 20 times, embraced the musical. "I'm used to watching 'Grey Gardens' with one or two people," he said. "To sit in an audience and see that it's not just this cult thing, that everyone gets it, is inon the joke, is thrilling." Some fans did not like the creators toying with the scenes they knew well. "The moments that bother me are the ones where the dialogue has been extended for dramatic effect," said Kevin Hertzog, a prop stylist and a friend of Mr. Frankel, who said he cannot go two months without seeing the film.

Eva Weiss, a fan who signs her posts to the Yahoo group "Little Evie," said some sections felt "strange," like Ms. Ebersole's impersonation of Little Edie during the song "The Revolutionary Costume for Today," which is based on a famous scene in the documentary. "It's very cartoony, it's almost like a caricature of Little Edie," she said. Ms. Weiss said she felt more comfortable later in the show, when Ms. Ebersole is "not imitating Little Edie's voice, and she's just singing these beautiful, sad songs."

Winning the loyalty of the original "Grey Gardens" fans is a hurdle that the film director Michael Sucsy also faces. He is making a movie about the Beales, with Drew Barrymore and Jessica Lange. Mr. Sucsy said that he had done extensive research, poring through Little Edie's private letters, journals and poetry, and that his film, which will stretch from the mid-1930's to 1979, will be faithful to her story.

"It's not an exploitation," he said. "We're not doing 'Grey Gardens: The Action Movie'."

Albert Maysles, one of the directors of the original documentary, has no problem with either the musical or the film. "The more people who react to it with whatever they have to say about it, the better," he said. He is even planning to turn audio clips from the movie into cellphone ring tones. He recently compiled unused sequences from "Grey Gardens" into a new film, "The Beales of Grey Gardens," which is now in a handful of theaters nationwide and will be on DVD in December.

In the end, though, given the harsh realities of Broadway, the problem won't be appeasing the fans but appealing to everyone else. Ms. Ebersole said that while she could detect when fans were in the audience, there were also plenty of performances when it was clear that not everyone got it: "There were nights when I would come out there and you could feel that the audience didn't know what the hell was going on."

The producer Margo Lion, who is not involved with "Grey Gardens," said that her show "Hairspray" was successful because it appealed to "a broader market" than the cult film it was based on. "You're not doing something with a brand name that's going to drive groups and individual ticket buyers in large numbers," she said.

Based on his observations of the Broadway audiences' reaction so far, Mr. Frankel said, "I would think the vast majority have not seen the documentary." He suggested that the show has enough universal elements to appeal to a larger public and pointed out that it does not only appeal to gay males but also to older women, a big theatergoing demographic. "They're responding to the notion that these women are able to express themselves, and they're able to be more authentic versions of themselves and not having to please men," he said. And what about the Beales? How would they have reacted to this? In "The Beales of Grey Gardens," Little Edie says, "I don't want anybody playing me." But Walter Newkirk, a publicist in New Jersey and a fan who befriended Little Edie before she died in 2002, said she knew a musical was planned.

"She thought it would be a smash on Broadway," Mr. Newkirk said. "Those were her words to me."

Source

Sitting down with Erin Davie, the musical's new young Little Edie

From Broadway.com, by Joe Tropia, on 19 October 2006

Erin Davie

Age

"I'm in my 20s—and that's the truth!"

Hometown

Nashville, Tennessee

Currently

Making her Broadway debut as budding debutante "Little" Edie Beale in Grey Gardens.

Beginnings

Davie felt the call of the stage after seeing her first show, a touring production of Cats. "God bless tours!" she says with a laugh. "My mom dragged me, and I loved it. I wasn't a movie fan; I got the acting bug purely through the stage." After earning a theater degree from Boston Conservatory, Davie landed an agent, moved to New York and won roles in the national tours of The Music of Andrew Lloyd Webber and Swing! Later, however, she faced the tougher realities of making a living as a performer. "A lot of people are interested in you right out of school because you're young and fresh," she says. "But then there was a time when I didn't work for a year." That led to a period of painful self-doubt Davie cautions young performers against falling prey to. "When you don't get work, you just have to keep your chin up," she says. "There are so many great people who are working hard, and their hearts are so big—I feel for them."

Mother, Darling

The night before her audition, Davie watched the celebrated 1975 Grey Gardens documentary, which forms the basis for the second act of the musical. The film's portrayal of the strange dynamic between middle-aged Little Edie (played onstage by Christine Ebersole) and her invalid mother, "Big" Edie (played by Mary Louise Wilson), struck a familiar chord with the young actress, who plays a young and innocent Little Edie in Act One. "Everybody always says, 'Oh, she's so crazy!' Davie notes of Little Edie, "and I'm like, 'No, I get it!' I come from a family of seven, and I grew up in one of the most dilapidated houses in the nicest neighborhood in Nashville. We were poor and there was a lot of bickering. I have family members who remind me of these people. I understand why they are the way they are."

The Girl Who Has Everything

Davie was working in a temp job late last summer when she got the call to come in the following day and present three scenes and sing two songs from Grey Gardens. Upon winning the highly coveted part, "My first thought was, 'Edie's probably up there helping me out,'" she says. "Have you ever felt like something's about to happen? This just felt really right." Joining an established company filled with theater notables proved to be a seamless experience, she adds, particularly her partnership with Ebersole, who plays Big Edie in Act One. "She's so comfortable being still onstage, which is something I'm working on," she says of Ebersole. "I'm that young, active, can't-sit-still person. I am learning so much from her."

Change Is Good

Well into previews, the creative team of Grey Gardens continued to tweak the show. In fact, as this interview began, Davie was studying a new prologue and opening being put in at that evening's performance—but she wasn't complaining. "As a temp sitting in an office, I felt my creativity shrinking away," she explains. "I think a lot of artistic people feel that way. I'm thrilled to be up here running around. I'm like, 'Give me a new page!'" The only down side: Davie's ear for accents has her speaking in Little Edie's patrician Yankee tones both on and offstage. "I'll have to reprogram myself after this show is done," she jokes.

Feeling the Love

"People come here and have a real human experience," Davie says of Grey Gardens audiences. "It touches them personally." She feels the same way: "I'm crying by the end of this show every night. Everybody can relate to having a parent getting older. Musicals tend to be funny and fluffy, but this is a meaningful, beautiful story that happens to be a musical. Everybody who sees it loves it, and that's why you should see it, too—aside from the fact I'm in it!"

Meet the Press

As she heads toward opening night, Davie is beginning to enjoy the perks of a high-profile show, including being the focus of a Broadway.com feature she's a fan of reading. "When you're at a temp job, you look at Broadway.com all day," she says, laughing. "You're like, 'Who's the new Fresh Face? Aww, who's that? How did she get that job?' Now I can't be all bitchy about it. Good for them and for me and all the others to come. I'm just so happy to be here."

Source

About Grey Gardens the Musical and Christine Ebersole

An interesting piece on the Grey Gardens musical

From Edward Copeland on Film, on 14 October 2006, by Josh R, via this very blog

A musical with more cats than CATS

You may or may not know that Broadway is, in fact, the longest residential street in the world. It extends from the southern tip of Manhattan 150 miles north to Albany, NY, where it comes to quiet halt, incongruously flanked by modestly apportioned tract houses with neatly groomed lawns... a far cry from the glittering, gaudy majesty of Times Square. In truth, Broadway's reach extends much further than that - all the way to the soundstages of Hollywood, California. For much of the 20th Century, The Dream Factory took its cues from The Great White Way, often plundering some of its greatest successes for film adaptation. Many of the most beloved movie musicals ever made--including Best Picture winners West Side Story, My Fair Lady and The Sound of Music -- began their lives on Broadway.

In recent years, however, a curious phenomenon has begun to take shape, as the two entities have enjoyed an increasingly reciprocal relationship. Just as Hollywood continues to turn stage hits into films -- Chicago, Rent, The Phantom of the Opera, and the upcoming Dreamgirls, to cite a few recent examples -- so has Broadway begun adapting successful films into stage musicals. Four of the last nine Tony Award winners for Best Musical are based on feature films -- The Lion King, The Producers, Hairspray and "Spamalot," the last of an adaptation of Monty Python and the Holy Grail.

"Grey Gardens," which began previews at the Walter Kerr Theatre on Oct. 3 in anticipation of a Nov. 2 opening, is the latest example of this growing trend, albeit one with a curious twist. This musical draws its inspiration not from a scripted fiction-based film, but from a documentary. It is the first (and is likely to stand as the only) instance of a documentary being used as the basis of a Broadway musical.

Continuing...

The film, which has acquired a cult standing since its premiere in 1975, examines the fallen fortunes of two women, both named Edith Bouvier Beale - an eccentric mother and daughter who inhabit the titular estate. Since they share a name, they distinguish themselves as Big and Little Edie, respectively. Their celebrity standing, as far as the outside world is concerned, owes itself to family connections -- Big Edie is the aunt of Jacqueline (Bouvier) Kennedy Onassis. Once well-regarded members of the social elite, by the early 70s the two women were discovered living an impoverished, isolated existence in Grey Gardens, a dilapidated 28-room Easthampton mansion overrun by over fifty stray cats and an assortment of raccoons; judging by the looks of things, the terms 'squalor' only barely scratches the surface. The New York Board of Health had authorized a survey of the house, once considered a showplace, and subsequently declared it to be "unfit for human habitation" as a result of their findings. The media coverage surrounding these events prompted an eventual, if somewhat shamefaced, intervention by an embarrassed Mrs. Onassis. Although long-estranged from her black-sheep relations, she dispatched a task force of construction workers and pest-control experts to Long Island to get the mansion (barely) back up to code to forestall condemnation of the property and the eviction of its tenants. Even more significantly, filmmakers Albert and David Maysles were motivated to track down the reclusive pair, and film them over a period of months.

The film is an oddity, alternately shocking, touching, and mordantly humorous in its consideration of two larger-than-life eccentrics living on the margins of society. The musical, which I saw in its off-Broadway premiere at Playwrights Horizons last spring, attempts to provide some context for the women's behavior, giving a glimpse of what their lifestyle was before it all came apart at the seams. The first act takes place in the summer of 1941, when Grey Gardens is at the peak of its splendor and WWII is still just a rumble on the horizon. Prominent socialite Edith Bouvier Beale, played by Christine Ebersole, is preparing an elaborate party at her Long Island estate to celebrate her daughter's engagement to Joseph Kennedy Jr. (the younger incarnation of the daughter was played by Sara Gettelfinger at Playwrights Horizons, and has been replaced by Erin Davie for the Broadway production). Mother and daughter have a complicated and often contentious relationship, exacerbated by the fact that both are natural "performers" competing for the spotlight and the attentions of a physically (and emotionally) absent husband/father. Subconsciously afraid of being abandoned, Big Edie eventually sabotages the relationship between her daughter and her fiance, and the engagement is dissolved. Little Edie resolves to leave Grey Gardens, but her attempts to extricate herself from the role of her mother's keeper are ultimately doomed to failure.

The second act picks up where the documentary begins -- with Ebersole switching gears to take on the role of the daughter, while Mary Louise Wilson assumes the role of the mother - and follows the action of the film very closely. Big Edie, now a bedridden, 80-year-old harridan munching on cat food, fondly recalls her days as a prominent socialite and would-be opera singer while singing along in a shrill voice to ancient gramophone recordings. 56-year-old Little Edie, a one-time debutante who counted Howard Hughes, Nelson Rockefeller and John Paul Getty among her suitors, now drifts through the abandoned rooms in a variety of outlandishly bizarre garments (fashioned out of materials as unlikely as duvet covers and old curtains) recounting her triumphs and disappointments to the odd visitor in breathless, stream of-consciousness fashion. Nursing old wounds that never fully healed, the two women seem suspended in a sort of existential limbo where time has little meaning - their sanity eroded by years of neglect and thwarted ambitions, they squabble over decades-old slights and conflicting versions of their shared history. Their relationship is contentious, but not without love -- forged in co-dependency, it makes them protective of one another even when airing their resentments.

If this all sounds rather strange, it is, really. But truth, as they say, is often stranger than fiction, and the musical successfully captures the essence of the film, highlighting the absurdity of its outrageous subjects without reducing them to caricatures - which would have been the obvious temptation given how easily the material might lend itself to grand guignol (or worse, full-on camp). If the show falls short in certain respects -- it does feel like two very different musicals awkwardly shoehorned into one -- it is a beautifully mounted production, masterfully directed by Michael Greif (Rent), with an excellent score by newcomers Scott Frankel and Michael Korie. Doug Wright's libretto feels oddly stilted in the first act, but flows more naturally in the second when adhering directly to the dialogue from the film. What really distinguishes the production is the performance of Christine Ebersole, giving twin tour-de-forces in two very different roles which collectively give full expression to the broad spectrum of her talents.

Through far from a household name, the actress has worked regularly since the late 1970s, achieving a moderate degree of recognition as a character actress in television and film. For the first 20 years or so, she seemed like a talent in search of a home -- her career seemed to consist mainly of false starts, enticing if fleeting indicators of an untapped potential. A classically trained soprano, she succeeded Madeleine Kahn and Judy Kaye as leading lady in the Broadway production of "On the Twentieth Century," more than holding her own against Tony winners John Cullum and Kevin Kline. Two more high-profile Broadway assignments followed -- as Ado Annie in the acclaimed revival of "Oklahoma!", and Guinevere to Richard Burton's King Arthur in the actor's well-publicized return to the role he'd originated some 20 years earlier, in "Camelot." She scored an Emmy nomination for her work on the soap opera "One Live to Live," and had featured roles in Tootsie and Amadeus -- performing her own singing in the latter as a tempestuous soprano who becomes the composer's mistress. After an disappointing season on "Saturday Night Live," in which she was criminally underutilized, she made an ill-advised return to Broadway in the legendary flop "Harrigan 'n Hart" -- better known to history as the Mark Hamill musical. She owned her few minutes as grind-house stripper Tessie Tura in Bette Midler's televised version of "Gypsy," and found continued film work in projects as diverse as Kenneth Branagh's Dead Again, Clint Eastwood's True Crime, and the Chris Farley/David Spade starrer Black Sheep.

The turning point in a long career of seemingly unfulfilled potential came with the 2001 revival of "42nd Street." Her pristine vocals and well-honed comic delivery helped her to rise above the mediocrity of a production, and earned her a Tony Award for her efforts. Other stage work soon followed, including acclaimed performances in Lincoln Center's production of "Dinner at Eight," scoring another Tony nomination as a stand-in for Billie Burke, and off-B'way in Alan Bennett's "Talking Heads." In "Grey Gardens," she has found not one, but two roles of a lifetime, in a performance that has already netted her Drama Desk, Obie and Outer Critics Circle Awards, as well as a special citations from the New York Drama Critics Circle and The Drama League. Ben Brantley of The New York Times has hailed her performance as "one of the most gorgeous ever to grace a musical," which is not an overstatement.

The genius of Ebersole's work lies in her ability to navigate the extremes of both characters -- she can be side-splittingly funny in one moment and heartbreaking in the next, without missing a beat. As Big Edie, a preening peacock who regards the world as her own personal stage, she is a delightful contraction in terms -- the lofty, cultured imperiousness of a born grande dame coupled with the giddy enthusiasm of an attention-starved child basking in the glow of the spotlight. Blissfully unaware of her own ridiculousness, she treats everyone in her presence as an audience, with the breathtaking conviction of one who has never doubted that applause is her natural due; she literally comes equipped with her own accompanist. In the first act, Big Edie rehearses songs from her repertoire, which she intends to inflict upon the unsuspecting guests at her daughter's engagement party. Ebersole executes these pastiches with hammy relish -- including a hilarious minstrel number that would probably be considered in bad taste even by the standards of 1941. The brittle frivolity of this self-styled diva might brand her as a kind of outrageous, flaky cut-up in the Auntie Mame mold, if it weren't for the subtle flashes of panic and desperation that inform her neediness. The world that Big Edie has created for herself teeters on the brink of extinction -- her husband, children and lover are all on the verge of leaving her -- and the possibility of being left alone looms large on the horizon. A star cannot exist without satellites to orbit around it, and Big Edie fights desperately to keep her universe intact.

However, it is in the second act that the star of Ms. Ebersole shines the brightest. As the fretful child-woman only intermittently able to distinguish the line between fantasy and reality, her Little Edie is a mass of silly pretensions, wistful yearnings and seething resentments held on a slow boil over a period of decades. She inhabits the role with an eerie exactitude -- in addition to capturing the unique look and posture of her real life counterpart, she recreates Little Edie's distinctive voice and cadence with uncanny precision (the accent is too strange to describe -- imagine if John F. Kennedy and Katharine Hepburn had a daughter who grew up on Long Island). Rattling around the decaying house in grounds in a series of increasingly bizarre outfits with matching headdresses, she holds forth on a variety of topics in a style that might best be described as incontinent babbling -- most of what she says is totally irrational ("They can get you in Easthampton for wearing red shoes on a Thursday, and all that sort of thing"), but the intensity and conviction of the speaker commands a peculiar kind of respect. She's at her happiest when left to revel in delusions of fame and romance waiting just around the corner - it's those piercing moments of clarity, when forced to confront the bleak realities of her present and future, that reveal how lost she truly is.

If there's a style of song that Christine Ebersole can't sing, the creators of this show haven't found it. The act opens with a rib-tickling, Sondheim-esque patter number in which Edie describes, in fastidious detail, her ideas about fashion, "The Revolutionary Costume for Today." It ends with a bittersweet ballad, "Another Winter in a Summer Town," that in the actress's hands becomes a haunting, harrowing anthem of despair and loneliness. Emotionally as well as vocally, she runs the gamut, and it's spectacular to behold. Special praise must also be reserved for the delightful Mary Louise Wilson, who scores a triumph in her own right as the elderly Big Edie. Needling her hapless daughter with vicious little digs (all delivered with an innocuous smile) and deflecting all rebukes with brisk denials, her sunny air of self-satisfaction makes a marvelous foil for Ebersole's prickliness.

For anyone interested in seeing the original documentary, Turner Classic Movies will be airing it at 8 p.m. Eastern time Oct. 29. Host Robert Osborne will conduct interviews with Christine Ebersole and Mary Louise Wilson both prior to and at the conclusion of the broadcast.

Source

Clips of The Beales available and more Grey Gardens information from an insider!

From the Grey Gardens Yahoo Group, by Libra Man

Lois showed some clips from "The Beales" on the September 13th episode of her TV show. DVDs of that episode can be ordered directly from LTV at (631) 537-2777. I haven't seen clips from "The Beales" anywhere else, unfortunately.

She's actually done a number of "Grey Gardens"-related episodes:

Episode #	Title	Date
18340	Guest: Albert Maysles	10/19/02
6639	Regarding the Edith Bouvier Beales	1990
15715	Grey Gardens Special	5/25/99
	Guest: Jerry Torre	2/8/06
	Another Grey Gardens Show	3/1/06
	"The Beales of Grey Gardens"	9/13/06

In "The Beales" episode, there's a counter running on the tape. The video quality isn't as perfect as it will be on the official "Beales/Grey Gardens" DVD re-release, but it does include some great moments.

I'm ordering these now!

Source

Photos of Grey Gardens from the time of the raid

Wonderful, absolutely wonderful! Thanks to our friends at Grey Gardens the Musical for sending these in!

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Review of the musical's previews from Bloomberg

From Bloomberg, by Philip Boroff, on 6 October 2006

'Grey Gardens' Grows on Broadway

Fans of the 1975 documentary "Grey Gardens" helped make the musical of the same name a hit off- Broadway earlier this year. Now in previews on Broadway, the show seeks ticket buyers who don't know Grey Gardens from Grey Poupon.

Grey Gardens was the home in East Hampton, New York, of Edith Bouvier Beale and her daughter, Edie Beale, who were the aunt and cousin of Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy Onassis. At the time of the documentary, the Beales had fallen on hard times and were recluses in their 28-room dilapidated mansion, living among raccoons and 52 cats. And that's the show's upbeat second act.

In the first act, set in 1941, Edie prepares to marry Joseph Kennedy Jr. and is thwarted by her overbearing mother. (Kennedy and Beale were in fact briefly engaged, according to liner notes of the addictive cast album from PS Classics.)

Scott Frankel, the show's 43-year-old composer, said that following the end of the run at Playwrights Horizons in April 2006, he and the show's other creators sought to better connect the two halves. They're trying to establish a closer link between the conventional Edie of Act One and the oddball nasal shut-in of Act Two.

"You see more of a thread," he said of the show, now at the 975-seat Walter Kerr Theater. "A road map to how she got that way."

Putting It Together

Statuesque Sara Gettelfinger, who played young Edie off- Broadway, was replaced by Erin Davie. Frankel says that Davie more closely resembles Christine Ebersole, who plays Edith in the first act and the older Edie in the second, and was a critic's favorite.

Frankel, whose music recalls both Cole Porter and Sondheim, insists there's a Broadway audience for serious shows. He cited the 14-month run of Lincoln Center's "The Light in the Piazza."

"There is a hunger for more individual fare," he said. As for "Grey Gardens": "It's a powerful evening, but it's not like taking your medicine."

He's hopeful it appeals to cultists of the movie and those unfamiliar with it. "Everybody sees their own family in the show," he said. "There's love -- infused with resentment and anger."

See http://www.greygardensthemusical.com/.

And, sorry, but those liner notes were wrong.

Source

Short video tour of Grey Gardens and interview with Al Maysles

Your boy Buster must have really dropped the ball with this one! He can't believe that he didn't post this sooner! It's wonderful!

Jenny Mayer at Grey Gardens

I'd just like to see more of the house!

Source

Reviews of the musical's previews

I was waiting for an "official" source of reviews of the musical's previews to post here, but then it hit be after a couple of days of waiting: what really matters is what the fans think! So, here are some reviews from people like you and me: Grey Gardens fans!

Posted by: JLagow (JLagow@aol.com) 11:29 pm EDT 10/03/06

Grey Gardens - 1st Broadway preview tonight (spoilers) ...

Well, just got home from the 1st preview - I loved it as much as ever.

As mentioned before the beginning has been changed. I liked the fact that we now see Act II Little Edie in the prologue - I think it better prepares the audience for Little Edie's sharp decline between Act I and II. I also liked that Act II Little Edie starts singing the new song "The Girl Who Has Everything" and then disappears to let the song be finished by Act I Little Edie. It creates a connection between the two Little Edies. As for the new song, I really liked it

Three songs have been dropped - "Body Beautiful Beale", "Better Fall Out of Love", and "Tomorrow's Women". "Being Bouvier" has been reworked into "Marry Well" - a similar song but one, which appeared on first hearing, to be more appealing. And, although I really liked "Better Fall Out of Love", I also really liked its replacement, "Goin' Places".

The continuing cast were all better than ever, especially Bob Stillman, Mary Louise Wilson, and, of course it goes without seeing, Christine. And, I REALLY liked Erie Davie as Little Edie in Act I. She was more believable in the role and was able to demonstrate Little Edie's "madness"/ emotional problems more clearly (i.e. it was not such a shock to see Little Edie at the beginning of Act II). Also, on a side note, she was shorter than Matt, which made them more believable as a couple.

On a side note, to be fair to Sarah G., I happened to like her in the role and felt she got a lot of criticism that should have been directed at the book's characterization.

I missed the reprise of "Peas in a Pod" at the end but found the new ending with a reprise of "The Girl Who has Everything and then silent action more touching.

There is still work that needs to be done but the show is in great shape and ran very smoothly.

All in all, GG is still high on my all time favorites! I can't to go again in November.

Whoever else saw it tonight, please post! I want to see others' thoughts on the changes.

Posted by: drjohnjersey (webguru@judyandme.com) 01:00 am EDT 10/04/06

We just got home from the city...and saw GG tonight...SPOILERS

I will post more tomorrow after I sleep on this one. However, we saw the show several times off-Broadway and have to admit we liked it there much better than what we saw tonight. In fact we weren’t the only ones who felt this way as we spoke at length to a few people including a lovely group in the row right behind us (Row F House Left)

A few random observations before I turn in.

The prologue has to go. I beg you not to introduce documentary Edie until Act 2. It is such a let-down for her Act 2 entrance and really doesn't give her the chance to establish herself as her Mother in this Act. This WAS NOT what was broken about Act One downtown. So please give Christine back the lead in 5:15.

Please work with Act One Lil Edie. I know she is the newbie in this cast. However, she doesn't even attempt an accent. Nor does she hold up next Christine in the scenes they play together. She does have a gorgeous voice. But in tonight’s show that is where her contribution ended.

I do like some of the new book changes. In particular the additions for Brooks in Act One. However, some of the reduction in Gould’s part were disappointing. It should be noted Stillman is again a standout in this production.

I liked McMartin’s original song Being Bouvier better than the new Marry Well number.

I still don’t like the number between Joe and Lil Edie….despite the fact this is a new song. I didn’t think it was possible for two people to have less chemistry with each other than Cavenaugh and Gettelfinger. However, there was 0 chemistry between Erin and Matt onstage tonight.

I thought Mary Louise was really on tonight.

The new Lee is adorable.

I thought Christine’s two tour de force numbers were amazing. I like the new staging stage left of the memorabilia number. Another Winter was again brilliant…despite the larger theater and the several people clearing their throats and/or coughing around us….which is one thing I have to mention…this space is too big for this show. We were row E orchestra. However, there were a bunch of people in the balcony. I know these are clearly marked as obstructive view…however…they are really obstructed. We went up and took a look.

Please put back in Peas in A Pod to close this show. Going from Another Winter to Edie putting on a record. Is NOT an ending. It is a disappointment.

More to follow tomorrow. We will be attending the show 9 more times during previews.

John

Posted by: LJZIM 01:56 am EDT 10/04/06

re: We just got home from the city...and saw GG tonight...SPOILERS

I, too, attended the first preview tonight with much anticipation and excitement, having seen the off-Broadway production several times.

I agree with just about everything that drjohnjersey wrote.

My main complaint with the revisions is that not one of the new songs is an improvement over what was replaced. The adjustments to the script were fine and moved the story along in a clearer fashion.

Seeing Christine as Little Edie at the beginning of Act I was terrific but not worth what was sacrificed: the spine tingling transition of Big Edie into younger Edith's performance of "Toyland." It was one of the most magical & electrifying entrances by an actress on a musical stage that I've ever seen.

And the Act II ending was a letdown because the old ending (the reprise of "Peas in a Pod") perfectly depicted the complex and ongoing relationship of the two women: yelling and crying one moment and then pouring soup and singing together.

I also heard lots of chat during intermission (including some of the creative team) and after the show and no one seemed pleased with the changes. Granted, it was the first preview but my fingers are crossed that they put back a lot of what was taken out.

Posted by: clintonct 05:18 am EDT 10/04/06

re: We just got home from the city...and saw GG tonight...SPOILERS

I, too, could not wait for GG to be transferred to Broadway, and took a couple of vacation days to have a mini GG vacation. Having seen it a few times at PH, I was more than ready to be in the audience tonight and looking forward to the changes. Tonight's preview was enjoyable, but left me wanting more of the complexity, which I knew was there.

Drjohnjersey’s and ljzim's comments express my feelings too. The book changes work, and I realize the production team is trying to create a smooth transition between the two Acts; but let me reinforce, please bring back the original Toyland/Five-Fifteen/Body Beautiful Beale, with Ms. Ebersole leading Five- Fifteen.

Mary Louise Wilson is again fabulous. Ms. Ebersole appears to be energized by her. I'm sure Erin Davie will grow into the role, and will learn to hold her own along side of Ms. Ebersole. Sarah Gettelfinger improved miles by the last PH performances.

Didn't understand why Big Edie drinking with Gould was added. What did this add to the story?

And TWO PEAS IN A POD for the final scene, was the connection between the two acts, but this time it was Big Edie cheering Little Edie... totally heartfelt, but not tonight. If it ain't broken.... '...you liked your dancing - you were very good at that ... yeah' !

Posted by: VanSchenck 08:09 am EDT 10/04/06

Some answers

(1) Is "5:15" still in the show? I loved the number and thought it really established Big Edie.

It is, but as there is quite a bit of dialogue preceeding it, it lacks some of the impact it had before. I think it may have also been trimmed of a few lines.

(2)Have they given Christine any new numbers in the first act?

No, but you hear a bit of her on a 'record' singing "The Girl Who Had Everything" .

(3) Is "welcome to Grey Gardens" still there? (That number always made me cringe)

Yes.

(4) Does Jerry sing at all in this version?

No.

(5)Do they keep the dialogue portion from the reprise of "Two peas in a pod"?

No. It's a much darker and despairing finish.

Posted by: VanSchenck 11:56 pm EDT 10/03/06

They are on the right track with the changes

As much as I am sorry to lose the sparkling "Toyland/Five-Fifteen/Body Beautiful Beale" segment (much of the meat of it is still there, though diced up and given to other cast members during Act 1). The instinct to open with Christine as Little Edie is a good one, and serves to introduce the story to GREY GARDENS newbies, as is the gorgeous waltz "The Girl Who Had Everything". Of the other songs... I was not all that crazy about "Better Fall Out Of Love", but "Goin' Places" sounds like a temporary song used to hold the spot for a better replacement. But "Marrying Well" is a far better number than "Being Bouvier" it also emcompasses snatches of the cuy "Tomorrows Woman".

I also really liked Erin Davie for the same reason JLagow states above - at time she seemed a bit tentative here and there, but it WAS her first performance and I'm sure she'll settle in just fine. She totally got the RAGE at her mother, that made the scenes with Christine late in Act 1 especially powerful.

I thought Christine's version of "Will You" was especially magical tonight.

Act 2 is essentially unchanged except for the finale which I think is a great improvement. I love the "Peas In a Pod" reprise too...but on another level it was too cheerfully Vo-De-Oh upbeat coming right after the wrenching "Another Winter in a Summer Town". The "Girl Who Had Everything" reprise and last 'shot' of Christine staring out of the screen window with an expression of utter defeat and desolation, is a far tougher and more affecting way to conclude GREY GARDENS.

Posted On: 10/4/06 at 08:27 AM

re: GREY GARDENS - First Preview - SPOILERS GALORE

As much as I was sorry to lose the sparkling "Toyland/Five-Fifteen/Body Beautiful Beale" segment (much of the meat of it is still there, though diced up and given to other cast members during Act 1, though I miss Goulds' acrid musical commentary during it), the instinct to open with Christine as Little Edie is a good one, and serves to introduce the story to GREY GARDENS newbies, as is the gorgeous waltz "The Girl Who Had Everything". Of the other songs... I was not all that crazy about "Better Fall Out Of Love", but "Goin' Places" sounds like a temporary song used to hold the spot for a better replacement. But "Marrying Well" is a far better number than "Being Bouvier" and it also emcompasses snatches of the cut "Tomorrows Woman".

I also really liked Erin Davie. At times she seemed a bit tentative here and there, but it WAS her first performance and I'm sure she'll settle in just fine. She totally got the Little Edies unbalanced quality and RAGE at her mother, that made the scenes with Christine late in Act 1 especially powerful - it seemed right out of MILDRED PIERCE.

I thought Christine's version of "Will You" was especially magical tonight and "Another Winter In A Summer Town" was shattering. Christines face was wet with tears and she seemed totally empotionally spent for the rest of the act.

Act 2 is essentially unchanged except for the finale which I think is a great improvement. Yes, though I love the "Peas In a Pod" reprise too...but on another level it was too cheerfully Vo-De-Oh upbeat coming right after the wrenching "Another Winter in a Summer Town". The "Girl Who Had Everything" reprise and last 'shot' of Christine staring out of the screen window with an expression of utter defeat and desolation, is a far tougher and more affecting way to conclude GREY GARDENS.

But THIS IS ONLY THE FIRST PREVIEW. More changes are coming. I spoke to someone connected with the show during intermission who told me that "We are going to trying out lots of things. That's what previews are for."

Posted On: 10/4/06 at 08:29 AM

re: GREY GARDENS - First Preview

Yes, the house was full. It's the Kerr, so it's wicked small. If Cherry Jones can fill it for a year, Ebersole might be able to give 'em two.

In Act I, the prologue is way, WAY more explanatory than it was OB (at least as recorded on the cast recording). Michael Greif is fundamentally incapable of directing a show where there is a "gimmick" that ties two acts together. He failed to help audiences map the characters and provide exposition in RENT (the "relationship maps" didn't appear in the original Playbills but started showing up at the start of the Angel Tour); so, now, he overcompensates here.

BTW, the first song with Little Edie, Lee, and Jackie is wretched -- perhaps the most cloying, annoying, and shrill thing I've seen on stage ever. It's not on the OB cast recording but precedes "The Five-Fifteen." Two words -- CUT IT!