There was a time when no one would have dreamed of producing a show that wasn't character-driven. From the 1930s through the '60s, musicals were generally built around strong, colorful performers who weren't quite like anyone else. In the 1970s, however, the show began to take precedence over the performer, and by the 1980s, actors were talking about being on the "Fantine track" or the "Christine track": the trick now was to project a bland personality that could become an efficient cog in the machinery of Les Miz and Phantom — to fit in anywhere. As Mrs. Brice says in Funny Girl, a sponge fits in anywhere, so it's not difficult to understand why hard-line theater historians such as Ethan Mordden and Miles Kreuger have pronounced the Broadway musical dead and buried.
With Grey Gardens, Ebersole returned genuine star wattage to Broadway. For thirty-three previews and 307 performances, her characterization burned itself into the DNA of Broadway theatergoers. Based on the 1975 documentary film of the same name, Grey Gardens tells the story of the complicated relationship between socialite (and frustrated singer) Edith Bouvier Beale and her daughter, Little Edie (a first cousin of Jacqueline Onassis and Lee Radziwill). The first act takes place in Grey Gardens, the Beales's sumptuous East Hampton mansion. As the second act begins, Big Edie and Little Edie are still in Grey Gardens, but the house is overrun with fifty-three cats, as well as raccoons. They are near-recluses, living in abject poverty, and the house has been condemned by the Suffolk County Department of Health. The contrast between the two acts is all the more moving and powerful for the fact that we aren't explicitly shown how the Beale women arrived at their sorry state; this absence of information lends the story a haunting universality.
In Act I, Ebersole was fascinating as the perversely willful and manipulative Big Edie. But the heart of the show came with Act II, when Ebersole impersonated Little Edie, consumed by regret and restlessness. "The Revolutionary Costume for Today," in which she shared the secrets behind her bizarre "fashion manifesto," was a breathtaking star turn — all the more so for being placed at the top of Act II. "Revolutionary Costume" is to Ebersole's career what "Adelaide's Lament" was to Vivian Blaine's and what "I'm Goin' Back" was to Judy Holliday's.
For all the professionalism evinced onstage, Grey Gardens was a troubled production from the beginning of its Broadway run. The show began life in 2004 at the Sundance Theatre Lab in White Oak, Florida. From there, it went to an off-Broadway production at the famous non-profit company Playwrights Horizons in March 2006. Eight months later it reached Broadway, where its consortium of producers was led by the independent production company East of Doheny. While this organization is to be credited with taking a chance on making possible a commercial run of a highly risky musical, few parties involved seem to have been happy with the way the Broadway edition of Grey Gardens was produced; among the issues was a seriously misguided, tabloid-themed promotional campaign that made the show seem like a campy burlesque and may well have undermined its run.
This mishandling was something of an insult to Ebersole's performance, which received ecstatic reviews. The day after Grey Gardens earned ten Tony nominations, it was announced that the show would go to London during 2007–08, with Ebersole re-creating her role. Grey Gardens brought home three Tonys, including one for Ebersole as Best Actress in a Musical. In her acceptance speech, she acknowledged Playwrights Horizons while pointedly omitting any mention of the show's Broadway producers. Soon after, it was announced that Grey Gardens would close on July 29, to coincide with the departure of Mary Louise Wilson (also a Tony winner for her magnificent portrayal of the aged Big Edie). Suddenly, it seemed that the London production was very much up in the air. "We just don't know what's happening with that," Ebersole says backstage after a performance.
Regardless of what the future holds for Grey Gardens, Tim Sanford, artistic director of Playwrights Horizons, feels that the show never would have transferred to Broadway without Ebersole's belief in the project. "The only seeming path to Broadway for us," says Sanford, "was that we opened the show and got warmly embraced and anointed by The New York Times. That did not happen. By conventional wisdom, we were dead. But when we all thought we were fucked by the reviews, Christine asked for a meeting with us and said, 'This can still happen. You have to know what I'm getting from the audience. People are approaching me. There's unconventional money from people who want to move it.' She restored our optimism when we needed it."
In the film of Grey Gardens, Big Edie comes off as a cruel manipulator, while Little Edie, for all her eccentric warmth and charm, appears seriously deluded. From an actress's viewpoint, of course, such an approach wouldn't quite work in a stage musical. Ebersole sees both Big and Little Edie as heroines who cling to their own individuality and right to eccentric self-expression. "I get the feeling," says Ebersole, "that Big Edie was just one of those exuberant, free spirits who couldn't really struggle to survive in the confines of what that position in society allowed her to do. I think you really do experience the genuine caring that she has for Edie, that she doesn't want her daughter to wind up like she did, a subject of this patriarchal system that was really incarcerating." Likewise, she feels that Little Edie "has a drum-major instinct, wanting to be first and in the front of the line, but as an individual. Doesn't have to follow the fold."
Ebersole has one of the best singing voices of any woman on Broadway today. She seems surprised by this assertion when we speak in early July, backstage in her tiny dressing room at the Walter Kerr, where the decor is dominated by deep reds. She is quick to point out that she defines herself as an actress, not just a musical-comedy star. Nevertheless, listening to her astonishing range of vocal color in "Revolutionary Costume" and her pure, true pitch on the plaintive "Will You?" and "Around the World," one might understandably reach the conclusion that she has years of solid soprano training. She doesn't. Born in Chicago in 1953, Ebersole exhibited perfect pitch as a child. (She brings along a tape of a Christmastime family sing-along, recorded when she was three, as proof.) Although Ebersole studied piano and violin, her voice developed naturally, without benefit of training, for years. In 1973, after a couple of years at MacMurray College in Jacksonville, Illinois, Ebersole went to New York to study at the American Academy of Dramatic Arts.
Late in 1975, she was waiting tables at The Lion's Rock when she got a call from the eminent agent Lucy Kroll, telling her that she was to succeed Christine Andreas as the seductive housemaid Nancy in a revival of Patrick Hamilton's Angel Street. "She said, 'Darling, you're on Broadway!' It was one of those fairytale things, where I went to work and said, 'Well, the Great White Way calls, I have to leave you darling little people.' A couple of weeks later, the show closed, and I was back at The Lion's Rock, begging for my job. There are no sure-fire bets."
Over the next several years, she found work on Broadway and in film and television, including a season on Saturday Night Live. She was Katerina Cavalieri in the 1985 Best Picture Oscar-winner, Milos Forman's Amadeus, and had to learn to lip-synch the fiendishly difficult "Martern aller Arten." "I did actually audition for it and made the tape," Ebersole says. "But Neville Marriner already had his group of opera singers lined up. Kiri Te Kanawa was up for that part, and they gave it to me."
During the 1980s, Ebersole began her first formal studies in some time, with Marge Rivingston. "I have a big range," says Ebersole, "but it was a hundred different voices, and Marge helped me to integrate them. The biggest compliment she paid me was when she said, 'You should have done opera.' To me, there's no one who works harder than an opera singer. Wouldn't it be fun to be in the chorus of something?"
In 1985, Ebersole opened in Harrigan 'n Hart, a show she believed in very much. It closed after four performances and proved a major turning point in her career. "I was living in a sixth-floor walkup in the East Village," recalls Ebersole, "and I think it was probably walking up one of those six flights of stairs, I thought, 'Wait a minute, I don't want to be going out of town to do a show so I can make money to come back here so I can walk up six flights of stairs. I gotta get out of here." Soon she received an offer from Hollywood to appear as a recurring character on the T.V. series Valerie. The show's star, Valerie Harper, found Ebersole a marvelous colleague. "She's got comedic talent up the wazoo," says Harper, "and she also has an extraordinarily soft center. Christine is the girl at the luncheonette counter, making sure your coffee's hot. She's such a contribution to the planet."
This was followed by a lead opposite Barnard Hughes on The Cavanaughs, where she met her husband, Bill Moloney, musical director on the series. They were married in 1988 and settled down in Studio City. Los Angeles had become home.
By the end of the '90s, however, Hollywood was a road that had run out on her. When her agent lost interest in promoting her career because she was in her mid-forties, she knew the time had come to leave. She returned to New York and received some of the most substantial offers of her career — Mame at the Paper Mill Playhouse, a Broadway revival of Gore Vidal's The Best Man, and then the 2001 revival of 42nd Street, for which she won her first Tony Award. She and Moloney, now a real estate agent, purchased a home in Maplewood, New Jersey, where they currently live happily with their three adopted children. There were further Broadway appearances with revivals of Dinner at Eight and Steel Magnolias. She was the latest in a long line of actresses misused by Hollywood who came to New York to find career-defining success, and she reveled in it. "The reality of life in L.A. for me comes up short on artistic fulfillment," she says. "To me, New York City is the greatest city on earth. I can't tell you how many times I will be in the city with my husband, and we will be walking down the street thinking how much we love this city."
When discussing her career, Ebersole shows a hint of reticence, but it disappears when the subject segues to politics. As the creator of one of the most colorful iconoclasts in the history of the Broadway musical, Ebersole has definite ideas about how welcoming the current American political and social currents are to those who don't conform. She makes no secret of loathing the Bush administration and has become one of the most politically outspoken members of the theater community. She considers that the surface of the real story behind 9/11 has not even been scratched and deplores what she considers President Bush's contemptuous attitude toward the tragedy. "He made cracks about the weapons of mass destruction. 'I know they're hiding somewhere! They're somewhere!' It's very sad, the complete and utter disconnect that he has with humanity. And yet, it's an opportunity for those of us who are aware of the destructiveness of this to act in consciousness, to not be buying all of these stories that they're feeding us.
"It seems as if there's this impotent rage that people carry around with them, and if they have a voice, it's not going to be heard. I think that's what Little Edie represents in a way, a voice in the wilderness, crying out against the establishment."
She has a point. At each of the performances of Grey Gardens I attended, Little Edie's description of East Hampton as "a mean, nasty Republican town" met with thunderous applause and cheers. "Everyone feels that oppression," says Ebersole, "and that's your chance to celebrate, to feel liberated in the declaration of truth. Nowadays, there are so many distractions. Early on, we had three or four channels. But now — oh, my God. The distractions are mind-blowing. But there's a way out of it. I don't have a television. And I don't get the newspaper. Fear is at the core of so much [news coverage]. So long as you can be kept afraid, you won't speak out, you won't make noise. But I think there's hope with the Internet. I think this is where people are using their voices. Before, it was on the streets. But I think the Internet might be the survival of the republic. The only thing I can do is to spread good will — and to promote consciousness, question authority. If we turn it back to Little Edie, she's really given me the strength. I look at the courage and the strength of this person, and I think, well — I can be like that, too."
It's time for Ebersole to get ready for the night's performance. As I prepare to exit down the stairs, she says, "Come this way — it's more fun," and walks me across the stage of the Walter Kerr. As I leave her at the stage door, she calls after me, with Edie-esque enthusiasm, "And remember — if the Met has any chorus jobs, let me know!"
Grey Gardens
Grey Gardens
Grey Gardens &
Grey Gardens
The Beales of Grey Gardens
Grey Gardens
Grey Gardens 11" x 17" Reproduction Poster
BFI Film Classics: Grey Gardens
Wild Blue Yonder DVD
Grey Gardens
Soundtrack to Grey Gardens MP3s
My Life at Grey Gardens
Forty Years of Gardening
Edith Bouvier Beale of Grey Gardens
MemoraBEALEia
Little Edie Live! A Visit to Grey Gardens audio CD
A Maysles Scrapbook: Photographs/Cinemagraphs/Documents
Talk to Her: Interviews
Contemporary Film Directors:
Ghosts of Grey Gardens DVD
Grey Gardens the Musical
Grey Gardens
Grey Gardens: The Complete Book and Lyrics of the Broadway Musical
Grey Gardens Songbook
The Road Not Taken: A Selection of Robert Frost's Poems
The Marble Faun
Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam
Gigi
Wings
Nashville
Andromeda and Other Poems (includes Lorraine, Lorraine, Lorree)
It's All in the Stars
Art by Pacifico Palumbo