Reviewed
by David Spencer
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They fixed it, by God. They fixed it. Oh, frabjous day! Oh, joy of joys!
What's so cool about this? Apart from the fact that it just is?
Well, there are structural principles to writing a musical theatre piece. You can ignore them, but most times at your peril. You can, if you're a master, choose to experiment with form, but most times at expense to popularity and profit-margin. There's nothing wrong with pushing the envelope honorably, though, and indeed, someone had to push it every now and again over the years for what we recognize now as the principles to find their shape. Principles having to do with story arc, three act architecture, a larger-than-life character who drives the story, consistency of tone and focus & etc.
And then this musical comes along that sort of tosses structure principles into a cocked hat. Doesn't ignore them, but uses them in an entirely new way, for all intents and purposes creating new principles, forging a new path to push the craft along a bit further, doing the thing as it has never been done before and in a way that will certainly, somehow, have impact.
Don't believe what they tell you about Spring Awakening's newness and innovation. That's pure hype, and I'll get into that more when it comes time to look at that Broadway transfer properly.
When you discuss innovation, the latest and most vigorously, exhilaratingly demonstrative example of it is this puppy right here. Grey Gardens.
That said: innovation takes work. Following is my original off-Broadway review. After it, I'll tell you of the miracle that has occurred between then and now.
It's wearying and
depressing to see a musical that doesn't work because its authors either
haven't got a grasp of craft or because their approach is transparently
misguided. It's quite another matter, and almost invigorating, really, to see
one that sort of brilliantly doesn't work. To borrow a phrase Stephen Sondheim
laid on me in a discussion once, many years ago, the wrong turns made by the
authors of Grey Gardens are all "conscious mistakes," which
is to say the collaborators knew precisely what they were doing and took the
risks they intended to take. You can't fault artistry here, or intent, you can
only acknowledge the boldness of the often entertaining experiment before you
likewise acknowledge that the experiment isn't sufficiently successful. But it
does seem to have been worth conducting.
The play is about the "forgotten" Bouviers, those relatives of Jackie
O who fell out of social favor and became indigent inhabitants of a condemned
mansion, rundown in appearance and overrun by more than half a hundred cats.
These are Edith Bouvier and her daughter, Edie Bouvier Beale, whose misfortunes
were famously recorded in the documentary film from which the musical derives
its name, and upon which it is in part adapted. But before the adaptation comes
the first act.
This act is a historical fantasy, an extrapolation from known fact, a
postulation that it might have happened this way. Set in 1941, it shows
how mother (a brilliantly nuanced Christine Ebersole) and daughter (a
charmless but sturdy Sara Gettelfinger) miss their best bid for lasting
social connection and wealth, chronicling the events which sabotage—no,
which might have sabotaged—Edie's pending marriage to Joseph Kennedy (Matt
Cavenaugh). The act's songs waver between period pastiches (Edith was a
society chanteuse), which serve as informative social commentary about the
times; and book numbers that are both fascinating and dramatically all but
static. There really isn't a compelling story going on, just a group of
characters and a situation that mingle until things happen, so what the songs
wind up doing is serving as little character dossiers, through recollection or
statement of personal philosophy. They don't often sing about things that are
urgent, they mostly sing about things that are tense, about issues that haven't
yet boiled over. This gives act one the sense of —well, of
exactly what it dramatizes, a party that never quite starts. Yet within the
structure devised by librettist Doug Wright, the songs fall in
the right place and serve the proper function, and Michael Korrie's lyrics are
properly incisive, layered and intricate. If they have a flaw, it's that they
encourage, in use of pattern and motif, composer Scott Frankel's unfortunate
penchant to channel Stephen Sondheim. I don't mean Sondhein's influence, almost all of us of
the post-mid 70s generations reflect that to some degree; it's unavoidable,
since it was his innovations that allow us to explore subject matter as complex
and mature as, say, Grey Gardens. No, I mean Sondheim's naked imprimatur: his
approach to accompaniment, signature harmonic patterns, motivic repetition of
lyrics with minor alterations to build detail and layer meaning; Frankel even
gives us what has to have been a conscious, perhaps private-joke quote from
"You're Gonna Love Tomorrow" in Follies, perfectly echoing
its button. The music is lovely, but it distractingly keeps hitting the ear as
the best score Steve didn't write. And Bruce Coughlin's highly artful
orchestrations sound, commensurately, as if they were ripped from the bowels of
Jonathan Tunick. (Other characters who figure into the Act One mix are Edith's
gay companion and accompanist [the always-beguiling Bob Stillman], her disapproving
father [a not terribly fierce martinet, as assayed by John McMartin; the family's black
manservant [Michael Potts]; and two very young Bouvier cousins, [the] Jaqueline and Lee
[Sara
Hyland and Audrey Twichell].) I'll get back to Act One in a bit.
Act Two is sortakinda the main event, to those who know the documentary,
because it is in fact a musicalization of the documentary. In this act, Ms.
Ebersole, with equal magnificence, captures the Edie of 1973, a darling of
society fallen from grace, dotty, self-deluded, self-absorbed and wearily
doting on her mother—played now by Mary Louise Wilson. Without any
specific articulation of the concept, the authors just assume you'll get the
notion of the subjects talking to unseen filmmakers or visitors (us) and you
do. Some of the Act One players have supporting roles here (Matt Cavenaugh is a
delivery kid who helps out; Michael Potts plays a groundskeeper who is clearly
around out of loyalty—he's the son of the Act One manservant), and the
rest (joined by the others when not in their passing roles) occasionally appear
as a Greek chorus.
The scenes that are drawn directly from the film without articulated commentary
are the most arresting and deeply human. Each number eloquently magnifies the
physchological/philosophical states being explored at the moment, and is woven
seamlessly into the fabric without the feeling of the documentary pausing for song (though my
Sondheim observation still stands: his imprinting on the songwriters' approach
remains too present). The Greek chorus stuff seems far less necessary. One number,
in the middle of the act, is an ethereal song, meant to evoke ghosts, long gone
shadows and the self-called "cat's eye view" of the dilapidated
manor...but by the time it's sung, everything it has to tell us is already
implicit. (Somewhere along the line, the question has to have been asked,
"What do we do with our supporting cast in Act Two?" Most of them,
alas, are not required.)
Very arguably, Grey Gardens eschews are some basic ingredients that
inform almost all successful musicals: a larger than life main character on a
quest, and the notion of something that must be accomplished by a deadline
before a "ticking clock" finishes counting down. I say arguably
because, in Act One, Beauvier mother and daughter are idiosyncratic and each
after a certain kind of validation by society and family—and the pending
arrival of unseen guests and what they'll be presented with is, in fact, what
everyone is focused on—but that pressure is very much diluted by drawing
room dramaturgy. In Act Two, however, it seems that dreams and desires are
dead, save for those clung to with a futility borne of rote energy, so there is
ONLY the documentary portrait. In musical theatre terms, this provides the most
fragile foundation for sustaining any kind of dramatic tension because, like
the women of the house, the show can only meander through the day with them.
There's no dynamic reason why we're focused on this aspect at this time as opposed to
any other; except perhaps to tacitly sustain the illusion of approximating the
structure of the original film.
Interestingly, Act Two, for all its sprawl, ultimately holds better than the
tighter Act One (both acts, by the way, are impressively staged by director Michael
Grieff.) And that's because Act Two has the authenticity of exposed,
tragic, human pathology to exploit; whereas Act One's characters seem like
musical comedy archetypes; not "standard issue clichˇ" but
unambiguous symbols: the society mom, the fashion page daughter, the
conservative military dad, the callow politician's son. This too may have been
intentional—to suggest that the Bouviers saw themselves as imperviously
protected within a neat societal bubble, and to dramatize the bubble at length
popping. With Act Two being the consequence. But instead, each act seems drawn
from an entirely different artistic (as well as theatrical) sensibility; and
more importantly, the women of Act Two seem almost completely unrelated to
their younger selves in Act One. It's not merely a discontinuity of fortune Grey
Gardens' daring difference of acts gives us—but a discontinuity of
behavior, of diction, of speech pattern, of accent. It's as if the authors
composed an Act One speculation of events, without working backwards from the
real people caught on film to give us an equally possible speculation of the
people they might actually have been. The people in Act Two could not have evolved from
neat archetypes; and the seeds of their sad fate have to have existed in much
more than merely sad turns of events. Pathologies like that go deep.
And yet and yet and yet.
As I say, I don't think the musical Grey Gardens is a blunder. I
think it's wildly courageous, and I think that on some level, not just for the
authors, but for the craft of musical theatre, it needed to be written. Despite
not
being altogether successful. Something in its matrix has something important to
tell us about new things that are possible. In ways that have yet to
reverberate and be made manifest, it stretches the envelope a bit. It goes to a
new place.
May we all make such mistakes...
I wish my comments about the
revised Broadway transfer were as long and detailed, just for the balance of
the read, but the truth is, what happened is really quite simple.
Grief,
Wright, Korrie and Frankel took the notes. A long time ago, Stephen Sondheim
gave me this caution about musicals in development: "The biggest danger is
getting used to things." Which can happen so easily. Even if you're primed
not to be defensive or possessive, you get so into following a path,
internalizing the gestation of choices, seeing things from the subjective
inside, that it takes nearly superhuman will to wrench your mind out of your mind, so you can begin
to see where something you thought critical is unnecessary; or something you
accepted as a given because it seemed structurally sound in theory is actually hurting
you; or where something that would work powerfully for you is hidden behind a
false assumption; or where something you were certain you just had to tell the audience is already
implicit. No matter your mastery of the principles, no matter how smart you
are, the creation of a musical is the solving of puzzles within puzzles.
But when
you hit the breakthrough point...ahh, there's nothing like it.
And the
breakthroughs for Grey Gardens are these.
They
have tightened show; revised some numbers, replaced others, to keep it all to
the point.
They
have sharpened the focus, so that right from the beginning, you understand the
ride you're on. There is a larger-than-life character at the center, it's Edie,
and in both acts she wants the same thing, really, escape from her mother's shadow; but the
swell hat trick of Grey Gardens is that this carries through as the thread of two
different stories, without ever spelling itself out in bold, obvious terms. The
authors let you find it; but you do because in the revisions they cannily tell
you where to look. And that's what gives the show its motor.
Among
the most crucial aids to this is the subtle reshaping of Act One. The dynamic
between mother and daughter lands as significantly more idiosyncratic—and
young Edie is no longer a miscast character woman in an ingˇnue role. Now she's a deceptive ingˇnue, petite, blonde Erin
Davie, who looks
and sounds every bit the archetype on the
surface, but who uses that surface to conceal genuine eccentricity (truly, the
recasting of this part, in tandem with the rewrites that have remolded it,
cannot be underestimated). Come the scene where she's begging her beau not to
leave, she isn't merely a woman trying to keep her heart from breaking...she's
as angry as she is desperate and in the anger dropping her fa¨ade. It makes her
more dangerous and Jack not so total a cad as before, and the whole conflict lots more
interesting. More still, the eccentricity as a link between mother and
daughter—the thing that will exponentially intensify and make Act Two
possible—is now palpably felt as not merely a planted seed, but a ticking
time bomb. (But I will add, in defense of Ms. Davie's predecessor, Sara
Gettelfinger was not to be blamed for being a mismatch to the part; whether her
range was miscalculated or her casting was a deliberate experiment that failed,
it was her stage persona—in fact, it was her very vital stats type—that was at odds with the
role, not her professionalism or artistry.)
Exactly
how Grey Gardens will
impact the art of the musical remains to be discovered—it'll happen in
indirect ways, even abstract ways; not so much in how it will be emulated (for
no one smart will, for its thing has already been done), but in the kind of
experimentation with form it inspires, in the way it may "sanction"
stories for musicalization that might not otherwise have been considered.
Something less seen than felt.
A little
show, Grey Gardens...but
it just made musicals a little bigger...