Philadelphia Weekly

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Philadelphia Theatre Company’s mainstage season is almost finished. This year, the season winds down with the area premiere of Grey Gardens, an award-winning musical about a co-dependent mother and daughter in the East Hamptons.

Inspired by Albert and David Maysles’ 1975 cult film documentary, the musical focuses on Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy’s eccentric aunt Edith Bouvier Beale and her equally idiosyncratic daughter Edie.

Grey Gardens is the first Broadway musical adapted from a film documentary. The show’s lyricist Michael Korie and librettist Doug Wright (both of whom garnered Tony nominations for their work on the show) talked to PW separately by phone from New York about the challenges of transferring the story from screen to stage.

Born into privilege and wealth, during their heyday the Beales’ hobnobbed with the rich and famous. But by the 1970s (when the film begins) the mother and daughter had become isolated in their now decrepit East Hampton mansion Grey Gardens, where they lived surrounded by garbage, cats and raccoons. (The home, which becomes a leading character in the show, is aptly described as “a 28-room litter box.”)

The idea for reinventing the Beales’ saga on stage originated with the show’s composer Scott Frankel. However while both Korie and Wright report that they had a strong affection for the film, each hesitated when Frankel approached them with the idea.

“I thought he (Frankel) was crazy,” Korie remembers. “But then I thought this is such a bizarre idea I better give it credence because the best ideas are usually the craziest.”

Wright’s reaction was similar. “I thought the idea was insane,” he recalls laughing. “I felt that the film was scary and disturbing, and that those were both attributes. I believed that in turning it into a musical we would by necessity tame it and make it more mainstream. I really didn’t want to do that because I felt that it was a deeply subversive film and I wanted to honor that.”

Wright also expressed reservations about the film’s lack of narrative, which shows the women as they go about their daily routine of cooking, bickering and singing old show tunes.

“Real life doesn’t have narrative or continuity and a good play requires those things,” Wright worried.

The solution was offered by Frankel. One night while dining with Korie, Frankel scribbled “Act 1: 1940s” on a napkin. On another napkin he wrote “Act II: 1970s.”

For Wright, Frankel’s concept of beginning the musical 30 years before the film—when both the women and the mansion were in their glory—offered a structure that worked on stage. “I suddenly felt that this was an angle into their world and a way of creating the kind of narrative causality that theater requires,” Wright explains.

But Korie and Wright say there was another concern. Natural, honest and spontaneous, both felt that the film’s cinema verité quality may not transfer to the world of musical theater, which relishes both fantasy and sentimentality.

“I worried that the greatest strength of the film was its verisimilitude and that was the first thing we would destroy turning it into a musical theater piece,” says Wright. “They’re compassionate, ferocious women and each had a tragic dimension. We didn’t want to capitulate to either sentiment or camp.”

When Gardens first opened off-Broadway audience members were divided mainly into two constituencies: curious theatergoers attracted to the Kennedy-Bouvier connection and devotees of the Maysles’ film. However, during Gardens’ Broadway run, the musical found favor among mothers and daughters, who according to Korie and Wright became among the musical’s biggest fans.

Wright says he’s gratified the show touched a nerve with this particular demographic.

“The irony of the parent-child relationship is that the parent both inflicts the wounds and lovingly applies the bandages. On one hand, that’s a natural process and on the other hand it’s traumatic. We wanted to honor that relationship and to show the women (Edith and Edie) in the full measure of their dignity,” he explains.

Korie is likewise thrilled that the Beales’ tragic but oddly poignant relationship resonated with mothers and daughters. He’s just not certain about the show’s effect; laughingly adding, “I don’t know if it was good for their relationship or if they had to instantly go into therapy.”