The acclaimed and award-winning new musical GREY GARDENS, based on the legendary 1975 documentary of the same name, played a sold-out world premiere production at Playwrights Horizons in the spring of 2006, and when ticket demand refused to abate, the producers announced plans to re-open it on Broadway in October. Starring the rapturously received Tony Award-winner Christine Ebersole and Tony Award nominee Mary Louise Wilson, GREY GARDENS concerns the aunt and cousin of Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, who were once among the brightest names in the pre-Camelot social register, but became East Hampton's most notorious recluses, living in a dilapidated 28-room mansion. For her performance, Ms. Ebersole won the 2006 Drama Desk Award, the Outer Critics Circle Award, the Obie Award, a special citation from the New York Drama Critics Circle and the Drama League's 2006 Distinguished Performance of the Year Award.CD: 1. Toyland 2. The Five-Fifteen 3. Body Beautiful Beale 4. Mother, Darling 5. Better Fall Out of Love 6. Being Bouvier 7. Hominy Grits 8. Peas in a Pod 9. Drift Away 10. The Five-Fifteen (reprise)/Miss Porter's Anthem 11. Tomorrow's Woman 12. Daddy's Girl 13. Will You? 14. The Revolutionary Costume for Today 15. The Cake I Had 16. Entering Grey Gardens 17. The House We Live In 18. Jerry Likes My Corn 19. Around the World 20. Choose to Be Happy 21. Around the World (reprise) 22. Another Winter in a Summer Town 23. Peas in a Pod (reprise)
Based on the Maysles brothers' cult 1975 documentary of the same name, this musical is an endearing---and sometimes genuinely heartwrenching---oddity propelled by Christine Ebersole's exceptional, for-the-history-books performance. The movie followed the kooky duo of Edith Bouvier Beale and her daughter, Little Edie Beale, as they lived with their 52 cats in a derelict East Hampton mansion. The show's first act, set in 1941, is a prologue of sorts, while the second act, set in 1973, follows the movie closely. Ebersole plays Edith in Act I (which she concludes in dazzling manner with "Will You?") and Little Edie in Act II (when Mary Louise Wilson comes in to play the mother). And while Wilson is superb, this is Ebersole's show. Technically, she is flawless---just listen to the way she changes her voice between the acts---but she also makes Little Edie a poignant eccentric, a lost soul stuck in a world of deluded, decaying grandeur. It all peaks in the poignant "Around the World," the show's best song and an Ebersole tour de force. Note that this recording documents the Off-Broadway production; the show transferred to Broadway in the fall of 2006 with a slightly altered first act. --Elisabeth Vincentelli
