Review | Grey Gardens at London’s Southwark Playhouse
By Will Stroude
After seeing Grey Gardens on Broadway (twice in succession because once just wasn’t enough) I wondered who on earth they’d cast over here should the show ever make it to London. Christine Ebersole and Mary Louise Wilson were so brilliant in it I couldn’t imagine it working with anyone else. But then I heard that Jenna Russell and Sheila Hancock had signed on for the first UK production and it was like ‘Eureka! That’s spot-on casting!’
And it is. Russell is Ebersole’s equal in the dual roles of the younger Big Edie in the first act and older Little Edie in the second and Hancock, who plays Big Edie in a brief prologue and takes over the role full time after the interval, is a match for Wilson. But they put their own spin on things. Hancock is a little lighter but a lot more caustic and Russell, so good in everything she does, seems more damaged than Ebersole, funny as hell but nailing the sadness of this saddest of sacks.
The two Edies have always been gay icons, ever since the 1975 documentary that brought them to public attention. There they were, Edith Bouvier Beale and her same-named daughter; Jacqueline Kennedy’s relatives (namely her aunt and cousin) living in squalor in a dilapidated Hamptons mansion, surrounded by cats and cat shit, driving each other up the mouldy walls, as mad as a box of frogs and camper than The Rocky Horror Picture Show, which opened that same year, and Bette Midler’s Clams On The Half Shell Revue, which was playing on Broadway.
The Beales were also the subject of a very well done 2009 HBO movie starring a both-brilliant Drew Barrymore and Jessica Lange and Little Edie was lampooned in The New Normal. But the musical’s the thing – a glorious, daring, original, impossible-to-categorise-or-compare show that avoids the obvious (there are no big production numbers and, thank god, no dancing cats) and cuts to the heart of the story’s pathos.
Yes, it’s wonderfully camp at times. How could it not be when Little Edie fancies herself a dancer and singer but can’t do either and, losing her hair, she uses whatever she can find for headscarves and cardigans for skirts? Russell talks (or rather sings) us through her bizarre style choices in the hilarious second-act opener The Revolutionary Costume For Todayand she’s got the voice and mannerisms down pat. But she, like the show, also gets under Little Edie’s skin, peeling away the layers like an onion so that her wistful ballad Another Winter In A Summer Town is heartbreakingly sad.
On opening night I was delighted to be sat next to composer Scott Frankel, whose score is truly sublime. He was as thrilled as the rest of us to see the show slaying em on this side of the pond, due in no small measure to his two leading ladies. Russell shines in the first half as her focus-pulling Big Edie tries, and fails, to make Little Edie’s birthday a special occasion. But it’s in act two that the show takes off as crotchety mother and disillusioned daughter bitch, moan and slowly unravel.
Jenna and Sheila are surrounded by great supporting players, especially Rachel Anne Rayham as a spunky Little Edie in the early scenes and Aaron Sidwell (who was Steven Beale inEastEnders) as both a dashing Joseph Kennedy and a disheveled handyman named Jerry with a yen for Big Edie’s sweetcorn – the subject of a very sweet song.
All in all, then, this is a superlative production that works brilliantly in the small Southwark Playhouse, with the comedy and pathos right in your face. You’ll laugh, you’ll cry and you’ll want to go again. Good luck with that; there are very few tickets left, which hopefully signals a West End transfer.
RATING: 5/5
Grey Gardens is at Southwark Playhouse, London, until February 6th. For more information and tickets visit southwarkplayhouse.co.uk
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