Da-Da-Da-Da-Dumm...

December 11, 2006 9:33 AM

A clip from "Grey Gardens" on Broadway! (YouTube). The critics have been won over. Albert Maysle has commented on how the Beales might react to their portrayals. Meanwhile, a new doc, "The Beales of Grey Gardens", made from Al's previously unused footage, comes with the Criterion Collection DVD of the original. Also, previously.
posted by hermitosis (19 comments total)

Poor crazy people = sad.
Rich crazy people = that's entertainment!
posted by billysumday at 10:35 AM on December 11, 2006

billysumday, Little Edie and Big Edie were far from rich by the time the Maysles shot Grey Gardens. In fact, they were nearly destitute. And I wouldn't call them crazy, either. They were fascinating women who marched to the beats of their own drummers.
posted by amro at 11:18 AM on December 11, 2006

New Yorker: "The Marble Faun" -- the Beales' handyman, Jerry Torre, comments on seeing a preview of the musical.
posted by ericb at 11:30 AM on December 11, 2006

The broadway adaptation looks to be exactly the travesty I expected. That woman's performance is dull. Watching the real little Edie is revelatory.
posted by fleetmouse at 11:33 AM on December 11, 2006

Can I break with orthodoxy and say that I found the movie to be tedious and incomprehensible? Maybe something interesting happens at the end -- I shut it off after about an hour. But for at least the first hour it seems to be an unflinchingly dull look at the lives of a pair of weirdos I ranged from not caring about to finding solidly repellent.

Can anyone who liked the movie please describe why for me? I'm not trolling here, I really want to know what others saw in it.
posted by rusty at 11:51 AM on December 11, 2006

To rusty, I'll agree that the movie is meandering at best. Watching the documentary is, for me, an indulgence of my voyeuristic tendencies. The same way I like to sneak peeks at crazy people on the subway out of the corner of my eye, I enjoy the opportunity to gaze into this alternate Beale reality where two women are unabashedly, almost unknowingly outlandish. There's no story, just eccentricity for eccentricity's sake.
At least, that's my two cents.
posted by Help, I can't stop talking! at 12:18 PM on December 11, 2006

Dont feel bad, rusty, it seems to be a phenomenon that has heavily depended on people's ability to re-watch it. Suddenly whatever it was that made it sad or disgusting or boring melts away, and you can appreciate it without having to try and strain to figure out what you should be liking.

People's sense of expectation is abused by movies like this one, because they expect to be led toward some eventual payoff. In "Grey Gardens", the payoff is in the opening scenes of the film, when you first lay eyes on Edie and hear her talking. Everything beyond that is cake, provided as if to simply prove that not only are these ladies for real, their lives are worth examination. Whether that examination is a tender one or a mocking one (or both) is in the eye of the beholder.

And as one of my links said, you might want to try watching it with the subtitles on. The Beale's speech is so candid and gushing that you don't always get to really process what they said the first time around.

And of course, there is the fact that personal taste can keep many people from liking any great film, no matter how good it is. YMMV.

As for the musical, I know quite a few people who have gone to see it, and they've all considered it a very powerful tribute. Considering that they (and most of the people going) are die-hard fans of the film, I imagine they know of which they speak. I am allergic to bad adaptations, but I'm intrigued by this one and am willing to give it the benefit of the doubt. I'd rather see this than the new "The Color Purple" musical.
posted by hermitosis at 12:19 PM on December 11, 2006

The show is very good. The first act is dull, but the second more than makes up for it.
posted by brevator at 1:00 PM on December 11, 2006

OK, does Broadway have to make a fucking musical out of EVERYTHING? First Edward Scissorhands, then High Fidelity, now Grey fucking Gardens?

I can understand and appreciate wanting to dramatize things for the stage -- it's always fun to see things through the lens of a different medium. But seriously. Not everything needs fucking songs.

This is exactly the same as if someone made a slam-bang action pic, with helicopter chases and explosions, out of the same movie. Broadway musicals are the stage equivalent of Michael Bay, and the only difference is that the fans seem to thing they're getting something more cerebral and aesthetic.

/rant

That said, I like that Grey Gardens exists, and I'm glad I've seen it, but after a couple of viewings it sort of lost its luster for me.
posted by hifiparasol at 1:30 PM on December 11, 2006

(I understand that Edward Scissorhands was hardly the first property to receive the B'way musical treatment. But for me, it was the straw that broke the camel's back. High Fidelity smashed the camel into a thick protein paste, and this Grey Gardens project has transcended the fourth dimension and annihilated all traces of camels from the space-time continuum.)
posted by hifiparasol at 1:35 PM on December 11, 2006

hifiparasol, I think you're overgeneralizing. "Broadway musical" sounds like a term that means one specific thing to you, and that couldn't be further from the truth. While I'll grant that there's a lot of trash on Broadway (and always has been), the whole institution is as varied as any other big-budget arts industry. And Broadway and cinema have always been joined at the hip, for better or worse.

Some shows are produced with an agenda to pander to tourists. Some are produced as a result of many years of workshops and runs at lesser venues by hardworking unknowns. Just because it makes it to Broadway doesn't mean it's bad. And just because it's original, as opposed to an adaptation, doesn't mean it's good. It is a not necessarily a crisis of exploitation to see a beloved movie or book get this sort of treatment. In fact, it can certainly be a crisis of imagination on the behalf of the purist.

I probably wouldn't have rebutted if you hadn't mentioned Grey Gardens in the same sentence as High Fidelity. Surely anyone can see the difference between these two projects. Taking a mainstream movie with a mainstream soundtrack and making it into a mainstream theatrical (by all accounts) dud is way different that creating a script that reimagines a fairly obscure, decades-old documentary (which itself featured memorable singing and dancing), which runs successfully through several venues.

The question shouldn't be whether they should or should not make a particular movie into a musical. It's whether a particular movie actually makes a good musical. Some do, some don't. The same goes for the amount of amazing Broadway musicals that have been made into really shitty movies. Occasionally you can have your cake and eat it to; usually, it's in the cases of projects like Grey Gardens, where you can tell that the tourist and mainstream audience appeal are less of a pressing factor, and artists are more likely to get to do what they do best.

Some stories benefit from being seen through a different lens. Most will suffer from being forced through that lens. I'd be interested in hearing from people who saw the "Grey Gardens" musical and loathed it. I'm willing to bet that they aren't people who are film-purists or who have even seen the film-- and I bet they wouldn't have liked the movie either.
posted by hermitosis at 2:17 PM on December 11, 2006 [1 favorite]

Point taken, hermitosis -- my girlfriend makes the same arguments every time I rail about Broadway. I do have a tendency to fly off the handle about these things.

I agree with this comment:

The question shouldn't be whether they should or should not make a particular movie into a musical. It's whether a particular movie actually makes a good musical.

I guess I did sound like a bit of a purist in those above posts, and really, nothing could be farther from the truth. It never bothered me that Gus Van Sant made a shot-for-shot remake of Psycho, nor did it bother me that Spidey had non-mechanical web shooters, mostly because none of those things is usurping the original material. The fact that there's a GG musical doesn't erase the fact that the movie exists, and who knows, it may even be good. So largely, the mere fact of making an alternate-medium version of a preexisting property doesn't bother me at all, as I alluded to in my first post. Mostly, I'm just tired of hearing that every property in the universe is now a Broadway musical, but that's also true of summer blockbusters, which doesn't bother me, so admittedly there's something of a taste issue on my part.

What I do still think is true, though -- and I can't really provide any documentation for this other than my interactions with people in the past -- is that a lot of people who enjoy Broadway musicals tend to think of them as a higher form of art, or that a Broadway musical version of some property is inherently "classier" than a film version of the same property. Like I said, it's an opinion I've formed mostly by talking to people who like Broadway, but I'm fairly certain there are lots of people out there who'd agree with me.
posted by hifiparasol at 2:39 PM on December 11, 2006

I worked on some props for the Grey Gardens production when it was at Playwrights Horizons, and I can vouch that there is a world of difference between a show that gestates in an off-broadway incubator for new work, and one that's a Broadway Producer's cash cow from first conception. Love it or hate it ( I felt neither when watching during the rehearsal process) for the most part all of the individual performances are strong. There is a certain amount of integrity and accountability inherent in the creative process when it takes place in small off-broadway theaters that are committed to developing new work. If one's looking to mainly to get rich and cash in, that's hardly the best place to do it.
posted by stagewhisper at 2:44 PM on December 11, 2006

Actually, another question, hermitosis. Judging from the YouTube clip, it seems like this isn't all that different from any of the more mainstream B'way musicals I'm familar with (I may be out of my element here, or the rest of the musical may be totally, totally different from the clip). So how does this statement of yours:

Taking a mainstream movie with a mainstream soundtrack and making it into a mainstream theatrical (by all accounts) dud is way different that creating a script that reimagines a fairly obscure, decades-old documentary (which itself featured memorable singing and dancing), which runs successfully through several venues.

apply?

Honestly, it just looks to me like something that cheapens everything that was good about the movie.
posted by hifiparasol at 2:48 PM on December 11, 2006

Edward Scissorhands was made into a BALLET. I cried at the original movie (although this was also because it was two days after my dog died), I cried at the male Swan Lake--also done by Matthew Bourne, but I didn't cry at this when I saw it last winter in London.
posted by brujita at 2:55 PM on December 11, 2006

That's an important distinction regarding Edward Scissorhands, brujita. Ballet /= a musical.

hifiparasol, I guess in order to answer that, I need to know what about it you think is "mainstream" based on this clip. In all fairness, this clip is from a special program, and doesn't take place on the set of the actual show, and so I'm sure the staging and perhaps even the orchestration are a little different. She's singing the song presentationally to the audience, which I'm not sure she does in the play. But ultimately what isn't mainstream about it is that she isn't the funny supporting character, and she probably isn't going to break out into "beautiful" American Idol-esque ululations. She's the main attraction, and she is what she is. That's not how the big cheesy shows really work.

What I think is a key difference is that the Beales were real people, and that the show is an attempt to show more of their story than a documentary could-- the whole first act takes place decades before the film was made. When Ebersole plays Edie, she's not just showing off her take on a character-- she's portraying a real, recognizable person. The show straddles a point between documented fact and imagined events, but fundamentally it is the women themselves who it efefctively pays tribute to, not the film. The Beales would still have been the Beales if no film had ever been made.

As for the musical style and creative decisions, stagewhisper and others who have actually seen it are the ones to turn to for credible opinions. I'm still waiting for my crack at rush tickets.
posted by hermitosis at 3:38 PM on December 11, 2006

What I do still think is true, though -- and I can't really provide any documentation for this other than my interactions with people in the past -- is that a lot of people who enjoy Broadway musicals tend to think of them as a higher form of art, or that a Broadway musical version of some property is inherently "classier" than a film version of the same property. Like I said, it's an opinion I've formed mostly by talking to people who like Broadway, but I'm fairly certain there are lots of people out there who'd agree with me.

Among the competition for Grey Gardens at Tony time will be stage adaptations of not only High Fidelity, but also Legally Blonde and Mary Poppins. The Wedding Singer closes in three weeks. No, the stage musical is not an inherently classier art form.

It does, however, offer some powerful opportunities that many people overlook, perhaps because they're familiar with the trite and trashy shows that have dominated the landscape in the past few decades. The achievement of the musical Grey Gardens is that it takes a piece that does not follow a traditional narrative, a piece where "character development" occurs piecemeal over two hours, and turns it into a series of brief and insightful songs that collectively tell a story. "The Revolutionary Costume For Today," "Jerry Likes My Corn," and "Another Winter In A Summer Town" are all extremely effective in the context of the score. (The first doesn't come off particularly well in this poorly recorded awards show performance--but as written, it's perfect in its depiction of an isolated, unbalanced woman whose eccentric fashion sense is her one form of rebellion.)

I agree with hermitosis. Grey Gardens is on a different level from most of the movie musical remakes, not only because it's less commercial, but because it required so much more effort and invention to get to the stage. It may not be wholly successful, but I respect that its creators were trying something audacious--something that can't be said of the people toiling away at paint-by-numbers adaptations of the hits of five minutes ago.

As for the film itself, I've never been able to get through it for some reason. I don't think I have the attention span for what is essentially a feature-length home movie.
posted by Epenthesis at 7:35 AM on December 12, 2006

Broadway is dead. Theater as an art form will thrive until the end of people, but Broadway is as dead as Hollywood. It just hasn't stopped twitching yet.
posted by Faint of Butt at 8:35 AM on December 12, 2006

Thanks for giving me more to think about, Epenthesis. There's no way I'll be able to see the show anytime soon (if at all), so I may be reserving judgment for a long time...

Incidentally, a stage musical of Mary Poppins makes a lot more sense to me, simply because that was a musical to begin with.
posted by hifiparasol at 12:44 PM on December 12, 2006