Grey Gardens on Broadway

I’m going to see Grey Gardens this Thursday.

Everyone has heard about this musical, and its development, and also its off-Broadway run. The buzz has been undeniable. You could hear it from Rhode Island practically. There’s so much theatre that goes on in this town, and every season there are shows you feel you have to see, good reviews, whatever. But buzz like this is rare. It feels different in an intangible way. It has more of the feeling of an EVENT, a HAPPENING. I am trying to remember the last time I’ve had that feeling about a play in New York … a feeling that it was an EVENT. Kathleen Turner in Virginia Woolf had kind of that feeling to it. I wasn’t around for the original Evita – but it seems like Patti Lupone got that kind of press at the time … That her performance was not just good, it was an EVENT. Barbra Streisand in Funny Girl. She was a PHENOM, an event unto herself.

With the press for Christine Ebersole in Grey Gardens, I got the feeling last year that something important and different was going on. It’s hard to describe, it’s more of a zeitgeist feeling than anything else, a sensation that something is “in the air”. It just seemed like this wasn’t just her moment. But it was a MOMENT, a theatrical MOMENT, a performance that will be remembered years from now, and talked about. Like Laurette Taylor in Glass Menagerie or Marlon Brando in Streetcar. People who saw Laurette Taylor as Amanda over 60 years ago STILL talk about it. About how they had never seen anything like it. How acting reached some kind of high watermark with her performance. Performances like that don’t come along too often. I am having a hard time remembering if I have EVER seen a performance like that. I’m talking stage now. Live theatre. Well – the Irish actress who played Nora in Doll’s House at the Abbey Theatre that I saw when I was 14 … her performance remains so vivid, so wrenching, that I can even remember her BLOCKING. It made that much of an impression on me. She was fantastic. But … what else? I’ll have to think more about it.

This is the kind of advance buzz that Christine Ebersole has been getting. And sometimes buzz is hollow … it’s a fabrication … it’s publicists and agents trying to make a ton of money … But sometimes buzz exists because the product is so extraordinary. Sometimes the buzz is not a fabrication – but an organic phenomenon. Julia Roberts’ success was like that. Which is why she is kind of untouchable, whatever you think of her talent. Pretty Woman was not supposed to “hit” in the way that it did. Roberts didn’t even do publicity for it. She was off doing her next movie when it opened. And within one weekend – it had happened. She had “hit”. The AUDIENCE decided she would be a success. Not her agent. Not the studio. It was the AUDIENCE. And there is NOTHING more powerful than an audience collectively pointing at one person and saying, in one voice, “Her. We like her. More of her, please.” It happens so rarely that you can probably count it on one hand. It happened to Marilyn Monroe, for example. The studios put her in crappy projects, they underpaid her … and yet the audience (men AND women – another important factor for this kind of organic success – it crosses gender lines) said: “We love her. Please keep putting her in movies. We love her.” So – this is the kind of feeling that appears to be “in the air” – when it comes to Ebersole’s performance. I have read stuff about it that makes the hair on the back of my neck stand up. Hardened old grumpy critics basically laying down their critical pens and saying, “You must see this. You must see this performance.” Critics are CAVING. They are SUCCUMBING to it, rather than resisting.

I read the review in The Times – by Ben Brantley and, to my ears, the TONE here … the TONE of the review … is quite out of the ordinary. Something is going ON. Something is going ON with this performance … Christine Ebersole has HIT it … What is going on here is bigger than the play, bigger than the actual project she is in. And I could not be more excited for her. I’m also excited to see it – but you know, I’ve liked Christine Ebersole for a long long time … she’s been around since I was in high school … and to see her HIT this moment … and TAKE her moment … is just exhilarating. I can’t wait to see it.

It’s like that last moment in Postcards from the Edge, in the hospital – when Shirley Maclaine says to Meryl Streep, “It’s your turn now. And I just think it’s so important … that you enjoy your turn.”

See, I’m in tears.

Brantley opens his review with:

“Da-da-da-da-dum.”

Not exactly a phrase that gleams with Shakespearean eloquence, is it? But once you’ve heard Christine Ebersole sing it — and believe me, this is an experience no passionate theatergoer should miss — “da-da-da-da-dum” is guaranteed to enter your personal memory bank of cherished quotations, the kind you summon when you’re feeling down and thwarted and need to smile.

This already fills me with an urgent sense of NEED. I MUST see what he is talking about.

What is even more powerful (and I haven’t even seen it yet) is that Brantley discusses the faults and flaws of the show in great detail. But Ebersole? No. No flaws. She transcends. It is her moment. It is her TURN.

Check out this observation (it’s Brantley at his best … I like it when he actually expresses WHY something is good … It’s rare that a critic can do that. They just say, “The lighting was dreary, the music was not inspiring, and the lead actress left much to be desired.” Awesome review … but WHY??? Can you tell me why?)

But anyway, here’s Brantley:

Still, pity the young actress who has to hold her own against Ms. Ebersole, who turns the first act into a personal tour de force. Dressed in the kind of at-home morning wear that wouldn’t look out place in a ballroom (the ubiquitous William Ivey Long did the costumes), Ms. Ebersole works her way through a catalog of period-pastiche numbers (including a hilarious minstrel-show paean to hominy grits) in a coloratura that captures exactly both long-gone musical genres and the particular egotism of the woman singing them.

He refers to Christine Ebersole’s performance as “mind-boggling”. Mind-boggling. A reviewer, a staid big time reviewer … resorting to ‘mind-boggling’. It must be something else.

And here is the end of the review, and it just makes me want to cry:

The wit, exact detail and, above all, compassion with which Ms. Ebersole infuses each of her numbers as Little Edie are ravishing. Even dancing like a drunken U.S.O. entertainer from World War II, flapping flags as if they were flyswatters, this Edie is never merely ridiculous. And when her voice goes pure and girlish for the show’s most conventionally pretty numbers, she becomes the frightened, resentful and perversely hopeful child that persists in everyone, longing for parental approval and the sanctuary of a real home.

There is another phrase, by the way, in addition to the immortal “da-da-da-da-dum,” that I can’t get out of my head. This one is two words, “Oh, God,” and Ms. Ebersole sings them in her climactic number, “Another Winter in a Summer Town,” with a layering of despair, rebellion and surrender that becomes a heartbreaking epitaph for an entire life. Watching this performance is the best argument I can think of for the survival of the American musical.

Unbelievable.

It is an event. What is happening is an organic phenomenon. Ebersole is taking her turn. Stepping into the light. Transcending. What is going on is bigger than the show itself.

And I’m so glad that I’m going to be participating in it – just by seeing it.