Grey Gardens: Original Broadway Cast Recording
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Composer: Scott FrankelConductor: Lawrence Yurman
Orchestra: Grey Gardens Pit Orchestra
Performer: Erin Davie
Performer: Bob Stillman
Performer: Christine Ebersole
Performer: John McMartin
Performer: Mary Louise Wilson
Performer: Matt Cavenaugh
Performer: Michael Potts
Edition: Music CD
Audio: English (Unknown)
Format: Cast Recording
CD Release Date: 2006-08-22
Music Label: P.S. Classics
Soundtracks:
- The Girl Who Has Everything
- The Five-Fifteen
- Mother Darling
- Goin' Places
- Marry Well
- Hominy Grits
- Peas in a Pod
- Drift Away
- The Five-Fifteen (reprise)
- Daddy's Girl
- The Telegram
- Will You?
- The Revolutionary Costume for Today
- The Cake I Had
- Entering Grey Gardens
- The House We Live In
- Jerry Likes My Corn
- Around the World
- Choose To Be Happy
- Around the World (reprise)
- Another Winter in a Summer Town
- The Girl Who Has Everything (reprise)
Music reviews of Grey Gardens: Original Broadway Cast Recording
Music Review: the best new musical of the year
Rating: 5 Stars
GREY GARDENS is fast becoming the "cast album dujour" title for 2006, and features Christine Ebersole in what may be the greatest performance of her career. Based on the cult favourite documentary "Grey Gardens" by the Maysles brothers; and featuring a score by Scott Frankel and Michael Korie. The book is provided by Doug Wright ("I Am My Own Wife").
The story of Edith "Big Edie" Bouvier Beale, and her daughter "Little Edie" is by now very well-known, thanks to the documentary. They became unfortunate figures of ridicule for some, but most were captivated by their bittersweet tale. The theme of bittersweet, and lives half-lived, permeates through the musical GREY GARDENS. Quite simply, it's the best new musical I've come across in a long, long time.
The show opens in 1941, with Big Edie (played by Christine Ebersole) hosting a party at her elegant East Hampton estate Grey Gardens, where her daughter Little Edie (Sara Gettelfinger) hopes to announce her impending engagement to Joe Kennedy Jr., (Matt Cavenaugh). When her dreams are dashed, Little Edie sadly - and somewhat unknowingly - resigns herself to a life of spinsterhood at Grey Gardens... Their demented relationship is sealed by Big Edie's "Will You?".
In Act Two, the elegant mansion is transformed into a delapidated wreck circa 1973. Big Edie (now played by Mary Louise Wilson) is a bedridden, somewhat senile recluse, cared for by Little Edie (now played by Christine Ebersole) who has grown embittered by resentment and regret.
The overreaching theme of the piece is captured in "Around the World", in which Little Edie imagines finally walking away from her mother's shadow. Ebersole's 11 o'clock number "Another Winter in a Summer Town" is also heartbreaking. There are also funnier, lighter pieces like "The Revolutionary Costume for Today" and "Jerry Likes My Corn" for the two actresses to sink their teeth into.
It's about time that Christine Ebersole is finally receiving her due, following years of solid work on Broadway (most recently a Tony-winning performance as Dorothy Brock in the revival of "42nd Street"), but I doubt that Ebersole has ever had a musical that best captures all her colours than GREY GARDENS. It is indeed the role and the musical that Ebersole has been waiting for all her life. Ebersole and Mary Louise Wilson bookend each other beautifully in their dual-performance as Big Edie.
Sara Gettelfinger (who rose to fame replacing no-show Jenna Elfman in "Nine" and later won the coveted role of Jolene in "Dirty Rotten Scoundrels") plays Little Edie in Act One, and gives a delightful performance as the "Body Beautiful Beale" with tons of potential, later squandered in the name of duty. Matt Cavenaugh quietly plays down the role of Joe Jr., with John McMartin (as Edith's father "Major" Bouvier) also very fine.
This recording features the cast and music as heard during the show's Off-Broadway run at Playwrights Horizons. I heartily and wholly recommend GREY GARDENS, a musical that proudly wears it's wounded heart on it's sleeve.
[PS Classics/Image Entertainment 642]
POSTSCRIPT (11th June 2007): The PS Classics label has just released a new edition of the GREY GARDENS cast album to reflect the changes in cast and score since the musical transferred to Broadway. Erin Davie replaces Sara Gettelfinger as "Little Edie" in Act One; and Kelsey Fowler replaces Audrey Twitchell in the role of "Lee Bouvier".
New numbers added to the score are "The Girl Who Has Everything," "Goin' Places," "Marry Well", a new ending to replace "Peas in a Pod"; plus the unrecorded "Telegram". Most of the recorded performances from the original album session have been used here again, except for the songs that required Davie and Fowler, and those have been completely re-recorded.
The original Off-Broadway cast recording (which was the subject of my initial review above) has now been discontinued and replaced by this current recording. No doubt this will be a confusing subject for a few people, but I'm glad that such a rewarding musical like GREY GARDENS has already garnered two separate recordings.
Description of Grey Gardens: Original Broadway Cast Recording
GREY GARDENS proclaimed the #1 Show of the Year by Time magazine--is preserved here in its Original Broadway Cast Recording. The show had been previously recorded following its off-Broadway premiere in the spring of 2006, but this new recording features the new songs and new cast members that were added for its Tony Award-winning Broadway transfer. Grey Gardens opened on Broadway on November 2, 2006, to rave reviews, led by Ben Brantley in The New York Times, who called it "an experience no passionate theatergoer should miss!" Starring Tony Award-winner Christine Ebersole and Tony Award nominee Mary Louise Wilson, it subsequently appeared on over 25 "Best of 2006" lists, including #1 Show of the Year (Time), Best Musical of the Year (USA Today, Entertainment Weekly) and Performance of the Year (The New York Times, New York) for Ms. Ebersole. In addition to the new songs and new performances, this Original Broadway Cast Recording also features an all-new 32-page full-color booklet complete with lyrics and Broadway production photos.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
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