Quotes of the Day

Here's a theme story with no theme, just a coincidence: two new Broadway musicals based on movies that couldn't be more different. One, Mary Poppins is from the P.L. Travers books that inspired the 1964 Walt Disney boxofficepalooza. The other, Grey Gardens, stitches songs onto the true saga of Edith Beale and her daughter Edie, the Jackie O. relatives who lived in spectacular squalor and family rancor in the ritzy Long Island village of East Hampton, and whose eccentricities the documentarians Albert and David Maysles put on display in their 1975 film.

I could try to lend this piece some heft by confecting a lofty theory — say, on the lure of stories about families in turmoil who live in haunted houses and are visited by strangers who change the families' lives. But this time, I'll get straight to the assessments. For me, Mary Poppins worked, at a level higher than efficient and just this side of splendid. The pleasures of Grey Gardens are more mixed. It boasts a glorious performance by Christine Ebersole as both mother and daughter (I'll explain later), and Best Support by Mary Louise Wilson, in a smart show whose main deficiency is exactly what so many modern musicals lack: good music.

MEET THE BEALES

The Grey Gardens musical opens with this announcement, news-clipping style: "In a statement released today, Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis confirmed that her 80-year-old aunt, Mrs. Edith Bouvier Beale, and her adult daughter Edie are living in squalid conditions in an East Hampton estate known as Grey Gardens. The house that once played host to Howard Hughes and the Rockefellers is now a refuge for 52 stray cats, a few rabid raccoons and its two reclusive inhabitants, all living in an environment the Health Department calls unfit for human habitation."

The Beales had already been the subject of a 1972 New York magazine cover story by Gail Sheehy when the Maysles brothers got to them a year later. By then, Albert and David had pretty much patented the branch of documentary known as showbiz vérité. Showman, a profile of movie distributor Joe Levine (1963), What's Happening: The Beatles in the U.S.A. (1964), A Visit With Truman Capote (1966), Meet Marlon Brando (1966) and the Rolling Stones' Altamont debacle Gimme Shelter (1970) all demonstrated vérité's affinity for performers. A form of documentary that plants a two-person film crew (camera and sound) in a room with the subject, then waits for something to happen, vérité is dependent on exhibitionists, self-dramatizers, natural actors, people eager to tell their story in front of strangers.

Cinema vérité translates as movie truth, but the subject's story doesn't have to be true; it only has to compel the viewer to keep watching. Anyway, the lies or evasions people bring to explanations of their lives can be as revealing of their real personalities (if there are such things) as the truth (if that even exists). And in Edith and Edie Beale, Albert and David found a mother-daughter act eager to act out their lifelong psychodrama. As Edie, who was 56 when the movie was shot, confides to the brothers about her dreams of nightclub stardom and her altruistic imprisonment tending for her mother in Grey Gardens, Edith, then nearing 80, insisted that she was the caregiver and her daughter the emotional invalid. It is up to the moviegoer to choose one version as accurate, or neither, or a bit of both.

In the film — which is being reissued next month, along with a new feature-length collection of outtakes, The Beales of Grey Gardens, by, guess who, the Criterion Collection — we see that the Beales they have perfected a kind of living-room vaudeville act, in which Little Edie lives in a world of grand delusions, and Big Edie tries to slap some sense, and some shame, into her with sharp words. The younger one uses the camera as a confidant (Edie had a crush on David M., and flirts openly with him); the elder at least recognizes the public stink that can come from airing dirty laundry. When Little goes on a rant, Big cries, "But the movie, the movie!" and points at Al and David as if they were arresting officers. Finally, exasperated, Mama snaps at her daughter, "It's a goddamn beautiful day! Shut up!"

Still, both Beales seem equally estranged from the norm, and the present. They are Blanche DuBois and her mother, Norma Desmond. So for a few decades, the Beales have replayed the old melodrama in their shrill, sad and funny way: chattier than Beckett, more mannerly than Mamet, as addled from their mutual confinement in Grey Gardens as Tennessee Williams' ladies were in their Glass Menagerie and as suspicious of the outside world that doesn't understand them. ("We'll be raided again by the Village of East Hampton," Little Edie frets wryly. "You know, they can get you in East Hampton for wearing red shoes on a Thursday.") The bickering banter runs through the movie and the musical, giving both versions their oomph and poignancy. The Beales look at oil portraits and sketches of their younger selves, thumb through old photographs of Little Edie in her deb lustre. Big Edie asks, "Doesn't she look like the girl who had everything?"

They bear the scars of a glamorous and corrosive family history, one to wallow in when they're not trying to blot it out. "It's very difficult," Little Edie says, "to keep the line between the past and the present." For her, the past was that of a debutante who in 1941 might have been thisclose to marrying Joseph Kennedy, Jr., if Big Edie hadn't scotched the engagement by telling Joe of her daughter's sexual adventures. (Or maybe she made them up. Or maybe this Kennedy was never that interested in this Bouvier girl. The past can be a fiction too.) The suggestion, at least in this version of a romantic Rashomon, is that with her husband close to abandoning her, Big Edie was desperate for a life companion, and Little Edie was the designated victim.

That, anyway, is the assumption that underlies the first act of the new Grey Gardens show, with a book by Doug Wright (I Am My Own Wife), lyrics by Michael Korie and music by Scott Frankel. In 1941, the Grey Gardens drawing room is a symphony of soft colors and a cacophony of beautiful people who thoughtlessly destroy one another. The father, J. V. Beale (John McMartin), is a bluff philanderer intent that his offspring marry well; his wife Edith (Ebersole) thinks of the place as a cage for her ambition as a professional singer; young Edie (Erin Davie) is a sweet young thing perfectly cast as the victim of her mother's need to control. For dry comic relief there's Edith's bisexual accompanist, Graham Gould Strong (Bob Stillman); and for plot purposes only there's young Joe Kennedy (Matt Cavenaugh), who can't see beyond the stereotypes of upper-class girls.

Stereotype is the word for most of these characters. And that's appropriate, since director Michael Greif stages Act I as a pastiche and a parody of the light musical comedy that dominated Broadway between the World Wars. Underneath the strained gaiety lurks family tragedy. That sets up Act II, which is simply a musicalizing of the movie, this time with Ebersole as Little Edie and Wilson as the matriarch of that decrepit mansion.

The tone of pastiche is even more obvious in the songs. Gould's farewell number, "Drift Away," recalls the elegiac mood of "Sail Away," the Noel Coward standard. "Will You?", the pretty ballad that closes the first act, takes its tonic cue from the 1936 Brown and Freed "Would You" that was introduced in San Francisco and reprised in Singin' in the Rain. The first few bars, and the whole mood, of Little Edie's lament "Daddy's Girl," are a direct lift from Sondheim's Follies song "In Buddy's Eyes." Little Edie's second-act fashion statement, "The Revolutionary Costume for Today," is another Sondheimlich maneuver (that's David Zippel's pun, for praise or blame, not mine); and Big Edie's "The Cake I Had" takes its repetitive phrase from West Side Story's "A Boy Like That."

Give Frankel credit for stealing from the best. He's like a pickpocket with a great eye for fat wallets. But he doesn't add anything. (As TIME Theater critic Ted Kalem said of Cats back in 1982: "You'll leave the theater humming other people's better songs.") That's a shame, because Korie has a knack for clever lyrics; I'd never heard eunuch and Punic rhymed before. For the "Drift Away" bridge he conjures a lovely wistfulness — "Our tete-a-tetes, midnight duets, / Our breakfast tea and toast, / Funny how things that mean the least/ Are what we'll miss the most" — that approaches the pop poetry of Broadway's Golden Age lyric masters.

In those days, immortals like the Gershwins and Cole Porter and Rodgers and Hart built shows around the top performers. Star turns are just what Broadway used to thrive on and now shrivels from; yet, glory be, here's one. You may discount the rumors that the Tony committee isn't going to bother nominating four other women for the Best Actress in a Musical award because Ebersole already has an unbreakable lock on it. But, no question, she's totally terrif: funny, sexy, domineering, pitiable, lending her formidable, witty soprano voice to two disparate roles she was born to play, in a show she's a little too good for.

PUTTING THE POP IN POPPINS

As the only person in the Western world who had never seen the movie, I had no yardstick to measure the new show by, or to rap it on the knuckles — which some opening-night critics did — for inexcusable infidelity to the original. And when I finally did catch up with the film on DVD, I surprised myself by preferring the show put on by producers Cameron Mackintosh and Disney's Tom Schumacher.

The essentials are still here: the fractured London household, with pompous father George Banks (Daniel Jenkins), mother Winifred (perennial Broadway luminary Rebecca Luker) and two rambunctious children, Jane and Michael (played by three pairs of kids); the hiring of the uncanny nanny Mary Poppins (Ashley Brown); the narration by Mary's friend, Bert the chimneysweep (Gavin Lee); the rooftop dance of Bert and his proletarian pals; and most of Richard M. and Robert B. Sherman's hit score. Eight of the Shermans' 14 songs (including "Chim Chim Cher-ee," "A Spoonful of Sugar," and "Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious") have been retained; George Stiles and Anthony Drewe expanded some of these and wrote six new ones.

Foremost among the interpolations is "Temper Temper," in which the toys in the children's bedroom come alive, giant-size, to teach kids a moral in the time-honored Disney fashion: by scaring the poop out of them. (What were Snow White and Bambi and Pinocchio if not horror movies about death and disfigurement?) Stiles and Drewe also offer a signature song for Mary Poppins, "Practically Perfect," so close to the Sherman style you'd swear it was in the original. Fiddling with the old songs, they have sharpened the humor of "Jolly Holiday" ("The gargoyles need to gargle cos their throats get rather dry") and dreamed up new rhymes for "...docious" (hypnotious, halitotious, rococococious). The wordplay is only slightly less amusing than the spectacle of theater critics pretending that the movie was a significant work of musical theater in order to slap down the current version.

What's missing here? The dancing penguins, alas; and the scene with Ed Wynn as a giggling floatation device, hurrah. I also wish Lee had the amazingly limber, leggy grace of Dick Van Dyke in the movie; but that's asking too much. No actor since the silent clowns had Van Dyke's gift for blending comedy and dance. (Brown, though she's given to wiggling her hips in a way not at all Edwardian, is fine in the title role, favoring a smiley demeanor over Julie Andrews' prim severity in the film.) And though choreographer Matthew Bourne matches the acrobatic vigor of the movie's "Step in Time," his first-act ballet involving nudish park statue must be consigned to the What Were They Thinking? bin.

More serious is the dowdying-down of the parents. As played in the movie by David Tomlinson, George was that familiar figure of British comedy, the absent-minded middle manager; and Glynis Johns' Winifred was a spunky suffragette, blithely abandoning her children to go throw squirrel eggs at the Prime Minister. Both characters had an instinctive understanding of eccentricity; when the dotty Admiral next-door neighbor would fire his cannon, they automatically would reach for the nearest vase to keep it from crashing, then replace the object as the table or vanity slid back into place after the explosion. Here the parents are standard mopes: Father a class snob, preoccupied with job anxieties, Mother demurely resentful about, as her one solo goes, "being Mrs. Banks."

But there's plenty to please an audience. Mine, as settled in, directed most of its applause to Bob Crowley's sets: of a blustery London street and the five levels of the Banks house (downstairs kitchen, living room area, parents' bedroom floor, children's attic and rooftop) — a pretty astonishing achievement in imaginary architecture. He almost tops this later, with the oppressively, amusingly forced perspectives of George Banks' bank. Inside these sets, some very gifted technicians have reproduced or improved upon many of the movie's comic effects: the collapsing tables and uncrackable crockery; the materializing of large household objects — a hat rack, a standing lamp, a wall mirror — that Mary magically pulls from her satchel.

I was impressed by the technical legerdemain that lets Bert walk up the wall and on the ceiling of the proscenium; hadn't seen that since Fred Astaire did it in Royal Wedding, and here it's live! I liked the puppet pet that replace the movie's strenuous reliance on dog reaction shots to cue the kiddies to laugh. I loved hating Ruth Gottschall as Mrs. Andrew — a nanny in the Margaret Hamilton wicked-witch mode — who had warped George in his youth and returns to frighten Jane and Michael with her brimstone and treacle and three-octave range. All these effects and performances are expertly coordinated by director Richard Eyre. He both fulfills the no-trick-missed obligations of a Disney show and gives it a suave, practically perfect grandeur.

All right, sue me, I quite liked this Mary Poppins. It may not be absolutely super, but only Miss Andrews, or her avatars in the press, would rate the show any less than, well, califragilisticexpialidocious. So don't be surprised if the Broadway version outlasts the cavils of its critics. I give it a decade.

• Richard Corliss
• Mary Poppins and Grey Gardens come to Broadway. But how do these musicals rate against their film versions?