By Wendell Brock

For The AJC


Raise the tent, chill the champagne, congeal the aspic! The Beales of Grey Gardens are throwing the social event of the season at Actor’s Express. Yes, darling, it’s the fabulous musical about Jackie O’s eccentric aunt and first cousin: Edith Bouvier Beale and her daughter, Little Edie. But face it, kitten, we wouldn’t be nearly as interested in these Kennedy courtesans if they hadn’t taken such a tumble from their gilded cage.

In 1973, the Beales created tabloid scandal when they were discovered holed up with an army of cats and raccoons in the dilapidated 28-room Long Island mansion they called Grey Gardens. A 1975 documentary by the Maysles Brothers turned the women into camp icons, living Miss Havisham-style with their bitter memories, and a 2006 Broadway musical cleverly conceived their story as a two-act play in which a single actress plays glamorous songbird Big Edie in one half and the wacky, turban-wearing Little Edie in the other.

With music by Scott Frankel, lyrics by Michael Korie and book by Pulitzer Prize-winner Doug Wright ("I Am My Own Wife"), "Grey Gardens" captures before-and-after snapshots of the Beales by juxtaposing the opulent past with the squalid present. Act One centers on Little Edie’s ill-fated engagement party to Joe Kennedy Jr. (an event that most likely never happened in real life) and features a score of faux-period parlor songs, while Act Two becomes a hallucinogenic parade of dancing cats and costume changes by the hopelessly mismatched Edie.

On the one hand, it’s kind of marvelous the way the writers turn scenes and dialogue from the documentary into tour-de-force musical comedy bon-bons (“The Revolutionary Costume for Today,” “Jerry Likes My Corn”). But even the finest productions can’t reconcile the musical’s tonal schizophrenia and abrupt ending.

Still, director Freddie Ashley and company give the theater’s highly anticipated season opener a pretty good go.

As the weathered and slightly exhibitionist Big Edie of Act Two, Kathleen McManus is a knockout. She captures the signature tics and twitches, the half-cocked glasses, the manipulativeness and cruelty of the original Momzilla — sorry, that’s “Mother Darling” — and delivers the vocal goods, too.

As Major Bouvier (and Norman Vincent Peale), Wade Benson acquits himself as one of the city’s best senior actors, while the young Katie Hollenshead and Abby Goldberg show remarkable poise as Jackie and her little sister, Lee, respectively. David Howard makes for a nicely understated Brooks Senior and Junior, the Beales’ African-American butler and gardener. And newcomers Justin McGough and Sarah Turner pair up nicely as the lovely Joe Kennedy and Young Edie. (McGough is even better, however, as the Beales’ goofus handyman/hanger-on, Jerry — aka “The Marble Faun.”)

So what about the double-duty performance of Jill Hames as both Edies? In a role that won Broadway’s Christine Ebersole a Tony Award, Hames has a beautiful vocal instrument, gets in a good many comic zingers as the kvetching Little Edie and gives an absolutely heartbreaking turn as a woman who sacrifices love, marriage and career for her mother. But Hames hasn’t quite mastered the regal manners of the society maven of Act One. Emerging later as Little Edie, she nearly shatters her voice, presumably for comic effect, as she belts the phrase “S-T-A-U-N-C-H women” in “Revolutionary Costume.” And while her character’s pithy one-liners and outrageous costumes (by Sydney Roberts) are virtually guaranteed laughs, Hames misses some of the flag-waving giddiness of Edie’s dancing.

In fact, most all of the choreography of the second half looks a little clunky, as if the performers are on a collision course with the clutter of the women’s tiny upstairs bedroom. (Sets, including the ravishing living room of the opening segment, are by Phil Male.) The ghostly “cat dance” is uninspired, and the blocking sometimes loosens the physical tension that ties this mother and daughter into such a knot.

As funny as it is, “Grey Gardens” is a portrait of co-dependency and lost dreams — a complicated battle of wills that recalls Mama Rose and Gypsy Rose Lee. However uneven the musical may be, the Beales remain fascinating bedfellows, and it’s a delight to see them ensconced on an Atlanta stage. Da-da-da-da-dum.

Theater review

Grade: B+

8 p.m. Wednesdays-Saturdays; 5 p.m. Sept. 6, 20 and 27 and Oct. 4; 2 p.m. Sept. 13. Through Oct. 10. $25-$37. Actor’s Express, King Plow Arts Center, 887 W. Marietta St., Suite J-107, Atlanta. 404-607-7469, actorsexpress.com