Word: broadways
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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...
...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...
...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...
...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...
...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...