Rendering 4 (Theatre)

The title of the article is "Grey Gardens Is Missing Its Heart. The Musical Gets Better as Its World Gets Worse". The article was published by Adrian Ryan on March 27, 2013 and is taken from The Stranger magazine. The article is about Grey Gardens musical and the reporter's appreciation of it. 

Grey Gardens is a musical based on the fascinating real-life story of Edith and Little Edie, a mother and daughter from the wealthy Bouvier-Beale clan. They are great socialites who became fallen, cat-food-snarfing shut-ins.

As the author reports the performance was damned. He describes every act in detail giving his own exclamations in brackets. 

The first act needs to have a context, to introduce the family, and to properly frame their fall, but from the author's point of view this part is too short and is definitely not the most interesting of the Grey Gardens story. 

Act one also suffers from its in-the-round staging, a hurdle for many plays and any musical. Actors' voices are not enough loud and are not heard in all four corners of the room. Besides the family's background another important information is garbled and lost, forcing the audience to figure it out or forget about it.

The reporter is also unsatisfied by the actors' playing. Patti Cohenour, who plays "Big Edie", is feckless and conniving while Little Edie plays deeply ashamed and resentful. Only Allen Fitzpatrick saves act one, but in the second act he is not good at all and the scene where he is a singing cat is not appropriate. 

What is more, the musical has historically wrong things, for example, the main characters cooks food with gas, though in 1975 there is no gas. 

Further the author reports that act two is better than act one. Hunt's Mother Darling is a heart of the show as her voice is much better than her younger self in the first act. The reporter also praises her acting and advises everyone to see her number "Revolutionary Costume for Today". 

The reporter comes to the conclusion that the performance is not worth seeing. I don't know whether the author is right or not, maybe for amateur spectators the play is not so bad as he describes.