Composer Scott Frankel on Turning the Cult Documentary "Grey Gardens" Into a Beloved Musical 20 Years Ago
I had my chance to go deep with Scott about how you break down one cherished art work and reconstitute it into another.
Hey Caftan readers! I’m home slowly recovering from this stomach surgery, which means there’s not much more I can do currently than be on a phone or laptop—perfect for seeking out Caftan interviews! The one I have for you below is one I’ve been meaning to do for a few months now—it’s with the musical theater composer Scott Frankel, whom I’ve gotten to know the past year or so through our mutual friend, Gays Against Guns cofounder Kevin Hertzog.
Scott, at age 60, has a few musicals under his belt, including the 2013 adaptation of the film Far From Heaven and 2017’s War Paint, but he’s best known for the beloved 2006 musical version of Grey Gardens, which—I likely hardly have to tell this audience—is the beloved cult-classic 1975 documentary the famous Maysles Brothers made about the sequestered life of Big Edie and Little Edie Beale, a mother and daughter who were Jackie O.’s aunt and cousin, respectively, and somehow, over three decades, descended from privilege and glamour into living in bickering squalor in their falling-down East Hampton mansion, surrounded by cats and raccoons and trash and their faded, haunted memories.
I am not going to devote space here to a disquisition on why I love Grey Gardens so much—partly it’s just that it’s a beautifully made documentary that captures the devastating passage of time, and of the seasons, with rare poignancy—but I’ll merely say that my first reaction when I hear that a beloved film, play, novel, etc. is being made into a musical is to cringe. Almost inevitably, I know, it will be a train wreck. But my reaction when I first saw Grey Gardens the musical at Playwrights Horizons in 2006 was thinking that, in addition to the score being gorgeous and perfect for all its purposes from beginning to end, it brought the emotional dynamics of the film to the fore in a way that made them starker and more heartbreaking, yet without ever hitting us over the head with them. I will never forget the last five or ten minutes of the show—will Little Edie, suitcase in hand, go seek her deferred dreams, all but abandoning the imperious but helpless Big Edie in her crumbling seaside home? I walked out of that show vibrating with the excitement over how theater can move us when it’s done well.
How do you take a very dense and complex film, chockful of references that have become mantra lines to many a gay young and old (“Mother wanted me to come out in a kimono, so we had quite a fight”), and transpose it to a music-driven story? That’s what Scott graciously agreed to chat with me about—to have a real artistic-process conversation, which is one of my favorite kinds. He is in fact working on something new, which he talks about toward the end, but for the most part, we talk here about Grey Gardens. You may have seen both the doc and the musical. If not, the doc is easy to find on streaming platforms like HBO, and I’ve included here YouTube performances from the songs in question, including some of them by the imcomparable Christine Ebersole, who created the role of Little Edie…
…alongside the equally incomparable Mary Louise Wilson as Big Edie…
Scott also claims that if you look hard enough, you can find bootleg video of the entire musical online. I hope that by including here videos all the numbers we discuss, you can listen so that you can better understand our conversation about them.
Scott talked to me on a beautiful Saturday morning from his home in Livingston, in the Hudson Valley, where he lives with the architect Jim Joseph, his life partner of 20 years.
Tim: Hi, Scott! I’m so excited to talk. So to start, how did you become a composer in the first place?
Scott: I grew up an only child in suburban Cleveland, a musical little boy with parents who were arts supporters. I started piano lessons when I was five. I had a great first teacher who instilled in us a knowledge of harmony and theory. We had to run to the chalkboard and do key signatures. It gave me an incredible structural understanding of music. I could also play by year, so when I was five or six, I sounded like an older pianist.
Tim: What did you first compose?
My parents were regular Cleveland Orchestra subscribers. The French composer Pierre Boulez, who later took over the NY Philharmonic, became the principle guest conductor and ended up living with our family on and off for two or three years. He was the foremost avant-garde composer of his day. In 1969 and 1970, at about six or seven, I started composing little pieces under his watchful eye. I wrote this piece called “Plexiglass Catacombs.”
Tim: You were so precocious!
Scott: When I was eight I was discovering Chopin and Rachmaninoff, which he just despised. When he was home, I would only practice Mozart and Bach—anything more Romantic I avoided to not offend him. But we also had a parade of visiting soloists who would stay with us, so I guess I was exposed to musicians at a young age. I thought I wanted to be a classical pianist, but I also saw how lonely and solitary that life was, always away from your family.
Tim: How did you get into musical theater?
The first Broadway show I saw was A Chorus Line at age 13 in 1976. I also loved pop radio hits and played my Jewish piano version of them. I’d get jobs in junior high and high school playing rehearsal piano for things. I was really attracted to this fusion of classical underpinnings with theater and performance.
Tim: Did you have an idol? Sondheim? Bernstein?
When I was in high school, I told my parents I had to go to New York to see Patti LuPone in Evita and also Sweeney Todd. I was a bossy only child. I got on a plane to New York alone at 16. I was not at all scared of New York. I was fascinated by it. I remember sitting in the theater when the Sweeney organ started. I thought it was the most incredible rollercoaster ride of a show.
Tim: I do love asking Sondheim lovers—and I am one myself—this question: What is it about Sondheim that you love?
Scott: It’s the incredibly rich harmonic language and the influences you hear so pointedly, like Ravel, or Jerome Kern and Victor Herbert in Follies. Every score sounded different but the musical language was always sophisticated and surprising, but also—I found—throbbing with emotion. He always got the rap, which I never understood, of, “He’s a brilliant lyricist but the music is passionless.” Really? “In Buddy’s Eyes”? “Johanna”? “Not While I’m Around”? That’s absurd.
Sondheim was about how you take the form and push it to extremes. You didn’t have to just do ditties. Musical theater songs could really have a kind of orchestral palette to them.
Tim: TimThink of a Sondheim song and talk a little about its structure. Pick one that wows you and explain why.
Scott: Take “The Miller’s Son” from A Little Night Music…
The conceit of it, that she is imagining her life in three different scenarios, what that sets up structurally. Then it starts with a minor verse introductory section, kind of a parlando—not exactly recitatif—but a little bit halting. Each intro section ends with “Meanwhile…”, which is thrilling. What’s coming around the bend? Then this exciting, more marcato edgy, driving section with an explosion of words and notes. Then this very rhapsodic, Ravel-like waltz section. And each of these imaginings of what her life would be like with different men is extended ever so slightly the longer at a climactic point. Then the very last part there’s a real extension that is musically and lyrically thrilling. Then a classical kind of A-B-A form. That’s about as far away from “Put On a Happy Face” as you can get. It’s clearly not just like a Tin Pan Alley song. It has intent and structural ambition where each component of the song informs the others. Everything’s firing on all cylinders—that’s what I love about musical theater. You don’t have to be aware of that architecture, but you still have a feeling of being pushed and pulled.
Tim: That’s a great break-down. OK, so let’s talk about Grey Gardens. You had two shows before it, Doll and Meet Mr. Future. What is the origin story of the musical adaptation of Grey Gardens?
Scott: It was my idea. I was in Provincetown, where I spent the summers. Somehow a lightbulb went off in my head. I’d seen Grey Gardens the film many times. Passed-around bootleg videotape copies. It felt like contraband. And it was a moniker of your cool quotient if you knew about it or had a copy. It’d never occurred to me adapt it, but around 2000, it kind of did. I was frustrated with my previous shows. But they were optioned by commercial Broadway producers. I thought, “What if I de facto function as my own producer? Would I get a better result by pushing the rock up the hill myself?”