‘She could have been a Kennedy’: A cult documentary has been reimagined as a musical

It’s the early stages of rehearsal, and Helen Dallimore is still trying to nail the broad Mid-Atlantic drawl of Edith ‘Little Edie’ Bouvier Beale of Grey Gardens, one of the great American eccentrics. With the accent comes Edie’s life story, contradictions and tics.

“I’m thrilled to be playing somebody who is my age, and who has not decided that she is worthy of being discarded,” she says, in her own accent.

Edie is known to most as the star of the legendary 1975 documentary Grey Gardens. In the film, Edie and her mother, Edith ‘Big Edie’ Bouvier Beale, once wealthy socialites, live a reclusive, co-dependent life in a crumbling mansion in New York’s upmarket Hamptons. Singing, dancing and bickering.

The musical version, written by Scott Frankel, Michael Korie and Doug Wright, and directed by Tyran Parke, delves into the Edies’ backstory. It’s an intergenerational tale about the remembered past warping the present.

“How did Little Edie become that woman?” asks Dallimore. “What turned her from a debutante and the belle of East Hampton into this eccentric and paranoid anti-establishment figure? She could have been a Kennedy. People are fascinated by the story because it’s such a long way to fall.”

Dallimore plays two roles in the play. In act one, set in 1941, she’s Big Edie, contending with her faded dreams of being a singer, while her glamorous socialite daughter Little Edie (Meg Williams) prepares to announce her engagement to Joe Kennedy jnr.

“I still feel 25. I haven’t really caught up.”

Helen Dallimore, actor

In act two, set in 1973, Dallimore moves into the role of Little Edie, alongside Deidre Rubenstein as her mother, with the pair sharing the crumbling ruins of their home with countless raccoons and cats. The first act of the musical is mostly fictional, but the second draws heavily from that endlessly quotable film.

Little Edie remains one of the most compelling characters in American cinema, and she went on to become a camp icon, known for her eccentric outfits and sharp wit.

“Little Edie has this absolutely no-f—s-given enjoyment of life,” says Dallimore. “Every man in their life has basically discarded the Edies, but they are proud and unashamed. They watched the documentary, and they were happy with it. That was exactly what they wanted to say about their lives.”

The film can be messy, grimy and uncomfortable to watch, and at times feels exploitative. But the women always come out on top. They are defiant, staunch even. It’s generally known as being directed by two men, Albert and David Maysles, but editors Muffie Meyer and Susan Froemke are also credited as directors. To Dallimore, this is key.

“It was shot by men, which was perfect because I think that those two women really liked having men to perform for,” she says. “But the way it’s edited, I can sense that it’s women looking at women. It feels feminine to me.”

Dallimore says there’s a “recalibration” that happens to women in middle age, both in themselves and in society at large.

“Looking in the mirror and seeing a middle-aged woman staring back at you is quite profound sometimes. It always comes as a great surprise. I still feel 25. I haven’t really caught up.”

Dallimore has been on stage and screen for three decades, most notably in musicals: as Glinda in the first West End production of Wicked, alongside Idina Menzel, as Cinderella in Into the Woods, and in the supporting role of Paulette in Legally Blonde, for which she won a Helpmann.

Historically, she says, women have become accustomed to the disempowerment of age. “To losing one’s fertility and attractiveness, and therefore usefulness to society,” she says. “But I think middle-aged women of Generation X, of which I am one, are just going ‘F–k that.’ This is an awesome time to be alive. We’re in a post-Me Too era, people are talking about menopause in a way they never did before, medical misogyny is beginning to be investigated… There are so many wonderful things happening for women right now.”

Lately, she’s turned her hand to writing children’s books. Her novel The Hits and Misses of Melody Moss and its sequels delight in pre-adolescent awkwardness.

“Melody is starting year 7, and she’s obsessed with musical theatre,” says Dallimore. “And everyone thinks she’s a loser. But she turns it around.”

Sounds familiar.

“100 per cent,” she says. “How do I write for a 12-year-old girl? The only reference point I’ve got is my 12-year-old self. I found that she was viscerally still present in my imagination. There she was.”

As Little Edie says in Grey Gardens, a look of distant longing in her eyes, “It’s very difficult to keep the line between the past and the present.”

“It was great to be able to turn that experience into jokes, to laugh at it,” says Dallimore. “And to tell kids you can be an outlier and it doesn’t matter. Because one day you might get to be in an amazing musical.”