Big and Little Edie stand shoulder to shoulder with Judy and Liza as pop culture’s pre-eminent mother-daughter duo. It’s therefore fitting that their story, made famous through the Maysles brothers’ 1975 documentary Grey Gardens and beloved in LGBT circles to this day, has been retold as a musical.

Grey Gardens, the documentary, is an arresting yet pitiful snapshot of Jackie Kennedy Onassis’s impoverished aunt and cousin, both named Edith Bouvier Beale, who lived in the dilapidated family mansion from which the film takes its name.

This musical adaptation by Doug Wright (book), Scott Frankel (music) and Michael Korie (lyrics) seeks to further explore the Edies’ relationship with each other and their own inner worlds by depicting their glory days in Act I before catching up with the duo in Act II as their living situation hits the newsstands.

Helen Dallimore as Little Edie in Grey Gardens. Photo © Ben Fon

The second act is rife with meaty, emotionally charged themes – disability and caregiving, regret, abusive relationships and poverty, to name a few – all filtered through the fraught relationship between Big and Little Edie.

The air crackles between Helen Dallimore’s Little Edie...