Watching the 1975 cult documentary film Grey Gardens about “Big” Edith Bouvier Beale and her daughter, “Little” Edith Bouvier Beale, is like hanging out with family you only see at Christmas for an hour and 45 minutes and seeing yourself reflected back.

There’s Little Edie in her signature black shroud and transatlantic drawl, opening a book on astrology to tell you all about her Sagittarian lovers. There’s Big Edie in a single bed surrounded by cats and covered in newspapers, dressed like she’s in a Ralph Lauren catalogue.

Like that infamous magnifying glass Little Edie uses to zoom in on her astrological chart, Grey Gardens had the unintentional effect of zooming in on what defines a queer icon: fragility without shame; pain without self-pity; and a theatrical commitment to personal expression rooted in an earnest need for connection.

In Dino Dimitriadis and Victoria Falconer’s occasionally brilliant adaptation, House of Rot, this classic of queer cinema is stripped back to its foundations. There are some explicit references to the original film peppered throughout – a classic Little Edie quote to signal a scene change, a can of tuna, a black headpiece – but Dimitriadis and Falconer favour a liberal approach more interested in bringing out the film’s underlying themes conceptually.

Adam Noviello and Paul Capsis: House of Rot. Photo © Gianna Rizzo

In the show’s program notes, they talk about taking ‘an impulse and an emotional trajectory’ from Grey Gardens for their 70-minute ‘cabaret invocation’. This ‘invocation’ amounts to a theatrical mixed bag: new cabaret-style arrangements of Lady Gaga, Lana Del Rey and Stephen Sondheim delivered alongside scenes featuring near-absurdist dialogue, large-scale projections and enough fog to fill a stadium. These are the tools the show uses to ask: what parallels can be drawn between the evocative world of Grey Gardens and the contemporary queer experience?

The cast they’ve enlisted to explore this difficult question are two national queer icons of our own: living legend and cabaret star Paul Capsis as Big Edie, and musical theatre powerhouse and pop star Adam Noviello as Little Edie.

Dimitriadis and Falconer have succeeded in offering a spectacle-filled showcase for Capsis and Noviello’s individual talents. But I found House of Rot oddly vacuous, split between the gritty intimacy of cabaret and the slick but occasionally heavy-handed style of contemporary musical theatre. This divide might have been intended to represent the generational divide between Capsis and Noviello. And it does, for better and for worse.

After a moody opener by Falconer (whose musical direction is never less than evocative and creative), Capsis walks onto a minimalist stage with a line of empty black chairs for a short rendition of another iconic queer work: La Cage aux Folles’ I Am What I Am. Capsis, with his mischievous grin and gloriously teased hair, saunters through this piano cover, his eyes flickering from one audience member to another.

When Noviello joins him soon after, the duo begin flirting and winking at us. These moments of dialogue between them were a highlight. Often taken directly from the film, the pair’s stilted conversations took on a Beckettian absurdity on the shadowy stage, as if Whatever Happened to Baby Jane was written by a French existentialist.

Paul Capsis and Adam Noviello: House of Rot. Photo © Gianna Rizzo

Cabaret’s close connection to its audience makes it the perfect form to replicate the intimacy and unpredictability that endeared us to Little Edie and Big Edie in the film. But as Capsis and Noviello flirt and wink at us, you feel the tension that cuts this production off at the knees. This moment isn’t the organic audience connection you find in cabaret; it’s a scripted gimmick feigning the intimacy that comes from a broken fourth wall without truly breaking it.

Cabaret has the free associative logic of poetry rather than the narrative-led form of musical theatre. It’s the cabaret performer who shepherds their audience through non-sequiturs or pulls them into a song as they recontextualise it.

Falconer is a force, and her violin-led arrangement of On the Nature of Daylight managed to find fresh ground from an overused score that has appeared everywhere: in Hamnet, Arrival and even Sydney Theatre Company’s On the Beach. But as she sings, or plays violin centre stage, her presence implicitly leads the show without being a clear character in it. I wanted Capsis or Noviello to interact with her explicitly, or to have more chances to lead transitions between scenes and cue songs on their own.

These are a few of the many examples throughout the show that illustrate the corner this team has backed itself into by straddling two forms with two different adaptation styles: the narrative-led musical and the non-linear impressionistic cabaret. Noviello’s track seems to follow an implicit narrative structure with a clear character arc.

They get an ‘I Want’ song, a tragic ballad, a concluding empowering showstopper. This track is never less than beautifully performed, but my critique of Noviello is also a compliment: their poise and impeccable vocal performance feel at odds with the fragility of Little Edie, who is closer to the raw imperfection of a figure like Sally Bowles. Their often-heavy-handed emotional beats are big on spectacle but small on real intimacy.

It might seem ridiculous for me to be asking a show that features a nude piano cover of I Touch Myself for something more intimate, but as the night went on, this is what I craved. I wanted to see the genuine connection the production so often floats but rarely commits to. I wanted to laugh with Capsis ad-libbing with his audience; I wanted to feel Noviello sing with us rather than at us.

As the show continued to spotlight Noviello in more moments of larger-than-life theatrical spectacle, the production seemed to reach deeper into the well of musical theatre conventions to fill the large Merlyn Theatre at the expense of its quieter and more affecting conceptual resonances.

Adam Noviello and Paul Capsis: House of Rot. Photo © Gianna Rizzo

Capsis’s guttural belt has no trouble filling the space, but his assets are underutilised. His comedic timing is not given enough space to shine and the vulnerability of his rasping timbre is smoothed over by a frustrating echoboost. Capsis is far too good to sit comfortably on the sidelines, and they’re on stage with Noviello far too often for you not to notice that their increasingly rare interactions together feel uncomfortable, as if they are caught between playing themselves and these characters.

Watching Noviello belt out Sia’s Alive (beautifully, as always) with Capsis watching on far behind them, I wondered if this was really the best story of intergenerational queerness we could’ve told: of an older performer, nowhere near a swan song, relegated to the background to watch a newer performer rise.

It’s a wasted opportunity to encounter the difference between Capsis and Noviello – in experience as much as in their practice as artists – as a question of the divide between generations of queer people that cannot be so simply answered. This showstopping version of I Am Alive, delivered with a prerecorded backbeat under a bright spotlight, offers a solipsistic and heavy-handed answer to a more complex dynamic.

Noviello’s eyes are looking somewhere just above us, the ever-staunch professional finding the vanishing point somewhere in the middle rung of the back row. They’re performing a gorgeous moment of individual defiance and empowerment. We’re watching on.

I think Little Edie would’ve looked at us directly, like Capsis does. Her direct address to the camera in Grey Gardens was always the key to her cult following. Her larger-than-life musings, style and charisma became queer, I think, because they felt driven by an earnest desire to connect with us through that address. The sense of fragility behind her eyes was a hint of that paradox queer people know so well: the desire to be seen and the fear of being seen too truly. And so, we connect with her because we see ourselves in her and we want to be seen by her.

That’s the real divide that plays out in House of Rot: between an idea of queer art that performs queerness for its audience to connect with, and one that wants to connect to its audience because that is essential to the experience of queerness. In Grey Gardens there is a display of queerness you share in and help to construct. In House of Rot there is a display of one person’s queerness you merely watch and applaud.

After its Adelaide and Melbourne seasons, House of Rot plays at the Hayes Theatre, Potts Point, Sydney, 23–28 June.