Mommie queerest: three gay men have turned the cult documentary Grey Gardens--about a high-society mother and daughter reduced to living like hermits--into a stage musical. "It's just delicious,".

"Big Edie and Little Edie were honorary gays," exclaims composer Scott Frankel. He's talking about the straight heroines of Grey Gardens, the amazing documentary film that has acquired a huge gay following since its 1975 release. The movie tracks the daily lives of Edith Bouvier Beaie, a 79-year-old former high-society aristocrat--who also happens to be Jackie Kennedy Onassis's aunt--and her middle-aged daughter, "Little" Edith, living in near squalor in a dilapidated mansion in East Hampton, N.Y.

"They were gutsy, those ladies," says Frankel, who, along with two other gay men--lyricist Michael Korie and playwright Doug Wright--has written a musical based on the film. (It's running at New York's Playwrights Horizons through March 26.)

Frankel recalls being initiated into the Grey Gardens cult by gay friends who could quote lines from the movie verbatim. The film's particular appeal for gay viewers is not hard to explain, he says. It's mostly about Little Edie, with her utterly captivating and idiosyncratic wardrobe and her thwarted ambition to be a dancer. "Even though she experienced tremendous loss and disappointment in her life she was still able to face every day of her life with this huge amount of energy and style," says Frankel, who came up with the idea to turn the film into a stage musical. The Beale women, he adds, "stuck to their fierce individuality their whole lives at great financial and personal cost, and then at the eleventh hour they were celebrated and mythologized. They were rewarded ultimately for their very otherness."

Korie adds, "You can't but admire Little Edie's courage, her staunchness, which is the word she uses. And her sense of fashion almost borders on drag."

"It's a very singular film," Frankel says. "It has so many levels as these women go from these fantastic bons mots and witty quips to a completely self-deluded comment, to a song and a dance, to screaming."

Onstage Big and Little Edie are played by Christine Ebersole, a Tony winner for 42nd Street, and Mary Louise Wilson, who played Diana Vreeland in Full Gallop. The show's creators were determined to give them fill] roles to inhabit, not mere camp shadows of the Beales. "It is incumbent on us to look beyond the camp trappings," says Wright (I Am My Own Wife), "because we are also trying to satisfy the people who haven't seen the film."

In the movie the women bring out sepia-tone photographs and scrapbooks that hint at a glamorous past life. Reflecting those tantalizing glimpses is the show's first act, which is set in 1941 and provides a striking contrast to 30 years later--the time frame of the movie, presented in the second act. "It's not a simplistic route as to how they ended up in that house in 1973," Frankel says.

The musical's first act was shaped in part by the writers' discovery that Little Edie had been briefly engaged to John F. Kennedy's brother Joe, who was killed in World War II. "It's such a historical near miss, it's just delicious," Frankel says. In the movie the ladies themselves offer contradictory versions of what precipitated their exile, with accusations flying back and forth between them--exchanges that may have been amplified by the presence of a film crew.

"It just energized them both with a third party present," Frankel speculates.

Wright says, "We tried to create a backstory that was sufficiently complex to allow for the possibility that, in their old-age recriminations, both women might have strong cases against each other. What has touched us all is the phenomenal parent-child story." He adds, "In this complicated relationship it is always the parent who both inflicts the severest wounds and also bandages them with the most tender care."

Raymond writes on film and theater and lives in New York City.