The fragile voice warbles from a scratchy phonograph: "She was the girl who had everything." Instantly, "Grey Gardens" introduces itself as a nostalgic portal into the sad and broken dreams of youth. Too, it reminds us that grand social standing is no guarantee against fate.

The stage show, in its Twin Cities premiere at Ordway Center, attempts to recapture the voyeuristic thrill of a 1975 documentary on the real-life freak show of Edith Bouvier Beale and her mother, Edie Beale. It's not an entirely successful endeavor. In a show decked out with Tin Pan Alley music and a longish fictional setup, playwright Doug Wright, composer Scott Frankel and lyricist Michael Korie do get beyond the film's mesmerizing banality, but without much conviction.

The first act is a contrived scenario to set up how Edith and Edie ended up living with raccoons and cats in their fetid East Hampton manse. Edith was first cousin to Jacqueline Onassis and Lee Radziwill, which undeniably increased America's fascination with their slide into decrepitude. So Wright's scenario wisely appropriates the Kennedy trope to imagine Edith on the cusp of her 1941 engagement party to Joe Kennedy II. Set designer Kate Sutton-Johnson has decked out "Grey Gardens" in muted tones of sophisticated good taste and for good measure, little Jackie and Lee are visiting for the summer. Zoe Pappas' Edith, a winsome charmer eager for life, carries the story with her young hopes.

The only thing preventing Edith's everlasting happiness is her mother, portrayed by Christina Baldwin with an eccentric amusement at life. With her court eunuch (Michael Gruber as a foppish dandy) always ready to plunk out a tune on the piano, Baldwin's Edie marks all those around her with an indelible and controlling ego. The final thread of this psychological web is grandfather Bouvier, all brutish rectitude in Richard Ooms' hands.

The tone is light, dancing along on Frankel's perfect period tunes and Korie's clever lyrics. Wright strives for more, whipping the confection stiff with a plausible exposition of dysfunction. His attempt succeeds only modestly, and the froth settles into a sentimental treat.

Directors James Rocco and Jayme McDaniel seem to understand this. Their staging has the sense of a cinematic melodrama, tinged with the cold sepia and gray tones in Michael Kittel's lights, and Raymond Berg's rich, pitch-perfect band. As her character's world crumbles, Baldwin uses her amazing eyes to exude an unhinged retreat from the world, with more than a whiff of Norma Desmond's smug hauteur.

The second act moves to the documentary material. Edie (a sweetly vulnerable harridan in Wendy Lehr's hands) and Edith (Baldwin, taking over the daughter's role) have collapsed in on each other. Joshua James Campbell is a neighboring slacker who helps out. His greater purpose, though, is as an object for Big Edie's mothering, and Lehr shines in the wonderful ode to homeostasis, "Jerry Loves My Corn," after she cooks him a cob on her bedside hotplate. Baldwin's haunting final number, lamenting the Hamptons' tourist exodus, "Another Winter in a Summer Town," mirrors her existence.

We leave with the sad sense of loss in these two lives and slightly fascinated by the wreck of wealth. But "Grey Gardens" remains an odd duck that seems content with providing nothing more than entertainment. With its fine cast, the St. Paul production fills that bill.