Gypsy
The beloved musical Gypsy, now in its fifth Broadway revival since its 1959 premiere, has won hearts the world over. Arthur Laurents (book), Jule Styne (music), and Stephen Sondheim (lyrics) created a timeless production. Loosely suggested by Gypsy Rose Lee’s memoirs, the show will never flatline because of its penetrating look at the American dream.
In a stunning, unique portrayal of a heart-wrenching Mama Rose, six-time Tony Award® winner Audra McDonald vibrates with life. McDonald’s fury, passion, longing, bitterness, regret, and desperation spin out at the Majestic Theatre through June. This gobsmacking production is a must-see.
With her incredible acting and vocal skills, McDonald colonizes every cell of Mama Rose. With her unique understanding of the archetypal mother, she becomes the master of ceremonies in her daughters’ lives. McDonald’s Rose fashions the indomitable matriarch as an unstoppable force of nature. Despite her race and class, Rose will, Rose does. She propels herself forward with feisty, engine-driving persistence. How can one not be frightened of her, yet lionize her for her seminal courage and heart?
George C. Wolfe directs
Under the guidance of director George C. Wolfe, with choreography by Camille A. Brown, the production shines as perhaps the finest Gypsy revival. Wolfe and McDonald place Mama Rose’s ferocious ambition to achieve the impossible for her daughters front and center. The show, presented as “a musical fable,” answers the difficulties some might have with the multiracial cast.
Previously, every Mama Rose mirrored the race of the real Rose. Broadway star turns included Ethel Merman, Angela Lansbury, Tyne Daly, Bernadette Peters, and Patti LuPone. Wolfe cleverly launches this characterization with McDonald’s high-pitched, emotional interpretation into the realm of everywoman and specifically everymother. With clever casting of her daughters and her grandfather as racial blood relatives, the coherence of this revival comes from authenticity.
Freed from racial limitations, Wolfe encourages the audience to look past race to human needs on a profound and complex level. We see the extent to which McDonald’s Rose takes life deadly seriously. Rose appears in the audience in a hand-sewn period outfit. Accessorized for glamor, she wears a forlorn hat and drapes a much-used handbag on her wrist. Carrying a miniature Yorkie (Tana June) under her arm, Rose uses him to distract and misdirect. Rose defies Uncle Jocko’s (Jacob Ming-Trent) “no mother backstage” rules. With obstreperous charm she intrudes. She takes over Uncle Jocko’s audition contest to give her daughters a “leg up.”
Rose controls the situation the moment she arrives
Rose upends Jocko’s auditions of the kiddie acts. Like a whirlwind, she directs the conductor (the excellent Andy Einhorn at the helm of a 26-piece orchestra). She instructs the lighting designer to feature “star” Baby June (Jade Smith) with a pink spot. As she barrels over Uncle Jocko’s protests, she gives tips to the shy Baby Louise (Summer Raye Daney). After touting her girls’ professionalism, she asks Uncle Jocko if he knows an agent. Their kiddie version of “May We Entertain You” in “baby” voices that don’t entertain draws Jocko’s ridicule. Rose stops his laughter in its tracks like a schoolteacher. The scene ends with Rose sabotaging Balloon Girl (Kyleigh Vickers) with a hat pin.
Though the sub rosa humor sneaks in, Rose overwhelms and shocks us with her gutsy dynamism. We follow her as she takes us on a fateful journey toward a hard-won “success.” Dismissing her daughters’ lackluster performance with Jocko, she returns home more convinced than ever with a new dream.
During her argument with her grandfather (Thomas Silcott), we begin to understand Rose’s core. Three husbands later, her quest for material and psychological survival through exploiting her daughters reveals her intentions of last resort. For them, she eats dog food, so they can have chow mein. For them she steals her grandfather’s gold plaque to finance their trip to vaudeville’s Orpheum Circuit.
The song “Some People” solidifies Rose’s character and the arc of her development
In the pivotal “Some People,” McDonald justifies the revolutionary boldness of Rose’s dreams to her grandfather. Unlike him and her mother who abandoned her, she will fight for her daughters’ future stardom. In many of the songs McDonald sings that convey this maverick woman, we fear for her emotional fragility. However, a dream and a hope always emerge to carry her through even as she breaks apart. Despite her wayward, tawdry risks, (i.e. she keeps her daughters out of school), Rose mesmerizes us as a fantasist. For Rose will die trying. Rather than working a job or living a daily death married to someone who doesn’t dream, she will starve. In her soul, she has no choice. And fleeting time and her aging daughters place her under tremendous, palpable duress.
From “Some People” onward, the production soars on the back of McDonald with phenomenal assistance from Danny Burstein. As their agent and Rose’s love interest, Burstein’s Herbie provides the perfect complement. For a time his earthy authenticity seems to pair well with Rose’s ferocious dreamer. With his stalwart love, loyalty, and support, Rose moves forward. Their “Small World,” beautifully acted and sung, brings a sweet relief from Rose’s carnivorousness. Though Herbie understands the danger of her driven, volcanic nature, he can’t help himself. Burstein grounds their journey with an endearing poignancy. Lured by Rose’s life force, Herbie takes the audience on the ride that can’t really happen without him.
The journey toward the impossible
As their journey fancifully bumps and grinds toward the realization of the impossible vaudeville success, they manage to enjoy a few adventures together. “Baby June and Her Newsboys” and “Have an Egg Roll, Mr. Goldstone” reveal Rose’s obsession with June’s “stardom.” In “Little Lamb” we note the older Louise (Joy Woods), as Rose’s forgotten afterthought, who doesn’t know how old she is. To maintain their underage act, Rose especially encourages June (Jordan Tyson) to project girlishness, while lying about their ages to booking agents.
As a continual undercurrent, Herbie’s realism chips away at the heart of Rose’s hopes. Not only does he confront Rose with her daughters’ aging and educational neglect, he reminds her of her promise to marry him. In “You’ll Never Get Away From Me,” Rose reaffirms her great need and dependence on Herbie, but still delays their marriage. Once more Burstein’s Herbie relents, smitten with this fireball that burns, yet tantalizes him. Their duet and dance is easy, lovely. Just smashing!
Rose ignores Herbie’s warnings
Rose ignores Herbie’s admonition that films and the Great Depression have killed vaudeville and reshapes their old act into “Dainty June and Her Farm Boys.” Tired of few bookings and living from hand to mouth, after a promising audition yields less than expected June runs away with Tulsa (Kevin Csolak). Freeing themselves from Rose’s oppression, June and Tulsa modernize their song-and-dance duo and make their own bookings. Following the couple’s cue, the others leave to make their own ways. Only the shy Louise and Herbie remain, repeating the theme of abandonment that haunts Rose’s life.
Without June as her motivation, Rose fragments in a soul apocalypse. In the dialogue before, then during the astounding, “Everything’s Coming Up Roses,” McDonald’s emotional and vocal range gyrate wildly. Normally a mellifluous soprano, McDonald’s transformed voice, raw, edgy, spews out Rose’s desolation. Dripping grief, then converting it to anger that rises from the depths of despair and desolation, Rose becomes a phoenix.
Rose rises from the ashes of her own soul death
Rose musters her shattered strength to forge a new dream. This fixes on the unexceptional Louise and confers on her an evocation of misplaced glory. Rose’s mania sends her imagination flying high as she prophesies bitterly, “Everything’s coming up sunshine and Santa Claus,” in increasingly dark and deterministic refrains. Struck silent, Herbie and Louise watch her impassioned witchery. Noting the irony of her psychological state, the audience weeps for the great tragedy of the life Rose has made for herself as Act I concludes.
If Act I unspools with complication and conflict, it does so to set up the immense payoff in Act II. A recovered but still manic Rose establishes the imperfect “Madame Rose’s Toreadorables,” a girls act. And restored enthusiasm flourishes among Rose, Herbie, and Louise in “Together, Wherever We Go,” an exceptional number. Their exuberance manifests. We consider that perhaps this time they will succeed.
However, they’ve reached bottom and don’t know it. Herbie mistakenly books them into a gritty, slutty burlesque theater. There, the gaudy, bawdy “larger than life” burlesque queens normalize their acts for Louise and even give her a new identity to wear proudly. Performed with humor, spice, and salt by Lesli Margherita, Lili Tomas, and Mylinda Hull, the jazzy “You Gotta Get a Gimmick” convinces Louise she may be in the right place at the right time for once. When Rose encourages Louise to pretend-strip, as they hang by a thread over the abyss, Herbie’s protests fall on deaf ears.
The last segment of Gypsy answers the overriding question about Rose
The last segment of the musical speeds up time and resolves Gypsy’s mysteries and conflicts. Like a butterfly, Louise emerges from her cocoon of shyness into a glittering, savvy new identity. She steps into her own power as Gypsy Rose Lee. Once again, Rose faces abandonment. She must finally do for herself what she has done for everyone else. But who is she and does she deserve her own love? In the setup for “Rose’s Turn,” McDonald explodes with a lifetime of regret and pain, “With what I have in me, I could’ve been better than ANY OF YOU!”
As she sings on a bare stage out to the audience, her name in light behind her, Rose becomes the archetype of everyone who didn’t have the opportunity to fulfill their own talents and dreams. Her profound lament and affirmation of self-love resonates powerfully, sufficiently. The standing ovation McDonald received could have gone on for many more minutes than it did and might have concluded the musical, but for the next dialogue cues. Certainly the audience was overcome with empathy at McDonald’s Rose, extraordinary in her exposure, both human and primal. At that point in the show, McDonald sang all that could be expressed and more. Indescribable!
The show’s last five minutes of reconciliation between Louise and Rose necessitated a happier, certain resolution. Thus, Louise states, “You really would have been something, Mother.” After a bit more banter and dreaming about a school Rose might set up, they walk off together arm in arm.
The technical elements convey the glory and themes of Gypsy
Every technical element provides a sufficient canvas against which the superb ensemble displays their prodigious gifts. Wolfe outdoes himself with his vision for Gypsy, helped by Santo Loquasto’s spare, period/class scenic design. With coherence Toni-Leslie James’ meticulous costume design, Michael Clifton’s makeup design, Mia Neal’s hair and wig design, Jules Fisher and Peggy Eisenhauer’s lighting design and Scott Lehrer’s sound design infuse this musical with glory.
Gypsy runs three hours with one intermission at the Majestic Theatre (245 West 44th Street). Don’t miss it.
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