Gypsy is as close as the American theater has come to an indestructible musical. Recently opened in its fifth Broadway revival, directed by George C. Wolfe and starring a magnificent Audra McDonald, this 1959 show by the hallowed team of Arthur Laurents, Jule Styne and Stephen Sondheim has singular bones and longevity. Its vigor has now been proven across so many dizzying cultural shifts, and with such a variety of actresses in the lead role of Mama Rose—a ferocious stage mother Walter Kerr once called a “busybody, battleaxe and . . . heartbreaking failure”—that its endurance may be its most interesting feature. To borrow the agent Herbie’s famous line about Rose: “Nobody can kill you”!
Gypsy’s title (which wasn’t considered a slur when it was chosen) is sometimes called misleading, but to me it’s spot on. It refers to the burlesque star Gypsy Rose Lee (real name Louise Hovick), whose memoir the show is based on, even though she’s not the focus. The focus is her domineering mother, a frustrated former performer bent on living her dream through her kids: Louise and her more talented younger sister June, relentlessly flogged as a child stars on the dying vaudeville circuit of the 1920s and 30s. Rose was written for the famous postwar Broadway belter Ethel Merman and has been a pinnacle role for stage-devouring divas ever since.
The subtlety of the title is that it dangles Louise’s butterfly transformation the whole evening. We’re aware that the demure, awkward, browbeaten girl in front of us will eventually blossom into a star, and the wait for that mimics the historical Gypsy’s coy burlesque gimmick. Gypsy notoriously talked through her act and, instead of full-on stripping, teased audiences with flashes of skin, often while exiting. That’s what the musical does. Near the end, lackluster Louise suddenly blooms as an adult sex-bomb, playing as Gypsy in a quick montage that sets up the dynamite showdown with mom. Faced with Louise’s fierce independence, Rose finally has to decide who she is and what she wants.
The clarity of this story as performed by McDonald is the major triumph of the current revival. Both previous Roses I have seen—Tyne Daly and Patti LuPone—were showstopping marvels, but they were also distractingly monstrous. I recall Daly as incandescently savage, vulgar and sexy, and Lupone as hilariously ripe for the padded wagon. Many Gypsy devotees, I’m aware, insist that this sort of scene-stealing is what the show was made for. But McDonald’s new emphasis is equally worthy and impressive: Rose’s humanity.
The humanness shines through in her singing as well as her acting. McDonald is no brass-neck belter but rather a classically trained virtuoso with a confident, rangy coloratura. She can’t help bringing multi-layered nuance to every number—even those Styne carefully tailored to Merman’s vocal burglar alarm. “Some People,” for instance, Rose’s Act 1 declaration of loathing for “humdrum” domesticity, contains complex shades of fear and injury now that I never saw before.
“Small World” and “You’ll Never Get Away From Me” too, Rose’s bonding songs with her agent-boyfriend Herbie—whom she dangles with promises of marriage until he gets fed up and leaves—have now acquired strains of real attraction. With both Daly and Lupone, these numbers felt like pure calculation. In this matter, it helps that Herbie is played by radiantly warm Danny Burstein, who makes the relationship with Rose seem genuinely tender. Sometimes.
Both daughters are also shrewdly cast. June—played as a little girl by Jade Smith and Marley Gomes (I saw both) and as a big girl by Jordan Tyson—is all pep and no charm. Making this character so shamelessly shrill and grating is brave and also effective, because it underscores how deluded Rose is to insist June is a star. Joy Woods’s Louise, by contrast, is all quiet poise. After June runs away and Rose turns her ruthless ambitions on Louise, Woods plays a fascinating blend of diffidence and competence waiting to bud. Watch Woods’s reactions to Rose’s ugliest moments of clutching: tensing her shoulders, clenching her skinny fists--it's a study in accidental grace.
The elephant in the room of this production is of course its much-discussed racial dimension. McDonald is the first African-American to play Rose on Broadway, and Wolfe inserted race and racism into his staging in several ways. June wears a blonde wig and is lighter-skinned than Louise, making colorism a factor in Rose’s preference for her. Burstein is white, suggesting that white privilege is an advantage in his vaudeville bookings. The act Rose creates for her girls includes four young Black boys picked up on the road, who are blatantly switched out for older white boys during a time-lapse number evoking their grinding life of travel (Rose has evidently absorbed the bias around her). Finally, Gypsy emerges costumed like the breakout Black star Josephine Baker.
All this might have been taken in stride by most theatergoers if left to itself. The racial choices became a public issue last June, however, when the columnist and professor John McWhorter objected to them in the New York Times. Since segregation meant that Black performers in the 1920s could never really aspire to the sort of mainstream stardom Rose dreams of, McWhorter wrote, her ambition would be “frankly, ludicrous” if she were played as Black and, if she weren’t, would amount to historical whitewashing. McWhorter:
recoding characters, at least historical characters, as Black just because Black people are playing them is just another kind of denial of racism. It pretends that in the past (or even the present, for that matter) Black lives and white lives were interchangeable.
Ten days ago, however, McWhorter recanted these claims. He published another column stating that he saw the show, liked it, and was no longer worried about whitewashing. For one thing, he was now assured that McDonald could “play ‘white’—or maybe raceless—convincingly.” [!!] And for another, he felt he hadn’t given the public enough credit. Last summer, he “was writing more out of duty than belief, a bit of the kind of performative wokeness I usually decry . . . If the sight of a Black actor in an old white musical convinces any audience members that America was never sullied by racism, they are too few to justify limiting the chances for great Black actors to play great roles.”
Phew!
My own feeling is that, McDonald’s white-playing chops aside, this show’s racial content is so recessive and occasional it amounts to light period detail. No changes were made to Laurents’s book, and no actor gestures or expressions were added, to emphasize racially charged interactions, so race mostly hovers over the show’s surface like a sort of counterfactual patina. Interestingly, this is also the way race comes off in the current Broadway Our Town, directed by Kenny Leon, which features a Black Gibbs family and white Webb family who could never have comingled the way they do in early 20th century New Hampshire. Audiences at both these plays encounter ahistorical “what if” scenarios without being told what to make of them. They can make as much or little of race as they like, and I, for one, will readily admit that those of us who aren’t Black may indeed incline toward little out of that white privilege that too easily forgets race.
In any case, what popped for me most of all in Wolfe’s Gypsy was how strongly it benefited from a Rose as coherent and substantial as McDonald’s. You might even call this interpretation feminist. Her astonishing performance of the Lear-like eleventh-hour number “Rose’s Turn,” for instance--an emotional high-wire act often described as a mental breakdown--reads as a terrifying trudge through a sequence of painful and shocking realizations. She ends it neither mad nor broken, having brought the audience to its feet just as wildly as all the monster-Roses before her, but, I believe, for different reasons. Walking up to her strong, Josephine Bakerish daughter afterward—a woman who needs marriage to complete her no more than Rose does and who has furthermore legitimized burlesque by finding joy, redemption and salvation in it—Rose links arms with her in solidarity. At that moment, I felt they were both daring the whole world to comprehend them.
Photos by Julieta Cervantes
Book by Arthur Laurents, Music by Julie Styne, Lyrics by Stephen Sondheim
Directed by George C. Wolfe
Majestic Theatre
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