The marquee says it all: “AudraGypsy.” With less brass and more heart, Audra McDonald’s distinctive portrayal of Madam Rose, the mother of all stage mothers, is the reason to see this sixth Broadway production of the 1959 musical inspired by the memoir of Gypsy Rose Lee, the (s)mothered childhood vaudevillian turned famous adult stripper. Some people have called “Gypsy” the greatest musical ever written. “But some people ain’t me” — to quote a Stephen Sondheim lyric from one of Jule Styne’s many tuneful melodies in the show, which opened tonight at the Majestic.
The distinctiveness of McDonald’s performance first hits with full force at the end of Act I, after June (Jordan Tyson) runs away with one of the boys in Rose’s vaudeville act. June is the younger of Rose’s two daughters, and the one whom Rose has groomed for stardom from birth, treating her older daughter Louise (Joy Woods) at best as a supporting player. After a moment of uncharacteristic silence, Rose turns to Louise and says “I’m going to make you a star,” and launches into the first of the musical’s four showstoppers, “Everything’s Coming Up Roses.” But rather than the false bravado of so many Roses I’ve seen, this Rose is all defiance, tinged with desperation. When she rips up June’s letter and thrusts the little pieces in the air, you feel it.
“Gypsy was my first chance to write lyrics for characters of considerable complexity,” Sondheim wrote in “Finishing the Hat.” And Rose was a “dramatist’s dream, the self-deluded protagonist who comes to a tragic/triumphant end.” But McDonald’s Rose can’t mask the fierceness of her feelings. As she has done in previous performances – for which she has won six Tony Awards, more than any other actress — McDonald seems to project her heartache from her insides directly into ours; it’s honestly difficult to witness her “Rose’s Turn” without crying.
As a classically trained lyric soprano, her singing voice at times suggests a warmth and formality that contrasts with the brash sound by mezzo-soprano Roses of the past, most famously Ethel Merman, for whom the role (and the show) was written. But if McDonald’s Rose sometimes comes off like a fussy meddler rather than a bulldozing dame, her performance keeps intact the humorous aspects of a character who is delusional, obsessive and oblivious.
“Honey, don’t you know there’s a depression?” Herbie, her agent and love interest, asks.
“Of course I know!” she replies. “I read Variety”
In a recent interview, McDonald explained how she came to play Rose. It was not a longtime dream of hers, she said, but at a Thanksgiving dinner six years ago, her friend Gavin Creel (who died this year at age 48) excitedly insisted she should take on the role. “And I thought: Huh, that’s interesting. It could be played by a Black woman; that would be a real challenge.”
What intrigues me about her immediate reaction is that it assumed color-conscious rather than color-blind casting.
Director George C. Wolfe has assembled a fine cast.
Joy Woods makes a remarkable transformation from self-effacing tomboy to headlining, um, ecdysiast,
Jordan Tyson as June and Kevin Csolak as Tulsa, the boy with whom she elopes, each have stand-out moments.
Danny Burstein is as credible in the role of Herbie as he’s been in everything I’ve seen him in.
Mylinda Hull as Electra, Lili Thomas as Mazeppa, and Lesli Margherita as Tessa Tura, all make memorable (albeit dated) strippers with a gimmick.
Some of these cast members are Black; some are not. What this means is that there are two interracial relationships (June and Tulsa; Rose and Herbie) taking place in the 1920s and early 1930s as they travel the vaudeville circuit, sometimes in the South.
If the racial composition of the cast requires a certain amount of mental jiu-jitsu on the part of the audience, it’s a suspension of disbelief to which New York theatergoers have grown accustomed.
Some of the scenes, though unchanged, do play slightly differently now. After June has left, and Rose switches her ambitions to Louise, the act she puts together bombs. “They’re too damn un-American down here, that’s the trouble,” Rose says. “We better talk about heading up north.” That’s verbatim from the standard script.
Then, after Rose pushes Louise into burlesque, we see Louise emerge as Gypsy Rose Lee, getting better and better at her stripping routine in a series of “Let Me Entertain You” scenes, the last of which takes place at Minsky’s World Famous Burlesque. The announcer introduces her as offering a “Salute to the Garden of Eden.” Again, this is a standard number in the show, but, intentionally or not, Toni-Leslie James’s costumes,Mia Neal’s hair design, Santo Loquasto’s backdrop, Camille A. Brown’s choreography, evoked for me Josephine Baker at the Cotton Club.
That is one of the scenes in this production, coincidentally or not, that best show off the work of the creative team
I first saw a production of “Gypsy” when it was on tour, and I was not much older than the juvenile characters that Rose was bossing around. It didn’t help that it was obviously an off night, and there were technical glitches (a phone rang after a character had already picked up the receiver.) But the whole affair struck me as entirely too inbred: a show about show business, and not even the kind of show business that still existed; nostalgic celebration of something that just seemed grubby and exploitative to me. Were we meant to view the musical numbers with the kids ironically, or were they just chintzy? I even detected a whiff of hypocrisy: We were of course expected to disapprove of Rose’s narcissism and the way she abused these child actors, especially her own daughters, but at the same time we were also being asked to enjoy it. I wondered if the young cast members playing the young characters (who were being denied a normal childhood) were themselves being denied a normal childhood.
I can dismiss my youthful naivete, or I can honor my youthful integrity; I prefer the latter, which is why it’s hard for me to heap the superlatives on this show that others do.
But as I’ve grown old, and seen one “Gypsy” after another, I’ve come to appreciate the musical’s craftmanship, and to find a way past the show biz gloss — to see it as a story of a character who wants something more out of life, which is always out of reach. In his new book “How Sondheim Can Change Your Life,” Richard Schoch offers a chapter on “Gypsy” that elaborates on this idea, which he says is succinctly stated in Sondheim’s lyric for Rose “you’ll never get away from me,” which he calls “one of the many in Gypsy that sound endearing right up until they sound sinister. That’s the action in the songs: not getting away; not moving on, and not having what you want, whether it’s bright lights [as Rose and June want], a quiet family life [as Herbie wants], or just a life of your own [as Louise wants.] Mostly you’re stuck with life as it is. Now that’s an action that some people can definitely relate to.”
Audra McDonald is certainly entertaining in “Gypsy.” In the first part of Rose’s Turn, she gets fully into the suggestive and sexy moves of a stripper, albeit as the middle-aged Rose would interpret one. She is a precise actress. When she’s decided to build up Louise, she calls her “the talent” but stumbles on the word, exactly as Rose would, still convinced her oldest daughter has none. But her greatest contribution to this production might be the way she connects us to Rose’s feelings, and to our own.
Gypsy
Majestic
Running time: Three hours, including one intermission.
Tickets: $69 – $421. Digital lottery: $69. Digital rush: $54. In person rush: $49
Book by Arthur Laurents, music by Jule Styne, and lyrics by Stephen Sondheim
Directed by George C. Wolfe; choreography by Camille A. Brown, music direction and supervision by Andy Einhorn and additional orchestrations and arrangements by winner Daryl Waters.
Scenic Design by Santo Loquasto; Costume Design by Toni-Leslie James; Lighting Design by Jules Fisher and Peggy Eisenhauer; Sound Design by Scott Lehrer; Hair and Wig Design by Mia Neal; Make-Up Design by Michael Clifton;
Cast: Audra McDonald as Rose, Danny Burstein as Herbie, Joy Woods as Louise, Jordan Tyson as June, Kevin Csolak as Tulsa, Lesli Margherita, Lili Thomas, Mylinda Hull, Jacob Ming-Trent, Kyleigh Denae Vickers, Marley Lianne Gomes, Jade Smith, Natalie Wachen, Tryphena Wade, Shanel Bailey, Jace Bently, Brandon Burks, Hunter Capellán, Tony d’Alelio, Summer Rae Daney, Kellie Jean Hoagland, Sasha Hutchings, Aliah James, Brittney Johnson, Zachary Daniel Jones, Ethan Joseph, Andrew Kober, Krystal Mackie, James McMenamin, Cole Newburg, Joe Osheroff, Majo Rivero, Ken Robinson, Sally Shaw, Thomas Silcott, Brendan Sheehan, Jayden Theophile, Jordan Wynn and Iain Young.
