Broadway review by Adam Feldman
How is she? Ever since May, when it was confirmed that Audra McDonald would star in the latest revival of Gypsy, Broadway fans have speculated about how Audra would be as Mama Rose—or, more nervously, whether Audra could be Mama Rose, the implacable stage mother who sacrifices everything to make her two daughters into stars, including those two daughters themselves. The casting seemed inevitable: the pinnacle role for a woman in musical theater, essayed by the most accomplished musical-theater actress of her generation. It’s Audra’s turn. Yet to some, the casting also seemed unlikely: Rose has traditionally been played by big belters, from Ethel Merman in 1959 through Patti LuPone in 2008, not dramatic sopranos like McDonald. So let’s get that question out of the way up front. How is Audra as Rose? She’s a revelation.
So, too, is the rest of George C. Wolfe’s deeply intelligent and beautifully mounted production, which comes as a happy surprise. Gypsy is a model musical in every regard, from Arthur Laurents’s airtight book, inspired by the memoirs of striptease queen Gypsy Rose Lee, to Jule Styne’s thrilling music, which grabs you at the overture and doesn’t let go, to Stephen Sondheim’s dazzlingly witty and insightful lyrics. But this is the show’s fifth Broadway revival, and its third in the 21st century alone. One might reasonably wonder what is left to reveal in a show as well-known as this one. But like the monster some people believe her to be, Mama Rose refuses to die. Here she is again, boys: Rose is risen anew.
Gypsy | Photograph: Courtesy Julieta Cervantes
McDonald has played white characters before, but that’s not the case here. In Wolfe’s production, Rose is Black, and so are her daughters, played by two actors ripped from the pages of The Notebook: Jordan Tyson as June—the squeaky child prodigy around whom Rose builds a vaudeville act in the early 1920s—and Joy Woods as her shy older sister, Louise. Rose’s drive keeps her kids in a kind of captivity. At the end of the first act, when June busts out of her mother’s control, it’s not all over for Rose: With scary determination, she turns her attention to the previously neglected Louise—a nonsinger, and such a lousy hoofer that she has been consigned to actual hooves, playing the part of a cow in the act (and only part of the cow at that).
Gypsy | Photograph: Courtesy Julieta Cervantes
It’s at this point, at the end of Act I, that Rose sings one of the score’s many classic songs, “Everything’s Coming Up Roses.” As the literary critic D.A. Miller has pointed out, this rousing number contains the seeds of its own futility: There is not, he observes, “even a nominal difference between the initial formulation of disaster (‘They think that we’re through…’) and the terminal one of triumph (‘…and nothing’s gonna stop us till we’re through’).” In the world of this Gypsy, Rose’s ambition is even more delusional than usual. The act that Rose creates for June has always been mediocre: a stale routine that panders to rah-rah patriotism. (Her pandering will eventually take a more literal turn; not for nothing does she bill herself as “Madam Rose.”) Now, it has the additional burden of being a Black act in a mostly white industry. What Rose hopes to achieve is all but hopeless.
Gypsy | Photograph: Courtesy Julieta Cervantes
In many ways, this Gypsy is grandly old-fashioned: It has a cast of 30 and an orchestra of 25; the set (by Santo Loquasto), costumes (by Toni-Leslie James), hair (by Mia Neal) and lighting (by Jules Fisher and Peggy Eisenhauer) are worthy of the Majestic Theatre’s name. This is a tree with all the trimmings—including restored bits of text that Laurents trimmed from previous revivals; there’s even new musical material, such as a brief introductory duet for “Small World.” Many of its pleasures are traditional ones, such as the excellent supporting performances: the ideally cast Danny Burstein as Rose’s put-upon lover and manager, Herbie, a mensch with a core of moral strength; Tyson as a June whose potential this production takes seriously; Mylinda Hull, Lili Thomas and the uproarious Lesli Margherita as a trio of dilapidated strippers who show Louise the ropes. This Gypsy has a running time of nearly three hours, and it luxuriates in its own length; it wraps around the audience like a mink stole, and none of it drags.
Gypsy | Photograph: Courtesy Julieta Cervantes
But Wolfe’s reimagination of the central family as Black gives everything a fresh coloration. It combines attentive reading of the text with a sense of discovery; its effects emerge organically throughout the production. Sometimes, it teases fresh meanings out of familiar moments: When Herbie asks why Louise has to wear a blonde wig, and Rose replies that “It makes her look more like—it makes her look more like a star,” there’s a new resonance to what she’s not saying. Sometimes, it introduces new nuances: June’s light skin, for example, makes it possible for her to entertain a fancy of passing, and there’s a pointed moment early on when her Black backup dancers are replaced by white ones—including Tulsa (Kevin Csolak), for whom Louise pines unrequitedly. In her eventual guise as Gypsy Rose Lee, she playfully refers to herself as an ecdysiast—“One who—or that which—sheds its skin”—but offstage, Louise is on the opposite path: toward finally seeing herself as beautiful, not just as a grown woman but as a dark-skinned Black woman.
Gypsy | Photograph: Courtesy Julieta Cervantes
There’s a specific Blackness to McDonald’s magnificently acted Rose as well. It’s there in the small details, like the spin she puts on certain phrases (“my babies,” “I am her mother”), but also in her overarching characterization. This Rose has a defiant pride and an aspiration to higher class, and they come together in McDonald’s unique voice; it’s like a physical manifestation of Rose’s will-to-fanciness. Yes, it’s an unconventional sound for Rose. Every song is a bit of a test, a rite of passaggio between McDonald’s chest voice and her head voice; she hits you with a switch instead of a belt. But she makes the tension work to her advantage. The big notes that land in her upper register are not delicate; they throb with intensity and grandeur. Some people, Rose sings dismissively in her first song, have “the dream but not the guts.” McDonald’s voice has equal parts of both, and she uses it to deliver an unforgettable star turn.
Gypsy. Majestic Theatre (Broadway). Book by Arthur Laurents. Music by Jule Styne. Lyrics by Stephen Sondheim. Directed by George C. Wolfe. With Audra McDonald, Danny Burstein, Joy Woods, Jordan Tyson, Kevin Csolak, Lesli Margherita, Mylinda Hull, Lili Thomas. Running time: 2hrs 55mins. One intermission.
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Gypsy | Photograph: Courtesy Julieta Cervantes
