Julieta Cervantes

CAMERON KELSALL: Mount Everest. The female King Lear. Mama Rose in Gypsy has been described as the most demanding role for women in the musical theater canon, and it remains a pinnacle for Broadway’s greatest divas. Record-breaking Tony winner Audra McDonald stars in the current revival, which recently opened at the Majestic Theatre—the most high-profile actress of color to play the part, and, as a soprano, quite vocally distinct from predecessors like Ethel Merman, Angela Lansbury and Patti LuPone. As one might expect, she offers a complex, fascinating and highly individual interpretation. It doesn’t always work, but it seems well suited to the production helmed by George C. Wolfe: an extravaganza of ambitious ideas, some of which coalesce while others fall by the wayside.

DAVID FOX: I agree with all of this, and of course have more to say, particularly about Wolfe’s maddeningly inconsistent directorial vision. McDonald is indeed a distinctively different Rose in many respects, and I came away filled with admiration. She—more than anyone else I’ve seen in the role—is so different from Merman that any specter of The Great Creator disappears. I think that difference significantly helps her portrayal of Rose—and this production more generally—define itself.

CK: I’ll be frank—it took me a moment to warm to McDonald’s Rose. She’s always tended to be mannered in her acting choices, and that came through in the musical’s first scene, when Rose crashes the talent contest in which her two daughters, June and Louise, are appearing. That’s followed immediately by the musical’s first big number, “Some People,” which McDonald strives to make sound conversational and spontaneously invented. In doing so, though, she ignores the musical rhythms to a maddening degree. “We’re in for a long afternoon,” I thought to myself. But shortly thereafter, the method to her madness—and I think that word is appropriate to her conception of Rose—became clearer.

DF: Fair warning to our readers: we’re in for a long review, too, with so many elements to focus on. Rose is, as you point out, a monumental role both in terms of singing and acting. And there’s much more here to discuss about Gypsy generally; but let’s stay on the singing challenges for a moment. I will happily engage in any debate over the pros and cons of the various Roses—is there any gayer or more impassioned theater topic? But on this point, I am unwavering: the music that Jule Styne composed is a bespoke masterpiece, tailored precisely to Ethel Merman’s voice. Styne knew her money notes, her way of sculpting a phrase, her use of dynamics. (Contrary to some of her critics, it’s not always loud.) The score fit Merman like a glove in a way that it does no other performer.

If you want proof, line up recorded versions of “Everything’s Coming Up Roses.” Merman, singing in a higher key than most, is a bolt of lightning… simply electrifying. To my mind, it’s this song—the riveting Act I finale—that is the key to the character, much more than “Rose’s Turn,” great as that is. Other Roses have found their way into the character in subtler ways, and you may well prefer them—but for all of them, adapting to music so precisely written for one of theater’s most distinctive and recognizable artists is a challenge. As I said, that McDonald is so vastly different from Merman is a positive in this sense; in her voice, we hear the score as if new-minted.

CK: I think “Everything’s Coming Up Roses” is McDonald’s watershed moment—literally and figuratively. When Rose learns that her daughter June has eloped and escaped to become a serious actress, she recounts the litany of people who have disappointed her throughout her life: her mother, her former husbands, her own children. “I’m used to people walking out,” she says. “When my mother did it, I cried for a week. Well, this time, I’m not crying.” McDonald delivers the line with tears in her eyes, a sign of her growing break from reality. Recently, you and I spoke about our admiration for how Patti LuPone handled this moment and the subsequent song — that June’s departure was just one more thing to endure. McDonald goes in the opposite direction. It begins her descent into delusion, which continues straight through “Rose’s Turn”… and beyond.

Julieta Cervantes

DF: Absolutely… and for me the show’s second most startling moment — I’ll get to the first shortly– is an upward key modulation toward the end of the song. Initially, I virtually jumped out of my seat—it pushes McDonald almost uncomfortably high (and as you say, she’s known as a soprano), and anyone who knows the show well will likely share my sense of shock. But what really registers here is Rose’s incipient hysteria. Where Merman, with utter sang-froid, willed herself to move forward without so much as a backward glance, McDonald punches our guts with her vulnerability. It’s a character choice that works very well for her throughout.

CK: Indeed. More than any Rose I’ve seen, McDonald avoids the whiff of the harridan. In many ways, her Rose registers as young as her daughters—caught in the endless hope of a more promising future, a release from her stifling reality.

DF: That Gypsy depends on a great Rose is axiomatic. But the show is more than Rose, and I came away, as I have multiple times seeing it before, convinced that it’s the greatest musical ever written, for which both Arthur Laurents (the book writer) and Stephen Sondheim (the lyricist) of course are greatly responsible. Wolfe’s direction is a case study in pushing the beloved and supremely canonical work in new directions, while also honoring and preserving its basics.

It’s been well-publicized that this production introduces race as a fundamental element to the story. Much of this is done visually, without changing the libretto. Still, it’s clear that trying to achieve stardom in vaudeville is more difficult for Blacks than Whites… and those with lighter skin-tone have a much greater chance of success. Some literalists have pointed out that this veers far from the reality—that is, from the memoir of Gypsy Rose Lee about her family and career ascension—on which Gypsy is based. But for me, it’s a great idea, but one that is only intermittently realized here.

Julieta Cervantes

My favorite moment in this production is also its boldest: in a montage sequence that represents the group’s nomadic performing life, the juveniles morph almost magically into their adult selves. In the original production, this was famously done under a pulsating strobe light, rendering the changeover undetectable till the strobe went off and lights came up. I assume it was an invention of Jerome Robbins, the original director-choreographer, but it’s been a hallmark of every revival I’ve seen… till now. Here, the moment instead finds Rose unapologetically switching out the darker-skinned child performers for white (or white-passing) adults. I know people who have hated this reinvention, but I think it’s brilliant: replacing an iconic coup-de-theatre with a new one. I only wish Wolfe’s direction continued more steadily in this ambitious direction.

CK: I found that moment bold and striking—but I also noticed it was the last time that the production directly addressed race. That feels like a missed opportunity to me. In the original casting notice, the character breakdown specifically indicated they were seeking a Black actor to play Louise, the future Gypsy Rose Lee, and a biracial actor to play June, who grows up to become June Havoc. It would be interesting to consider the politics of Rose’s light-skinned daughter gaining success as a legitimate actress while her other daughter, who’s unable to pass, becomes known as a stripper. But within this frame, Wolfe equivocates.

DF: Exactly. For me, it’s not that Wolfe has gone too far—it’s that he hasn’t gone far enough. McDonald’s performance achieves a truly transformative take on the character of Rose. Not everybody will love it, but it’s a defining theatrical conception that presumably owes much to Wolfe’s direction. Alas, apart from her and that startingly reinvented transition, nothing else about the show comes close. Joy Woods (Louise/Gypsy) is fine but unmemorable, which describes several of the other actors as well. Danny Burstein ought to be wonderful as Herbie, but he doesn’t really register with much of a profile, perhaps because his presence and take on the role feel part of a traditional production in a way McDonald’s Rose does not.

CK: There’s a quiet quality to Woods’s performance that works better when she’s still in Louise mode, but her transition to Gypsy Rose Lee fails to register. I don’t think I’ve ever been less moved by the “I’m a pretty girl, Mama” moment than I was here.

Julieta Cervantes

DF: At the opposite extreme, the three strippers—often a highlight in Gypsy productions—here are clownish and crude. A degree of broadness works in more conventional versions because the comic tone echoes a nostalgic idea of vaudeville.  Here, though, it’s out of step with the mood and seriousness that Wolfe seems to want for the rest of the production.

CK: I found myself wishing that Wolfe had taken a page from the Sam Mendes’s playbook. One of the most striking elements of his 2003 production was his conception of the strippers as an utterly rough and ready bunch, without even a hint of faux glamour. That edge would have suited here too.

DF: More generally, this Gypsy is not a show that coheres. It also looks surprisingly on-the-cheap for a major Broadway production (at, I might add, top Broadway ticket prices). I expected a lot more from Santo Loquasto, often one of our finest scenic designers. It also needs to be said that the initial sound of the orchestra in the magnificent overture is distressingly thin and tinny, though it improves later in the show.

CK: That is, what you can hear of the overture over the audience chattering that continues almost until McDonald makes her first entrance. Perhaps it was expecting too much to assume a Gypsy audience would be better behaved than the modern hordes.

DF: But the big takeaway is Audra McDonald as Rose… and no lover of musical theater should miss her go-for-broke brilliance here.

Latest on Parterre

Comments