It’s only fitting that we pore over “Gypsy” as if it were holy writ. It was, after all, written by three of the holies: Jule Styne (music), Stephen Sondheim (lyrics) and Arthur Laurents (book).
One of the greatest American musicals, it is also, along with “West Side Story” and “Guys and Dolls,” one of the most frequently revived. The story of Rose, “a pioneer woman without a frontier,” pushing one daughter into vaudeville and the other into burlesque, thus invites a Talmud’s worth of exegesis.
For theater lovers, so did the prospect of George C. Wolfe directing Audra McDonald in the latest incarnation of the 1959 show. Praisers and carpers could not even wait for the opening on Thursday, at the Majestic Theater, to start the inquisition.
I understand their eagerness. The revival, certainly the most original of the five that have made it to Broadway, offers traditionalists much to worry on. Granted, a lot of what they have been mulling is minutia: The show has restored a 10-bar lead-in to the ballad “Small World”! Most of McDonald’s keys have been raised, sometimes in mid-song! The famous strobe effect that magically ages the young cast members into adults has been ditched!
And of course, unavoidably, there is race. Though it would be absurd (and a shame) not to get a Rose from McDonald, our leading musical tragedienne, it’s true that Rose Hovick, the woman the character is modeled on, was white. And on Broadway at least, she has always been played by white women: Ethel Merman, Angela Lansbury, Tyne Daly, Bernadette Peters, Patti LuPone.
So surely it meant something that Wolfe also cast Black actors as Rose’s daughters: June (who grew up to be the actress June Havoc) and Louise (who grew up to be the stripper Gypsy Rose Lee). Having spent his career putting the Black American experience in the spotlight, staging shows like “Caroline, or Change,” “Shuffle Along” and “The Colored Museum,” Wolfe seemed intent on opening the door to a new room in the musical’s capacious mansion.
Many poured into that room prematurely, wondering how Wolfe expected audiences to believe that a sane Black Rose could ever have dreamed of stardom for her children in the racist enclave of show business in the 1920s.
This production, in effect, is his answer. A hundred years later, he shows us, the dream has come true: McDonald is the star such a Rose hoped for. Doing a psychological striptease, showing more of the character’s rage than her predecessors, she is stupendously affecting. So, if a bit intermittently, is the show.
I say that with residual confusions, which Wolfe, in pre-opening interviews, waved away by noting that the authors called their work “A Musical Fable.” Characters in most fables do not have legs, let alone race. So even though it is based on Lee’s gritty memoirs, “Gypsy” is not a literal work but an uncommonly interior and admonitory one. No matter who plays the leads, Laurents has placed them in the context of American emotional poverty, as well as the literal kind. The story, already heavily fictionalized for the stage, does not depend on (and is already halfway unmoored from) facts.
To emphasize this, Wolfe’s production is suggestive, even surreal. On sets by Santo Loquasto that detail as little as possible, he moves the characters through encounters that have the dark intensity and fragmentary quality of memories. (The inky lighting is by Jules Fisher and Peggy Eisenhauer.) Just about the only thing you are asked to see in the early scene set in Rose’s father’s home in Seattle are a Bible and a gold plaque, one symbolizing everything she hopes to escape, the other providing the means.
The next scene finds Rose, a combination of the Pied Piper, Orpheus and the witch from “Hansel and Gretel,” driving to Los Angeles, picking up strays and orphans to serve as backup for Baby June’s newsboy act. She certainly bewitches Herbie, a theatrical candy salesman, into leaving his route to become the act’s agent — and implicitly her lover. To argue whether that interracial romance (Danny Burstein, who plays Herbie, is white) would have happened in real life is to miss the bigger point, especially given Burstein’s big menschy performance. In “Gypsy” it definitely happens, and only takes one song.
It’s in that context, I think — the context of the profound artificiality of musical theater — that Wolfe asks us to see his production. Race is real but not the point and not even solid-state. (When the newsboys age up, they go from Black to white.) To those who need a musical to be a manifesto, he seems to say dismissively, along with Herbie, “Everybody in show business listens to anybody.” Instead, he wants us to listen to the show itself, which in scene after scene, and especially in song after song, proves so deeply complex in its joys (the strippers!) and terrors (“Rose’s Turn,” the 11 o’clock breakdown) that it blurs the boundaries of form.
I found that approach rewarding and a relief, and it seems the cast did too. McDonald, as will be no surprise if you’ve seen her in full dramatic mode, makes a meal of Rose’s ambition and, with a slight southern drawl, a dessert of her guile. (On the Momma scale, at which one end is Appealingly Crafty like Merman and the other is Terrifyingly Crazy like Lansbury, she’s, well, both.) Her scenes with Burstein are rich and funny and regretful; those with June (Jordan Tyson) and Louise (Joy Woods) are withering. (Tyson is especially fierce, and Woods nails the depressive affect of a girl perpetually unnoticed by her mother.) Nor is McDonald vain about her voice; she lets Rose be ragged in service to the role. An unpretty part cannot be prettily sung.
“Gypsy” is odd that way: Brilliant as the score is, there are no merely nice songs. June’s act is deliberately awful; Louise’s first-act ballad, “Little Lamb,” though wistful, is bleak. (It’s her birthday and she doesn’t know how old she is.) Rose’s “charm” songs are beady seductions.
And because every number is loaded with callbacks and foreshadowings, both musically and lyrically, the rangy story is tied into a very tight thematic bundle. (Follow the evolution of Baby June’s inane ditty “May We Entertain You” into the grown-up Gypsy’s louche signature.) It says everything about the authors’ savvy that the show’s most uplifting musical moment is “You Gotta Get a Gimmick,” in which a hilarious trio of strippers (Lesli Margherita, Lili Thomas, Mylinda Hull) teach the underage Louise the fine points of their art. It may be the crassest (and literally brassiest) showstopper ever written. “If you wanna bump it/Bump it with a trumpet” — indeed.
Wolfe’s revival does justice to these contradictions: smart yet tawdry, high yet very low. You hear it immediately in the famous overture, played with élan and abandon by an orchestra featuring the original complement of 26 players. (The confident music direction is by Andy Einhorn; the unusually lively sound design by Scott Lehrer.) Toni-Leslie James’s costumes are period dowdy when they’re not agelessly vulgar. And though I found Camille A. Brown’s choreography a bit underpowered in the big showbiz numbers — it’s hard to beat the Jerome Robbins originals — her work is often lovely and haunting elsewhere.
That not all this revival’s choices will please everyone is probably a good thing. On occasion, I found myself recalling moments that moved or thrilled me more in earlier productions, just as I did when I saw those productions in the first place. “Gypsy,” like other great works of midcentury American drama — it opened the same season as Lorraine Hansberry’s “A Raisin in the Sun” — rewards a layering of lifetime impressions. Wolfe offers a rich new layer, sufficient in itself, and more so as part of history.
Most important, he has given us a way of seeing a star who had to be seen in this role. As “Gypsy” suggests, and McDonald keeps proving, a pioneer woman needs a frontier.
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