Eight times a week at the Majestic Theater in Manhattan, the entire, harrowing arc of a classic tragedy is delivered in 4½ minutes that are as exhilarating as they are upsetting. All the textbook components of tragedy according to Aristotle are vigorously at work here: self-delusion and self-knowledge, pity and terror, and the sense that what is happening is somehow both unexpected and inevitable.
And all of this — right down to that climatic, rushing release called catharsis — is provided, near the end of a delectably tuneful show, by a lone woman performing a single song in what is generally regarded as the cheeriest of theatrical forms, the American musical. Yet by that number’s conclusion, Audra McDonald, the Tony-nominated star of George C. Wolfe’s Broadway revival of “Gypsy,” has the flayed-skinless appearance of a figure in a Francis Bacon portrait.
And while most hardcore lovers of musicals have surely heard this song before, they are likely to sense that something new is happening here — something harsher, rawer, more wondering and ultimately more devastating. An old standard is providing fresh and unsettling revelations, while an unconventionally cast, mold-cracking performer is shedding surprising light and shadow on one of the best-known characters in the genre. No wonder that audience members leave the Majestic looking as if they had just been sucker punched.
A visit to the show in late March inspired the Los Angeles Times theater critic Charles McNulty to call McDonald’s interpretation of the song “if not a religious experience, then a spiritually transfiguring one.” And a friend of mine, who is not generally a fan of musicals, emailed me after a Wednesday matinee that she “was so gutted by that number that when I walked out of the theater I really didn’t know where I was or which direction to turn.”
Such is the experience of watching McDonald sing “Rose’s Turn” in “Gypsy,” the 1959 story by Arthur Laurents, Stephen Sondheim and Jule Styne about one very determined stage mother named Rose in the dying days of vaudeville. It’s the kind of number that makes you entirely rethink both the show you’ve been watching — one you may have felt you knew all too well — and its central character.
At the same time, it reaches you on a deeper, visceral level than any song being performed on Broadway at the moment. Wolfe described it as the process of “a character stripping away and stripping away and stripping away and stripping away, and she doesn’t even know how much she’s stripping away.” Andy Einhorn, the show’s musical director, said, “It’s like watching something crawl out of the heart.”
To explore the road map to what McDonald calls a leap into “an abyss of rage, sorrow, abandonment,” I sat down last month with McDonald, Wolfe, Einhorn and Camille A. Brown, the show’s choreographer, to discuss how they devised a descent that, as McDonald said, takes her “all the way down, like Dory Previn says, down to where the iguanas play.”
The elements involved in this precipitous journey include a speech from Tony Kushner’s “Angels in America,” the neurotic dissonance of clarinets from the show’s original orchestrations, an interpolated key change, dance moves for young children and the happy existence in the Majestic of the catwalk known as a passerelle. There is also the resonant emotional use McDonald came to make of being the first Black woman to play Rose on Broadway.
The sum effect — as delivered on that passerelle, a place that as Wolfe puts it, leaves you “nowhere to hide” — comes uncannily close to that passage from “Angels in America” that Wolfe had McDonald read, in which one character asks another how people change. It says in part: “God splits the skin with a jagged thumbnail from throat to belly and then plunges a huge filthy hand in, he grabs hold of your bloody tubes and they slip to evade his grasp but he squeezes hard, he insists, he pulls and pulls till all your innards are yanked out.”
Introspective portraiture
McDonald is a singular performer, perhaps the most gifted musical theater star of her generation and the record-holding winner of six competitive Tony Awards for acting. And “Rose’s Turn” is a singular solo, a number that — written at the end of the organic musical’s golden age — anticipated the corrosive, introspective portraiture of song-and-dance numbers to come, which Sondheim perfected a decade later in “Company” and “Follies.”
A so-called 11 o’clock number, which occurs shortly before the final curtain, the song finds the hitherto dynamic, positive-thinking Rose in a rare moment of self-reckoning. She is fresh from a quarrel with her daughter, the celebrated stripper Gypsy Rose Lee (Joy Woods), who has told the mother who pushed her into stardom that she no longer needs her.
The number begins as an angry yelp of defiance as Rose, in her mind, at last claims the spotlight for herself and imagines the star she could have been. “And then,” as Wolfe put it, “she foolishly and unconsciously starts to ask the questions. And they’re brutal questions.”
Rose segues into a recapitulation of all the rejections of her life, wondering, “Why did I do it? What did it get me?” And as Styne’s score turns into an increasingly fragmented echo chamber of melodies used throughout the show, Rose enacts what is probably the first full-fledged nervous breakdown in American musical history.
With the right actress, “Rose’s Turn” can’t fail to bring the house down, an achievement memorably realized by stars like Ethel Merman (who originated the role) and Patti LuPone (who starred in the 2008 Broadway revival). But in most of the versions I’ve seen, the song becomes a heightening of what we’ve already sensed in a monomaniacal character driven by the desire to be noticed; it’s Rose with the volume turned up to new intensities.
What McDonald does is expose a woman you hadn’t known existed, but who when you think about it later was always there. In the song’s stormy preface, Rose speaks of “what I been holding down inside of me.” That turns out to be something more than the wounded, outsize ego of someone who believes she should have been a contender. The resentment and jealousy that Rose feels toward Gypsy and her younger, runaway daughter, the beloved and cosseted June (Jordan Tyson), are transformed into a more far-reaching fear of abandonment.
And it all hinges on what Wolfe refers to as one “dreaded word.” That’s “momma,” two syllables that are repeated with increasing desperation in “Rose’s Turn.”
In meetings with McDonald and Einhorn at Wolfe’s home in the Gramercy Park neighborhood last summer, the director had her speak the lyrics to each song. McDonald recalled that he stopped her at the point in “Rose’s Turn” when the character, in the fantasy burlesque act she’s performing, says, “Ready or not, here comes Momma!” As Wolfe told her, Rose has now said “the dreaded word” one too many times; her last defenses are shattered.
When McDonald performed “Rose’s Turn,” in concert at the London Palladium in 2022, she discovered she could use the anxiety in her own life generated by her elder daughter’s leaving home for college. (When first going over “Rose’s Turn” with Einhorn, she got to the lyrics, “One quick look and each of them leaves you,” and started sobbing, and hers may indeed be the most fully maternal Rose I’ve encountered.)
Later she and Wolfe began to focus on an unseen character from another generation: Rose’s mother, to whom she refers earlier in the show as having walked out on her when she was a child. For McDonald, it’s not just an imagined theater audience but also Rose’s absent mother for whom she is performing by the song’s end.
In her dressing room before a Thursday night performance, McDonald described that “cathartic moment” when she imagines Rose thinking, “You see me, mommy? See what I could do? Look at me, mommy.” McDonald had to break off. “Oh, Ben,” she said, “you can’t have me crying before I start the show.”
‘Singing it with my voice’
McDonald said she couldn’t have done Rose without Einhorn, with whom she’s been working since 2011 and who knows her voice inside-out. Her classically trained soprano, which soared to the heavens in her Tony-winning performance in “Porgy and Bess,” made McDonald a less than obvious choice vocally for the inveterately brassy Rose.
“I realize that I don’t sing it like everybody else sings it, that people don’t think I’m a belter,” she said. “Whatever. I don’t care. I’m singing it with my voice, and in a way that keeps my stamina up so I can do it eight times a week.”
Yet McDonald’s soprano is unleashed in “Rose’s Turn” only in its last section. That’s where the one modulation occurs, and it is, Einhorn said, “a good third higher than the original.” That allows an “emotional lift,” he said, that wasn’t happening with the score as written, and that the audience is hungry for.
In restoring the original orchestrations from 1959, Einhorn discovered “some really interesting dissonances,” including those nervous clarinets, appropriate to a woman who is falling apart. When Rose starts to dance distorted versions of the choreography she had created for her children years earlier — variations that Brown said she wanted “to come from the body and have a connection the ground” — the score suggests a nightmare music box.
Einhorn and Wolfe encouraged McDonald to make “Rose’s Turn” slower than is customary. She now freezes and takes her time when Rose first asks the big questions: “Why did I do it? What did it get me?” McDonald said “the first time I stood still and did it, I was like” — she inhales convulsively — “everything came up.”
McDonald sometimes deploys a guttural, almost raunchy voice in “Rose’s Turn,” summoning the great blues singers of the early 20th century. And she said part of what Rose has been “holding down” is the fury and frustration she can’t reveal because “Black women are supposed to behave in a certain way.”
One night McDonald learned at intermission that former Vice President Kamala Harris was in the audience, and by the time she got to “Rose’s Turn,” “just everything came up through our ancestors, and the roots all the way from the bottom of the earth.” That night, she said, was singing “for the collective” of all Black women. Afterward, she realized she had blown her voice out.
At any performance, “Rose’s Turn” is a hard song for McDonald “to recover from.” She said that sometimes, before the first-act curtain rises, she can’t think about what’s waiting for her in those final moments, “or I’d never set foot at the stage.”
At the number’s conclusion, she looks as raw and depleted as a person can. And the three times I’ve seen this “Gypsy,” I’ve always been astounded to discover McDonald transformed into the archetypal gracious and glamorous star for her curtain call only moments later.
She said I would be amazed at what she has waiting for her backstage to restore her for those bows: “There’s a cold towel, a warm towel, there’s anti-bac, there’s tissues, there’s a fan, there’s everything just so I don’t look so awful.
“But that’s fine,” she murmured, suddenly sounding very tired. “It’s fine. It’s the job. It’s the job.”
Ben Brantley was the chief theater critic of The Times for more than 20 years. He wrote more than 2,500 reviews over 27 years beginning in 1993, filing regularly from London as well as New York. He retired from regular reviewing in 2020.
The post Nothing on Broadway Hits Harder Than Audra McDonald’s ‘Rose’s Turn’ appeared first on New York Times.
