GYPSY
A revival of the classic musical has talent and taste but it could use a gimmick.
George Wolfe’s revival of the 1959 musical GYPSY is in previews on Broadway at the Majestic Theater. Audra McDonald stars as the Platonic archetype of all stage mothers, Mama Rose. Joy Woods plays her daughter Louise, destined to become the famous stripper Gypsy Rose Lee. And Danny Burstein plays Herbie, the long suffering lover and agent of Mama Rose.
Until her penultimate number, Audra McDonald brings a confident and beautiful lyric soprano voice to Styne and Sondheim’s songs. This is the most beautifully sung Rose I have ever heard on stage. McDonald’s vocal artistry makes parts of the songs feel like they are being heard for the first time, particularly the ruminating, recitative-like intros and interior connective tissue of the songs.
Yet though McDonald’s phrasing and interpretation of each of her numbers is varied there feels like there is a space separating them from the rest of the show. When McDonald starts to sing it can almost feel like a concert of standards sung by a great vocal performer. I say almost because McDonald also brings the skills of a great actor to her songs. Her “Rose’s Turn” eschews beauty for an ugliness and rawness that had one young man afterwards shouting into his phone that “Audra had walked away with the Tony”.
The problem is that McDonald’s songs still feel atomized from the rest of the narrative. The emotions that explode inside of them are not seen in embryo during the book scenes, they don’t build as an arc. Perhaps that is a choice on the director’s part. The songs are our view into the emotional interior of an emotionally barricaded woman.
George Wolfe’s direction begins promisingly, we seem to be in an historical America that is both color blind but also resonant with an African-American experience of societal rejection and a yearning “to be noticed”. In Rose’s dead end Seattle home her father Pop (Thomas Silcott) takes the bible seriously. This pays off beautifully when Rose later uses a bible for a stunt, another trick in her carpet bag of show business dodges and cons.
Rose’s flight from her grim background is staged imaginatively as a car ride through an equally grim depression era American with dancers representing highway signs. As Rose assembles her future act by picking up poor and hungry children from the side of the road she begins to resemble a kind of showbiz Mother Courage. She may be single-minded and narcissistic but she is also a force of survival. If Wolfe had continued in this vein the revival would have found its idea.
What happens instead is that Wolfe settles for a tasteful, surprisingly conservative reading of the musical. Rose’s obsession with making it in show business is observed by the production but not really activated into something believable and terrifying. But what we do experience is a deep sorrow penetrating the story of a mother and daughter both seeking love through “being noticed” and that love forever eluding them.
The highlight of the show for me was the second act toe-tapping opener, “Together, Wherever We Go”. For a brief moment, the production sheds its melancholy and McDonald, Woods and Burstein express a pure joy in singing and dancing with each other which radiates out to the audience. It is a particular treat to watch Danny Burstein dance in the character of Herbie, an adorable mixture of stiff, gruff with a bit of dainty gracefulness.
Camile A. Brown’s choreography appears to use Jerome Robbins’ original patterns and movements as a launching pad. Brown’s style favors bursts of tapping footwork and shuffling legwork below the waist and twisting and spiraling movements above it. This whirlwind vocabulary works better with individual dancers but doesn’t quite cohere when spread out to an ensemble. It works excellently with Tulsa’s solo dance in “All I Need Is the Girl” performed by the winning Kevin Csolak.
The orchestra conducted by Andy Einhorn has a lovely, full sound. The orchestrations are credited to four people including John Kander who did the dance arrangements. The playing in the pit is another pleasure of the show.
Santo Loquasto, still going strong at age 80, supplies the handsome production design. There is a focus on the shifting graphic styles of advertisement which are seen on brick walls or glimpsed in the background through the set units. The advertisements promise money, success, beauty and they seem to taunt and haunt the characters who yearn and struggle beneath them.
GYPSY is a musical I have seen many times on stage and on screens and, full disclosure, the productions have begun to blur into one another. Some highlights of past productions that I have seen include: the three hilariously geriatric strippers from Arthur Laurents’ 2009 Broadway production; from the same production, Laura Benanti’s Louise which believably limned the character’s transformation from vulnerability to steely self-sufficiency; and Jonathan Kent’s 2015 West End production that paid a close and unsettling attention to the short distance between the showbiz attractions of cute children to cute strippers. I can add now this surprisingly quiet, rather sorrowful yet touching revival.
The Majestic Theater built in 1927 lives up to its name. Its previous thirty-five year tenant was the long running PHANTOM OF THE OPERA and singleticket has not visited the house since he was much younger.
The theater was designed by Herbert J. Krapp in what wikipedia calls a “Louis XV style” but, in proper American Beaux Arts hodge-podge, it also includes neoclassic and Regency touches.
The theater’s interior is a dreamlike confusion of multiple domed ceilings, staircases, and cascading alcoves. It is a place to get blissfully lost in.
What a thrill that it is once again in circulation.
