GYPSY
Book by Arthur Laurents
Music by Jule Styne
Lyrics by Stephen Sondheim
Directed by George C, Wolfe
Starring Audra McDonald and Danny Burstein
Majestic Theatre
Official Website
Reviewed by David Spencer
(For this review, I’m going to assume most of you readers know the show. For those who don’t, there are plenty of YouTube presentations, including cast albums, and synopses galore at resources like Wikipedia. Check ‘em out.)
You must never discount the experience of the audience around you. Over the decades of theatre criticism that span only my lifetime, I’ve encountered the philosophies of a number of critics, and some notable ones, who have professed otherwise, for various reasons; but as a fellow who has worked as both critic-observer and dramatist-practitioner, I’ve become more and more convinced that if you don’t factor in the audience response, particularly when you’re at odds with the audience, you’re in a form of denial. And therefore keeping what can be vital information not only from yourself, but from the readers looking to you to help them decide where their theatrical dollar is best spent.
That said, you have to leave yourself a little wiggle room. Audience response can be interpreted. If, for example, an audience laughs in the right places for laughter, they’re legitimately finding something funny—but that doesn’t always mean they’re in favor the totality of what they’re seeing. There are mitigating factors, “tells,” that can give you the leeway, even the evidence, to assess this phenomenon toward an accurate review.
But an audience going nuts is unequivocal.
Which brings us to the current revival of Gypsy.
So let’s deal with this first: Why is the audience going nuts?
Well, first of all, because it is Gypsy. And if it’s not quite as foolproof a vintage-era musical as A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum and Guys and Dolls—you can sabotage ‘em, but if handled with respect for tone and intention, they can withstand a lot in venues from amateur to veteran—it seems to be damn near indestructible, if the story is presented cleanly and especially if you have that high-wattage performance from your Mama Rose.
And in this one, Mama Rose is Audra McDonald, who has always had one of the most glorious singing voices in musical theatre history and a presence to match. William Goldman likened stardom to insistence, and that magnetism she has in abundance.
And the story is told very cleanly. A pro job of a show built like a battleship; with a powerhouse score a pithy script dramatizing driving ambition, raw emotion and even relentless pathology. The jokes land, the songs land, the audience goes with the energy of the performances.
I won’t deny it, and if that’s enough for you, then, yes, you should go. Especially if you’ve never seen Gypsy live before. Due diligence done.
And yet.
A week or so ago, an acquaintance of mine in the biz, who hadn’t yet seen the current revival, said this to me: “The reviews all love it. But all my friends in the business don’t love it.” I hasten to add, that does NOT represent a survey or even a professional consensus, just a filtering of people in common. But since I would find myself in the second category—not at every moment of the show, but enough to be aware of it throughout—and have since heard a few colleague-assessments that concur…I have to look at the things we in this odd minority are seeing that the general audience either (a) isn’t seeing; or (b) sees but doesn’t care about; or (c) sees but thinks it’s the way Gypsy should be.
And for me, the following were those things. There aren’t many, but they’re pervasive.
(1) As has been publicized, Ms McDonald is playing the role of Mama Rose as a woman from a working class African American background, and she enters boldly, hewing to a familiar black mama trope; slightly bow-legged walk, slightly bent over, shading the Arthur Laurents lines so that “my babies” has the extra ethnic spin. Fair enough, but you wonder if that can possibly sustain as Mama Rose for the whole evening. But in short order, she begins to transition out of it; the posture straightens, the patois takes on an edge—by the time she meets Herbie, shortly thereafter, she’s even become sexy and flirtatious. Intellectually, I understand—or think I do—this to be a calculated seduction of the audience; make sure the ground rules of cultural/social background are established by way of setting up the permission for them, and then push them to the background, lest they dominate, until they’re needed. Fair enough again; but because Ms McDonald is such a nuanced performer, I couldn’t help but clock the decision to start within the broadest possible manifestation of the trope the material could withstand, and then become something else. It made me very aware of an actress at work. This leads to—
(2) Something related that happens at times when Ms. McDonald sings. She’s affected a very particular way of releasing consonants for Rose, especially when Rose is energized. When she sings “Some People”, for example, she adds a little “uh” vocalization to certain words, separating them from the expected natural flow: “Some-uh peo-ple-uh can be content-uh…” A little of this goes a long way, and again, because Ms. McDonald is so precise and versatile a singer, who doesn’t usually default to such devices, it made me likewise aware of an actress-singer choosing a diction…what a director colleague calls “making points.” (The flip side: there are audience members who find this kind of thing thrilling; a star putting a stylistic stamp on her rendering of a classic. And no reason why they shouldn’t. But again…there are those, like me, for whom conspicuously repeated technique breaks the illusion.)
Though the above is actually relatively minor compared to—
(3) A an almost relentless shrillness to everything involving the kids, and at times the supporting cast. For one example, there is virtually no behavioral distinction between Baby June onstage, Baby June offstage and older June (respectively Marley Gomes, the night I attended, and Jordan Tyson). The actresses give the impression not that June is a maybe-talented kid trapped in a cornball act, but a genuinely untalented kid who blows everything out of proportion, onstage and off. And it leeches all the humanity out of moments like “If Mama Was Married”, because Louise (Joy Woods) is obligated to match her energy. Tulsa (Kevin Csolak) performs “All I Need is the Girl” as if he were auditioning for the next gig rather than sharing a romantic fantasy; it makes Louise’s interest in him somewhat ambiguous, which makes the moment of her hearing later that he and June have run off to be married almost inconsequential. And though “You Gotta Have a Gimmick” is still a foolproof number, performed with appropriate brassy crassness (by the thoroughly winning trio of Leslie Margherita, Lili Thomas and Mylinda Hull)…everything before it has been brassy. The “new world” of burlesque thus seems a lot like the old world of vaudeville. And a collateral consequence of this is that certain nuances of moment-to-moment transition are overlooked or overwhelmed. You know the kind of thing: the ironic or psychologically weighted line of dialogue you look forward to…that gets glossed over such that no one unfamiliar with the show can clock its resonance. Such as the precise moment that it occurs to Louise that she can hold stage with nothing but an artful tease; or the moment of concession at the end where Rose, projecting the mother-daughter billing, gestures at the at it, “reads” her name—and then pointedly lifts her hand higher, indicating bigger letters for Louise and billing on top. It’s always the final laugh of the evening…unless the two heights of the gesturing aren’t precisely and clearly distinct from one another.
(4) And the cast is not to be faulted. At all. Not from the most passing player to the star. This kind of global consistency—overuse of vocal mannerism, overplaying the irony of a character or a behavioral quality, all excess, glossing over passing but impactful beats—whether conceptual, determined during rehearsal inspiration or some hybrid of the two—is always down to the director’s sensibility, his eye and ear for detail. And/or possibly his willingness to tell a performer to choose his or her battles, to be aware of effect-repetition, to make the effect in question count. George C. Wolfe is a gifted fellow, and I don’t want to generalize about him; but directing is as much about subtraction as addition. And while with Gypsy he has admirably-enough delivered a decent-looking production that honors the material and is generally well-paced, the self-editing reflex as applied to the stuff I’ve particularized, seems to have gone underground. (Not to put too fine a point on it: When at the age of about 19, I first met Steve Sondheim and played him some of my nascent forays into songwriting, he zeroed in on a compositional tic getting way too much love, and said this to me, hammering with his voice as he emphatically tapped the top of the piano with two fingers: “Any—device—has—to be used—sparingly!”)
(5) Danny Burstein, as Herbie, is sensational. Why is this a problem? Well, in one sense, of course, it isn’t; nothing wrong with sensational. But he’s so grounded and real and human that his presence emphasizes what’s missing in so much of the rest of Mr. Wolfe’s interpretation. Mr. Burstein is, of course (and as always), way too savvy an actor not to blend into the production’s energy; this is not a case of “It’s like he’s in another play.” He’s in the same play, all right. But the fact that he can wrangle that much humanity within this production, despite everything swirling around him, is the proof that more of the same would have been possible elsewhere and from others. It’s not merely that he’s the beating heart of the production…it’s that, with the exception of a few meaningful moments delivered by Ms. McDonald, he’s the only heart of the production.
Among those meaningful moments from Ms. McDonald is, of course, “Rose’s Turn”, the mad scene every great musical theatre actress seems destined to play—and perhaps the thing that makes it so effective is that it is a mad scene, and as the lyric indicates, Mama lets go, and thus any residual calculation goes too; it’s raw and honest. But also, in keeping with the above…maybe at times a little too mad, making it hard to go anywhere higher.
Again, importantly, as I asserted right at the start, this is a solid, “general purpose” Gypsy. It does the material no harm, it has bells, whistles, and exuberance…and…well…it’s delivered with enough Grade-A competence that audience goes nuts. Way nuts.
But if you decide to attend and find yourself more subdued…you’re not alone either…just part of a smaller, quieter group, is all…