Audra McDonald Triumphs in “Gypsy” on Broadway

In the nineteen-thirties, Gypsy Rose Lee, perhaps the world’s most famous stripper, helped transform burlesque from a vulgar pastime to café-society entertainment, simply by acting refined. She made arch references as she stripped—dropping names like George Bernard Shaw next to her garter. You can find one of her routines on YouTube, in an excerpt from the 1943 film “Stage Door Canteen.” Even in the sanitized movie clip, her coy allure comes through. Men gather before her, their eyes avid, but she stays playfully aloof, as cool and elegant as an opera glove.

Promise the audience something, then make ’em wait; that’s also the strategy of the fifth Broadway revival of the legendary musical “Gypsy,” from 1959, now at the Majestic. The key promise here lies in Audra McDonald, the once-in-a-generation soprano megastar and winner of six Tony Awards, who plays Rose, Gypsy’s ambitious juggernaut of a stage mother. Lee’s 1957 memoir—also called “Gypsy”—was adapted for Broadway in a lightning-quick few months by an unbeatable supergroup: the book writer Arthur Laurents, the lyricist Stephen Sondheim, the composer Jule Styne, and the director Jerome Robbins. With a wink to the truth (even the autobiography played fast and loose with the story of how Louise Hovick became Gypsy Rose Lee), the quartet built the quintessential show-business tragedy: a battle royal between a stardom-obsessed mother and her daughters, whose childhoods she feeds into the industry’s hungry maw.

In the years since, the mythical version of Gypsy’s mother has eclipsed Gypsy’s own fame. There’s a pantheon of terrifying Roses now: she can appear as a gorgon (Ethel Merman, Patti LuPone) or as a vain, manipulative pixie (Bernadette Peters). The newest production, directed by George C. Wolfe, who has his own stack of Tonys, must realize that we are keen, even avid, to know what kind of monster this Rose will be. And, in number after number, the show teases us with the answer.

For a long time, McDonald’s Rose Hovick is . . . warmly, nervously human. In the first act’s several dingy interiors—Rose’s father’s house; a crummy variety theatre, where Rose coaches her children, Baby Louise (Kyleigh Vickers) and Baby June (I saw Jade Smith)—Rose almost blends into the curtains of the designer Santo Loquasto’s set. (The costume designer Toni-Leslie James puts McDonald in a sad mauve coat, which connects her to the muted purple fabrics of her unsatisfying milieu.) McDonald’s Rose does become a little loud and embarrassing on her daughters’ behalf, and she’s clearly learning to stay on the defensive—she strides along with her feet wide, like a new sailor trying to get her sea legs. But she’s no steamroller. When Rose assures her daughters that she doesn’t mind eating dog food, because she’d rather her children eat well instead, McDonald becomes only slightly antic. Her big personality is, at first, a distraction technique, to keep the girls from letting poverty depress them.

At the same time, McDonald’s singing voice is so enchanting that it seems to be from another plane entirely. Unlike those other Momma Roses, who belted out numbers like baseball sluggers driving balls into the outfield, the classically trained, Grammy Award–winning McDonald sings in operatic tones that glow and soar. When the mild-mannered agent Herbie (Danny Burstein, deft and sweet as always) courts her, she sings, “Small world, isn’t it,” and we marvel at the chasm between McDonald’s gleaming cathedral sound and Rose’s cramped existence.

Wolfe has cast the Hovicks as a Black family, and, without altering the text, he depicts some theatres as effectively segregated venues, where Baby June’s relatively pale complexion seems to allow her to “pass.” Baby June and Baby Louise get older, of course, but Rose denies it: the girls have been playing the small-time vaudeville circuit as a juvenile act, so, goddammit, they’ll stay little until they make it big. Traditionally, the mid-act “Baby June and Her Newsboys” number goes on long enough that the younger members of the ensemble are replaced by grownup performers. Here, as the actors execute Camille A. Brown’s vigorous choreography, Jordan Tyson tap-dances on as an older June, and Joy Woods enters as a teen-age Louise. But Wolfe also has Rose change the backup dancers from a cohort of Black children to a company of young white men. Rose’s decision to hide Louise, her darker-skinned daughter, behind a cow costume takes on a new, uncomfortable charge.

What Wolfe has paid less attention to is the shift from one medium to another. As vaudeville dies out, desperation drives the little group first apart and then into a burlesque house. After June has taken off with one of her newsboys, Rose, grasping at any scrap of opportunity, forces Louise, who has so far been awkward and reticent, into stripping. McDonald has been laying down bread crumbs all along; we’ve watched her Momma gradually change from being a protective, if eccentric, champion to a harridan who pushes her child into harm’s way. But Wolfe hasn’t given Woods any stage business to suggest her own journey; there’s no sense that she’s been learning the ropes, or developing any particular style. One minute she’s a shy Cinderella, and the next she’s a va-va-voomy ice queen, gorgeous and self-assured.

The four theatrical talents who originally turned Gypsy’s story into a musical were all showmen, which is to say, they were recyclers, in love with Broadway’s antecedent forms, and conscious of how much repurposing they were doing. They enjoyed the way that influences, aesthetics, and methods could run into one another: Styne sometimes used melodies he’d written for other shows; Sondheim, in his book “Finishing the Hat,” describes how he came up with the showstopper “Rose’s Turn,” Rose’s eleven-o’clock breakdown, which operates as a kind of omnibus for the other songs in the show, like an overture in reverse. Yet Wolfe and Brown don’t make much of the musical’s extraordinary interconnectedness. Apart from the dancing newsboys’ dogged repetitions, we don’t get a sense of how each form—say, the variety act—might have shaped what replaced it.

Luckily, McDonald’s operatic soprano does much of that bridging work, connecting her Rose not to the bright trumpet hotcha of vaudeville but to the mad arias of Lucia di Lammermoor. Some people might regret McDonald’s so-called “legit” sound as she flies up into her exquisite head voice, but it made me think of the way that low art often hides high art underneath its glitz. In the second act, the stripper Tessie Tura (Lesli Margherita) takes great pride in dancing on pointe, for instance, and, of course, someday there will be Gypsy in her G-string, speaking French and citing Shaw.

That soprano also gives McDonald something beautiful and glasslike to shatter. Many writers have tried to describe the ruined grandeur of the Momma Rose role: Sondheim compared her to Oedipus, lost in hubristic delusion; several critics have called her the Lear of musical theatre; in the second act, Loquasto’s set design—Rose’s busted old car holds up one side of a clothesline—is, I think, pointing us to Brecht’s “Mother Courage.” McDonald, though, provides her own metaphor. Her voice is her grandeur, and it’s her right to break it, which she seems to do over and over again in her immense climactic song. The day I saw the show, McDonald, after throwing down a velvet coat the same luxe red as a theatre curtain, staggered out onto the passerelle, a little bridge that lets her walk partway past the orchestra and into the house. The audience leapt to its feet. From where I was sitting, the shouting, applauding crowd obliterated everything but Rose’s shaking figure. The slow striptease of this ferocious woman’s agitated mind was over, at last, and, unlike Gypsy, she showed us everything. ♦