Can a single performance change the meaning of a classic play or musical? This question occurred to me as I watched Audra McDonald, our greatest living musical theater actor, seem to transform the role of Momma Rose, the terrifyingly driven stage mother, in the stunning new revival of “Gypsy.”
It is not merely the fact that McDonald is the first Black actor to play the role on Broadway that makes this Rose seem like someone new—someone both real and larger than life. And it is not simply that her quasi-operatic voice makes Rose’s songs sound different (listen for the way the break in her voice lands on the word “dream” in Rose’s signature line, “I had a dream”). It also has something to do with the unique mix of needy grit and ingratiating sweetness McDonald brings to this towering role. When McDonald’s Momma Rose is onstage, which is most of the time in “Gypsy,” she makes us feel like she is the only person in the world who matters.
Which is, of course, part of the problem with Rose. Though she monomaniacally projects her visions of stardom onto her two daughters, June and Louise, as she schleps them around the crumbling vaudeville circuit of the 1930s and ’40s, it is Rose’s grinding ambition that drives the act, her craving for the spotlight that burns brightest. This is also what drives both daughters away in turn, as they outgrow the confining kiddie personas she’s imposed on them, and ultimately repels her loyal booking agent and boyfriend, Herbie (Danny Burstein), when he realizes he’ll never get top billing in her heart. At one point he compares Rose to “a pioneer woman without a frontier”—a funny line, but one that foretells perennial disappointment as much as aspiration.
Though placed in a musical comedy setting—with bright, brassy songs by Jule Styne and Stephen Sondheim, and an airtight script by Arthur Laurents—Rose is a role with the tragic scale, if not the body count, of King Lear or Medea. And here’s where I must doubt my original premise, that McDonald, great as she is, has somehow changed “Gypsy.” Instead I think this 1959 musical is the kind of masterpiece that raises the bar for everyone involved, and McDonald is the kind of performer, on par with many previous Roses (Ethel Merman, Angela Lansbury, Tyne Daly, Bernadette Peters, Patti LuPone), who doesn’t just clear that bar but leaves it in the dust. This is a show that requires and rewards the best of its interpreters, and which feels new and fresh, indeed transformed, when it is realized this fully.
Of course, “Gypsy” is not a one-woman show. A lot of the credit here goes to director George C. Wolfe and choreographer Camille Brown and a team of first-rate designers, who have created an exquisite frame not only for McDonald’s lead turn but for the entire ensemble. They also give as much attention and craft to the show’s fulsome vaudeville and burlesque pastiches as to its dramatic heft. It is remarkable, in fact, how many of the numbers in “Gypsy” are winking parodies of chintzy song-and-dance routines, yet they never cloy. Wolfe, Brown and the performers commit fully to the high-stepping, flag-waving kitsch of Baby June’s ridiculous act, and later to the glitzy strut of a trio of middle-aged strippers, managing to convey that these acts are terrible without making us feel terrible.
Wolfe also has a secret weapon, employed judiciously and triumphantly at key junctures: a lip at the front of the stage that encircles the orchestra pit. It’s here that the teenaged June (Jordan Tyson) and Louise (Joy Woods) let loose with the exhilarating duet, “If Momma Was Married,” their first moment of open rebellion against their mother’s plan for their lives—even if it is premised, it is hard not to notice, on a fantasy of taming the indomitable Rose into domesticity. It is also here that the three strippers mentioned above have a moment of tattered glory in “You Gotta Get a Gimmick.”
And, crucially, it is on this lip of the stage that McDonald’s Momma Rose delivers the climax of her final number, “Rose’s Turn,” the soliloquy/mad scene in which Rose takes centerstage to ask what she did it all for, and to answer her own question by demanding the attention—and love—for herself that she felt she deserved and never received. On one level, this is a raw-nerve aria whose power derives from nothing more exalted than a naked exposure of human pain, as Rose practically screams the final words, “For me!”
It is also, though, an impossibly complicated meta-theatrical moment, here given full expression by McDonald. Consider: This is a showpiece number voicing the pent-up frustrations of a woman who secretly felt all along that she herself could have been a headlining star, performed within an inch of its life by an actual headlining star, who then receives an ecstatic standing ovation from a grateful audience. I have never been so struck by this moment, in fact: Audra McDonald tearfully receives our thunderous applause, but in character as Rose, at last getting some version of her due.
Are we cheering Audra, the lauded diva, or Rose, avatar of the overlooked and underloved, in whom we can all recognize a piece of ourselves? I would say both. The mythical fourth wall separating the audience from the world onstage, and more broadly fiction from truth, artifice from real emotion, is shattered by a performance this undeniable. Also shattered, in the best possible way: our hearts.
