| Is there a show with more friction between the title and the huge name in lights on top of it than Gypsy? There’s a kind of double cosmic irony to the 1959 musical, with its super-singable score by Jule Styne, its zingy lyrics by a young Stephen Sondheim, and its book by Arthur Laurents, still considered one of the very best of its form by people who’ve put in the hours. Ostensibly, Gypsy tells the story — with plenty of theatrical liberties — of its mid-century celebrity namesake, the stripper Gypsy Rose Lee, born in Seattle as Rose Louise Hovick, whose memoirs inspired producer David Merrick and star Ethel Merman to start hunting up writers for a hit. But as anyone passing by the Majestic Theatre today can tell you, top billing never goes to the actor playing her. Louise’s mother — now known to the world as Momma Rose, though onstage, she’s Madame Rose or simply Rose — is the looming peak at the center of the play. It’s the role Frank Rich once compared to King Lear, the blueprint for all complicated, fearsome, possibly sociopathic, indisputably maniacal stage mothers that came in its wake. Fate twists and keeps twisting. If Gypsy is to be believed, Rose Thompson Hovick lived out the tragedy of getting what you wish for: making her daughter shine, only to be eclipsed. But then there was Ethel and Angela and Tyne and Bernadette and Patti and now Audra. Shine out, Rose. It’s your show after all. |
