As long as there have been child stars, there have been pushy parents living vicariously through them, a subject of cultural fascination from Judy Garland to Dance Moms. The devil works hard and Kris Jenner works harder, but no stage mom is quite in the league of Mama Rose, the relentless protagonist and handler of two performing daughters in Stephen Sondheim’s much-beloved musical Gypsy.
The mother of all stage mothers, based on the domineering matriarch in the burlesque icon Gypsy Rose Lee’s 1957 memoir, has earned her reputation as a destination for musical theater divas. The role is, as some have argued, Everest for a Broadway actor, pioneered by Ethel Merman in 1959 and since scaled by Angela Lansbury, Bette Midler, Tyne Daly, Bernadette Peters and most recently Patti LuPone in the 2008 revival. LuPone’s brassy, torrential belt, which earned a Tony and is now part of the modern Broadway YouTube canon, looms large over the role. But from the minute Audra McDonald’s Rose appears in the latest revival, directed by George C Wolfe at the Majestic Theatre, she is a different flavor of unmissable. With a small dog, a threadbare purse and total impatience, blistering past manners and barking over a befuddled kiddie talent show director (Jacob Ming-Trent), McDonald’s Rose is a gale of tremulous desperation and vulturous ambition.
This is the first time on Broadway that Rose and her family have been played by Black actors, and McDonald imbues her with an extra layer of tragic defiance; her uphill climb is extra steep. Never mind that her children, the talented Baby June (Marley Lianne Gomes and Jade Smith) and the meek, overlooked Louise (Kyleigh Vickers) will not go to school or have friends, opinions, a life. They will be, by decree of a single, perpetually broke, thrice-married mother from Seattle (and book by Arthur Laurents), the rarest of things: luminous stars of the waning vaudeville circuit.
For all of Rose’s brute tactics – recruiting benevolent candy salesman Herbie (a winsome Danny Burstein) to be their reluctant, lovelorn agent, forcing the teenage June (Jordan Tyson) and Louise (Joy Woods) to feign girlishness – McDonald foregrounds her fragility. Her Rose trembles as much as she blusters. A classical soprano, McDonald possesses a voice more operatic and delicate than bombastic, an occasionally odd fit for a character of uncompromising, ruinous force. Her voice, gorgeous by any measure, carries the sound of inner tears – though you might wish, in a show-stopping number like Everything’s Coming Up Roses, that it plaster you against the back wall instead.
But any questions of fit are allayed in the second act, as McDonald tears into Rose’s toxic ambition with sharp teeth. Rose, and the actor playing her, is the reason to attend Gypsy; with McDonald locked in on the mother’s white-knuckled obstinacy, the rest of the production falls neatly, if not too remarkably, behind her. Santo Loquasto’s sets – peeling entertainment ads on faded brick, humdrum boarding houses and shabby caravans – are enough to convey the indignities of show business during the Depression, the persistent gap between Rose’s bright-light dreams and their reality. The full 26-piece orchestra, under the direction of Andy Einhorn, makes lush work of the fully restored, golden-age music by Jule Styne. The trio of Lesli Margherita, Lili Thomas and Mylinda Hull conjure delicious, extravagant slapstick out of You Gotta Get a Gimmick, introducing Louise to her burlesque destiny.
And Joy Woods’s Louise, initially a too one-note wallflower to her mother’s firehouse, sharpens as she matures into a chameleonic striptease artist, a woman of lambent physicality and erstwhile warmth. Her latent sensitivity pairs well with McDonald’s quavering Rose, and ushers in this revival’s ace: McDonald’s rendition of the second show-stopper, Rose’s Turn. Alone on the stage apron, every bead of sweat and spit and tears alit, she channels a performer of abject desire, love and desperation. It’s a true bravura performance, the type of mesmeric, shamanistic, nearly unbelievable wattage promised by the best of musical theater. No matter your defenses – the skepticism of another Broadway revival, our collective inurement to the pursuit of attention, up to 70 years of experience with this particular show – McDonald makes it sting, and makes this evergreen show business tragedy stick.
