Folks, I have some bad news: Mama Rose is a relatable millennial queen. Here are the facts. Even though she’s always broke, she doesn’t want a day job; she’s not interested in marriage, only vibes; she’s obsessed with fame at all costs (oh boy, what she would have done with TikTok), and she is in a deep, unshakable thrall to hustle culture. In other words, Mama Rose is pretty much your basic “gatekeep, gaslight, girlboss” nightmare. Swap her reliance on dreams for a love of astrology, and we’d be fully cooked. Against our better judgment, we stand.
“Relatable” isn’t a word you often hear attached to Rose, the centrifugal figure in “Gypsy,” now playing at Lincolnshire’s Marriott Theatre. As she pushes her young daughters June and Louise towards an uncertain future in the dying world of ’20s and ’30s American vaudeville, words like “mythic”and “monumental” come to mind. Rose isn’t relatable, usually — she’s elemental. Watching her is like watching the moon drag the ocean tides up and down the beach twice a day —- whether they like it or not.
