Climbing the Gypsy Summit

 

 

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On an episode of the sitcom Will & Grace in which Will and Jack take a newly out-of-the-closet man under their wing, they bring him a cultural “starter kit” which includes three different Gypsy cast recordings. (“So much to learn,” the tutee sighs.) It’s a telling moment: a fluency in comparing and contrasting the various historical productions of a classic musical like Gypsy, particularly the diverse performances of its iconic leading role, is central to musical theater connoisseurship. Is there any show in the history of the genre that engenders such profound passion, such diva partisanship, such intense and complicated devotion? Every new revival rekindles the analysis and debate. On the morning after I saw the current Broadway production, I received a dozen texts asking what I thought. Well, like the other 1,000 middle-aged gay men in the audience, I had a lot of opinions. But first, it is worth exploring why this show occupies such a hallowed place in the canon.
 
Gypsy is based on the memoirs of Gypsy Rose Lee, a striptease artist and one of the most famous women of the mid-twentieth century. In an era when stripping was disreputable at best, and its practitioners shunned by mainstream society, Lee was the exception that proved the rule. She was the go-to example of her profession, a synecdoche in the way that one might refer to any brainy professor as “Einstein.” What’s more, she was embraced, celebrated even, by tastemakers. Gypsy, the musical, teaches us in a show-stopping number that every successful stripper has a gimmick, and Lee had a great one. Although she made her name in the seedy world of burlesque, she presented as a sophisticated, elegant, intellectual woman. She collected Picassos and Chagalls. She wrote books. She referred to herself not as a stripper but as an ecdysiast, a term coined by H. L. Mencken. She seemed like the kind of high-class, couture-styled woman whom most men could only dream of possessing, and yet there she was on stage, discreetly removing her clothing. And so, despite a lack of any virtuosic talent (she wasn’t much of an actress or singer or dancer), she became a household name.
 
The musical focuses on Lee’s childhood in the 1920s and ’30s. Her original name was Rose Louise Hovick, but she went by Louise since her mother’s name was also Rose. She was a child performer, along with her sister June. Gypsy shows how she eventually moved from vaudeville, an entertainment targeted to families, to burlesque, which was strictly for adults. Vaudeville was spectacularly popular in the first two decades of the last century, but talking movies dealt it a quick, fatal blow. Burlesque, which had been on the American culture scene for decades, survived, at least for a while, because it provided something that movies could not: female nudity and dirty jokes. During the Depression, when Lee rose to fame, burlesque was big business. Minsky’s, the most prestigious burlesque theater, achieved national renown, but backlashes from both church and state led to the form’s demise by the early 1940s.
 
Lee stayed famous well into the 1950s, thanks to frequent appearances on television and occasional forays into Broadway and Hollywood. Her memoir was a bestseller and was quickly optioned for the theater. But everyone who read the book had come away with the same opinion: the most fascinating, gripping character in the story was not Lee, nor even her sister June, who eventually became a very successful actress, but rather their mother. Rose Hovick, born in 1890, had a rough life and saw show business as an escape, pushing her two children on the stage whether they liked it or not. She fiercely protected and supported them, but her obsessive fixation, which brooked no dissent, almost destroyed them. She was the archetypal Stage Mother. In retrospect, we would classify her as a clinical narcissist. She had little interest in the actual desires of others, projecting her own needs onto them and steamrolling over any objections. Other people existed to do her bidding. Rose was apparently quite charming, feminine and fluttery, playing at being helpless. But when asked years later to describe her mother in one word, June didn’t hesitate to say “lethal.” Rose was a kleptomaniac. She was a grifter with violent tendencies. Later in life, after her children were grown, she may have murdered a woman who may have been her lover (biographers differ). Rose was, to say the least, ill-suited to her sweet and demure name.
 
The authors of Gypsy the musical—librettist Arthur Laurents, composer Jule Styne, and lyricist Stephen Sondheim—naturally found this woman irresistible. They toned down her criminality, but not her narcissism, creating a remarkably dislikable central character for a 1959 musical. In doing so, they drew on several contemporary cultural tropes, creating what is still one of the most compelling characters in the musical’s history. The first trope was, of course, the figure of the Stage Mother, a long-standing stereotype for decades before Gypsy, but almost always as a figure of ridicule, such as in Noël Coward’s song, “Don’t Put Your Daughter on the Stage, Mrs. Worthington.” We still see this figure today in television shows like Dance Moms. The comic Stage Mother is pushy and deluded, butting in where she doesn’t belong, full of ridiculously grandiose dreams for her untalented offspring. All of this describes the character of Rose, but Laurents, Sondheim and Styne downplayed the humor and instead subjected their protagonist to a psychological deep dive.
 
There had been serious, even fearsome, depictions of this archetype before, most notably in the 1933 novel Stage Mother by Bradford Ropes, adapted into a film starring Alice Brady. But Gypsy pushed deeper, drawing on another cultural current: the depiction of overbearing, damaging mothers in plays and movies of the era, from Tennessee Williams’ The Glass Menagerie to the popular film Now, Voyager. Depictions of motherhood in the first few decades of the century had been idealized, sanctifying the figure as virtually vestal, a tactic of course to put women on a pedestal and remove any semblance of empowerment from their lives. The specter of liberation that emerged as women entered the workforce during the Second World War led to an anti-feminist backlash, which coincided with fashionable mid-century pop-Freudianism, then at its peak in the 1940s and ’50s. In this shallow reading of Freud, your mother either set you on the right path, or she destroyed you. Aggressive, overbearing mothers were coded as castrating, setting up their children for a lifetime of neurosis. Gypsy takes this destructive maternal figure and grafts it onto the comic figure of the Stage Mother and then adds in a layer of empathy, all while still disapproving of Rose’s actions. It’s a heady, rich character brew, unprecedented in a commercial musical comedy.
 
Gypsy depicts the picaresque rise to fame of Gypsy Rose Lee. In the first act, Rose (and let us pause here to note that nowhere in the text is she referred to as “Mama Rose” or “Momma Rose”—and, therefore, let us avoid that nomenclature) is hellbent on getting her younger daughter June onto the Orpheum Circuit, the premiere national chain of vaudeville theaters. June is cute, but she’s not a major talent, and the acts that Rose creates around her are second rate. Rose charms candy salesman Herbie, a former agent, and talks him into representing the act. June’s sister, Louise, is withdrawn, neglected, stuck playing half of a cow in the farmyard number that Rose has cooked up for June. When an important producer shows interest in June and offers to provide her with training if Rose steps aside, Rose furiously refuses. June, by now sixteen, elopes with one of the boys in the act. Rose is devastated, and Herbie and Louise beg her to give up her show business dreams. Instead, she doubles down on her ambition, turning now to Louise, whom she vows to make a star. In the second act, Rose, Louise and Herbie navigate the dying world of vaudeville, ending up, by accident, in a squalid burlesque house. Rose finally agrees to give up, but when one of the strippers misses a performance, she sees a last chance and forces Louise onstage. Herbie walks out in disgust. Louise does well, and her career as a stripper takes off. She graduates to increasingly prestigious bookings, eventually becoming world famous as Gypsy Rose Lee. In the final scene, Rose, having achieved her dream of stardom for her daughter, struggles with her own lack of personal fulfillment and her damaged relationship with her loved ones.
 
Many consider Laurents’ book for Gypsy to be the best ever written for a musical. It could stand on its own as a play, they say, and that might be true, but that claim misses out on what makes Gypsy a masterpiece. It is the confluence—and in some ways the productive mismatch—of Laurents’ unsparing, angry work, buttressed by Sondheim’s sharp, raw lyrics, with Styne’s dynamic, tuneful music. On Laurents and Sondheim’s previous show, West Side Story, they had collaborated with Leonard Bernstein, a musician who matched them in intellectual ambition. Styne came from a pop background and, while undeniably an extraordinarily gifted composer, never strayed too far from 32-bar forms and from melodies that instantly imprinted themselves in the memory. In short, Gypsy is full of great tunes.
 
This unexpected match between the artistic ambitions of Laurents and Sondheim and the commercial savvy of Styne is perhaps the secret to Gypsy’s greatness. Rather than leading to incoherence, the variance creates rich layers of meaning. At the end of the first act, when Rose turns her monomaniacal attention to Louise, she sings “Everything’s Coming Up Roses,” a Sondheim lyric so spot on that many felt that the title phrase must be a standard saying in the language—but no, he invented it for the song. The music is upbeat, driving, in a major key, full of optimism and positive spirit. Yet in the context of the scene, in which Louise and Herbie are devastated at Rose’s narcissistic inability even to hear, let alone acknowledge, their needs, the song is shattering. Laurents’ stage directions indicate: “Herbie and Louise stand silent, numb, as [Rose] plows on, singing triumphantly.” Her relentless prophecy of victory is not a promise, it’s a threat. Sondheim must have been thrilled at finding the central pun on the word “Rose,” with the title phrase meaning both that things will successfully bloom, and that things will turn out the way Rose (and no one else) wants them to. Jerome Robbins, who directed the original production, didn’t get it at first: “Everything’s coming up Rose’s what?” he asked.

 

 

When one thinks of Gypsy, the first name that comes to mind is Ethel Merman, the undisputed “First Lady of Broadway” during the genre’s golden age. Rose was the last new role she created, capping a legendary career. She was the favorite singer of Cole Porter, George Gershwin and Irving Berlin, and a brilliant comic with astounding stage presence, but she was not a sophisticated actress. She didn’t do well with intellect or nuance; rather, she flourished in direct, clear, simple motivations. And perhaps that worked well for this role. Rose is not in any way a person who examines and reflects upon her own actions. Except: the famous final number, “Rose’s Turn.” This is one of the three or four landmark moments in the history of American musical theater. Rose feels disrespected, neglected, irrelevant, now that Louise has become rich and famous. “Just one thing I want to know,” she asks her daughter. “All the scheming and scrimping and lying awake nights . . . What’d I do it for?” Louise responds, “I thought you did it for me, Momma.” This takes Rose aback, and she walks away, out of the naturalistic world of the show and into an almost Brechtian mindscape, made up, as Laurents indicates, of “stacked flats of scenery used earlier in the big production numbers.”
 
Alone onstage, Rose must finally come to terms with the wreckage of her life. Why did she do it? “Because I was born too soon and started too late,” she says, indicating that she could have been a star herself. But that’s not quite it. The need, the desperation, goes deeper. In the middle of the number, Rose starts singing a litany of phrases, each beginning with the word “Momma,” and then she stutters on that word, breaking the rhythm and structure of the song, collapsing into an almost childish babble on the syllable “Ma.” The haunting presence of Rose’s own, absent mother has surfaced. This ur-character had been alluded to once before, at the end of the first act, when Rose refers to her own mother walking out on her when she was young, and how she cried for a week. But now, in “Rose’s Turn,” we get a sense of how deeply damaged Rose was by the shattering of that relationship.
 
It’s a climax unlike any other that came before it in the history of musical theater. It’s more of a nervous breakdown than a song. It’s now known that Sondheim was the primary author of this number, curating fragments from Styne’s music earlier in the show and mashing them together into a stream of consciousness. (This adventurous approach will not surprise anyone aware of Sondheim’s subsequent work.) “Rose’s Turn” is radical, with no formal structure. Throughout, Rose mutters, repeats sequences, and spirals through a diverse set of emotions. The song mirrors a splintering mind undergoing a psychic break. And astonishingly, Merman really went there. She dug deep, judging by the records we have of her performance, including the original cast album. It’s a harrowing five minutes—especially because we’ve never heard Ethel Merman sound anguished before. Her persona had always been the confident, tough broad: Annie in Annie Get Your Gun, Reno Sweeney in Anything Goes, Sally Adams in Call Me Madam. Sondheim tells a delicious anecdote in the first of his books of annotated, collected lyrics: after playing “Rose’s Turn” for Merman for the first time, she asked about the stuttered “M” in the word “Momma.” Sondheim launched into a rich analysis of the syllable’s subtext, of all the different ways the stutter could be interpreted, and of the musical structure underpinning this improvisatory moment. “Yeah,” said Merman after a pause. “But does it come in on the downbeat or the upbeat?”
 
How much of Gypsy is true? The basic outlines of the plot, and the timing, are correct. But most of the details are invented, or at least hard to verify. Herbie is a composite character. June, who modified her last name to Havoc and achieved success in theater and film, was unhappy that Gypsy depicts the childhood acts as lousy, relegated to the small time. The Hovick family had decent success in their time, playing big venues. It’s just that the rapid death of vaudeville left them stranded, a reality that the real Rose, like the character, refused to face. June was smart to get out when she did, even though the real Rose almost shot the boy with whom she eloped. Although June never achieved the level of fame of her sister, she did originate major roles in several Broadway shows, including Rodgers and Hart’s Pal Joey which, coincidentally, featured a song called “Zip,” which was about her sister, Gypsy Rose Lee, making fun of her image as the “intellectual stripper.” The lyrics depict what’s going through Lee’s mind as she zips off each piece of clothing during her act: “Zip! I was reading Schopenhauer last night. / Zip! And I think that Schopenhauer was right.”

 

 

June’s concerns about Gypsy were mollified when the authors added a subtitle: “A Musical Fable.” The show is indeed a fable, based on an autobiography that is somewhat factually challenged, and depicting a family who lived in a complicated relationship with the truth. There is still no precise evidence of when Louise and June were actually born, thanks to their mother’s constant reinvention of their ages as they grew up. In any event, as soon as the authors made the decision to center Rose in their telling, any concerns about autobiographical exactitude became less relevant. Gypsy is not really about Gypsy Rose Lee. Rather it is about families, and specifically about how to live with a difficult mother. We know that Sondheim’s own mother, Foxy Sondheim, was as much a piece of work as Rose herself, a narcissist with no filter. Surely Sondheim’s fraught relationship with Foxy had an impact on the depiction of Rose.
 
It’s hard to see Rose as anything other than a very bad parent. Just like the real Rose, as previously noted, the character of Rose would today be diagnosed with narcissistic personality disorder. The key components of this mental illness all apply to Rose: delusions of grandeur, an excessive need for attention and approval, and a complete lack of empathy, an inability to care about the feelings of others. When Herbie finally walks out on her in the second act, she begs him not to go and says, “I need you.” “What for?” he asks, and she responds, “A million things.” “Just one would be better,” he says. Laurents here brilliantly captures the quintessence of narcissism. Rose needs people to fulfill her million petty needs, but she’s incapable of the one major need of love and affection. Rose is a powerful life force, the thrillingly charismatic engine of the show. And, thanks to the authors’ psychological approach, a tragic figure in her own right. But the damage she inflicts on her children is difficult to forgive.
 
The original production of Gypsy was successful, well received by critics and audiences, but at 702 performances it wasn’t a blockbuster, compared to shows like My Fair Lady or South Pacific. It didn’t win a single Tony Award. Instead, Rodgers and Hammerstein’s final musical, The Sound of Music, dominated the 1959–60 season. Mary Martin won a Best Actress Tony for creating the role of Maria von Trapp, leading a group of much happier children in a much more wholesome environment, despite the threat of Nazis. After the ceremony, Merman, who already had a Tony on her mantelpiece, shrugged and said, “You can’t buck a nun.” The Gypsy original cast album soon became a classic, and revivals have been frequent. On Broadway alone, Rose has been played by Angela Lansbury (1974), Tyne Daly and Linda Lavin (1989), Bernadette Peters (2003), and Patti LuPone (2008). A big-screen, big-budget Hollywood adaptation was made in 1962, featuring Rosalind Russell (partially dubbed by Lisa Kirk), Karl Malden, and Natalie Wood, and a television adaptation in 1993 starred Bette Midler.
 
Gypsy always has good runs and makes money, but it’s a bit of a connoisseur’s piece, more in the Carousel and West Side Story vein: successful, beloved shows that are never quite powerhouse smashes. It’s a show whose reputation has grown with time, and at some point, the show entered the consensus shortlist of Great American Musicals. I place this canonization around the Daly revival in 1989. Frank Rich, then chief theater critic for the New York Times, went on record saying it was his favorite musical. Many historians and buffs followed suit, and the show locked its position in the pantheon. Which is interesting, because it’s a tough musical to watch. It’s not a feel-good show. Even the up-tempo numbers have undercurrents of anxiety or desperation. Gypsy is about very unhappy people. There is no catharsis at the end, generally a requirement for leaving audiences satisfied. There is only a grudging kind of truce between Louise and Rose, a sense that they are going to keep trying to get along.
 
Despite this edginess, Gypsy is revived as often as any classic musical, mainly due to the desire of prominent actresses to test themselves against the leading role. Rose, as is often said, is the King Lear of musical theater. It’s the Isolde, the Mount Everest. Rose has seven—count them, seven—powerhouse numbers that need to be catapulted across the footlights. Requirement one: a huge, tireless voice. Requirement two: the kind of acting that is not always expected in musical theater. Each diva brings something different to the role. The real Rose was a tiny woman with, as noted, a deceptively helpless affect—definitely not the sturdily built bulldozer first embodied by Merman and generally re-created in revival. Of all the great actresses who have played Rose, the one who probably looked most like the historical person is Imelda Staunton, who headlined a scorching 2015 London revival. The one who probably acted most like her was Peters, and, interestingly, her performance is still the most controversial of all the Broadway Roses. Peters was tearful, flirtatious, not at all a loudmouth in the Merman mold. The performance had its moments. But I’m not sure that’s the Rose that Laurents, Sondheim and Styne wrote.
 
Every production of Gypsy has some decisions to make. Most notably: what is going on in that final scene when Rose seems to want to take the spotlight as a star in her own right? Could Rose have made it as a big vaudeville star? Or is she delusional? What is the correct answer to Rose’s question to Louise: “What’d I do it for?” And for that matter, what does Louise’s response—“I thought you did it for me”—mean? Is she being generous? Confrontational? Sarcastic? For me, the key line comes after “Rose’s Turn.” Caught out by Louise, Rose finally speaks a simple, honest truth: “I just wanted to be noticed.” Is that not the core of what drives us all as conscious, communal beings? This is the central moment of revelation in the show. Wanting to be noticed is at the base of all narcissism. But it is also a universal need that all humans feel. In this profoundly compassionate moment, Laurents (a miserable human being by all accounts, but clearly a perceptive one) grants us all a benediction. The need to be noticed can drive our basest instincts, but it is also an inevitable part of being alive, and thus worthy of forgiveness and understanding.
 
The latest Broadway revival of Gypsy, which opened in December 2024, is a vehicle for the already legendary actress Audra McDonald. And in several important ways her performance is even more a departure from the norm than Peters’ was. Most obviously, McDonald is the first Black actress to play Rose in a major revival (Leslie Uggams essayed the role in 2014 at the Connecticut Repertory Theatre). Before the current revival opened, there was much speculation about whether McDonald’s casting, along with that of the Black actresses Joy Wood and Jordan Tyson as her daughters, would evince “color-blindness” or “color-consciousness.” In the event, the answer was sort of both and neither—more on that later. Just as interestingly, McDonald made a clear attempt to humanize Rose, not only to justify her actions but to validate them. In interviews before the opening, she indicated that she did not believe Rose was a monster. Her only crime was loving her children too much.

 

 

McDonald is arguably the most gifted performer working in the American musical theater today. She combines a voice of lush, molten glory with an astonishing ability to access and project rich, deep emotions. She’s a generational talent and has been rewarded with six competitive Tony Awards, an all-time record. Of course, her Rose would be a must-see event. And the headline is that she’s tremendous. Few performers in the world today have her ability to hold a stage with precision and power, to find something fresh and telling at every moment. You can’t take your eyes off her. That said, for me, it was a fascinating example of a superb actress who was in some ways fighting the material. McDonald’s defining stage aura is that of a huge well of emotion. She puts her entire self onstage, thrillingly vulnerable. But as written by Laurents, Sondheim and Styne, Rose is not vulnerable (until the final minutes of the show). She’s a manipulator, someone who is unaware of anything other than her need to dominate. McDonald wants her character to be loved by the audience and wants us to feel her deep love for her daughters. The result is that what is written as angry and bludgeoning feels desperate and anxious. McDonald’s Rose seems always on the verge of emotional and physical collapse. She works hard to keep the character coherent within the confines of the text. But for me, the result was an accumulation of hard-working moments, as opposed to an organic embodiment of the character.
 
Of course, McDonald is far too great an actress not to be fascinating on a moment-by-moment basis. More than a few lines completely stunned me. In the final scene, Louise suggests that her mother open a school for child performers, and Rose says, “I could open one. But kids grow up—and twice is enough.” The depth of McDonald’s existential anguish and bone-depth weariness on that line was so powerful that I thought for a minute it must have been added for this revival. It had never registered for me in that way before. I looked it up when I got home and, sure enough, it was in the script. McDonald just landed it in a new and devastating way. On multiple occasions, she went big and deep, with results that were exciting, if not always right.
 
At the performance I saw, early in the run, there was another problem in that Styne’s score sat right on the break in McDonald’s voice, when she needs to shift from a chest-produced sound to a head-produced sound. This made for a tense ride, as I could hear her constantly navigating where and how to place each note. Unlike almost every previous Rose, McDonald is essentially a soprano, and it took a while to get used to hearing her trained upper register in what is usually a belted score. It ultimately works, especially in Rose’s more relaxed ballads like “Small World” and “You’ll Never Get Away From Me.” And reports indicate that, as the run has progressed, she has found ways to navigate the role’s range which feel more natural, and which downplay the gearshifts.
 
Directed by George C. Wolfe, this revival of Gypsy was mostly complete, even incorporating a new, brief introductory verse to “Small World” that I had never heard before. Otherwise, only a standard cut in the “Broadway, Broadway” sequence was noticeable. It’s a long evening, but the pace doesn’t slack. Wolfe and his set designer, Santo Loquasto, have given us an abstract-looking Gypsy rather than the usual naturalistic flats and drops. They also did away with the vaudeville-style title cards that announce each new scene from the side of the stage, a feature of almost every previous production.
 
As for the question of race, Wolfe and team certainly approached it with consciousness. We were not meant to ignore the fact that Rose and her daughters were Black; that was part of their struggle for visibility and success in the vaudeville industry. In the early part of the show, Rose recruits a group of young boys to serve (along with a short-haired Louise) as backup to June’s act. Later, we see June, Louise and the boys age into teenagers, a time passage usually accomplished with a strobe-lit transition. In this production, the young boys are all Black but, during the transition, we see Rose hand-replace them with older, mostly white boys, the implication being that the act needed more white performers to break past the color barrier. When Louise becomes a star as Gypsy Rose Lee, the “Garden of Eden” number we see her perform at Minsky’s felt more like a Josephine Baker revue than a historical Lee performance—a deliberate choice, according to an interview Wolfe gave on NPR. Still, the issue of race was never foregrounded in this revival, nor was it dealt with in a precisely historical manner. The text does not allow Rose to indicate that she is trying to break out of Black vaudeville and into what would have been considered the “mainstream” circuit, and so that struggle was only implied.

 

 

One major miss in this revival was the treatment of what is, for me, the most moving song in the show, “All I Need Is the Girl.” Tulsa, one of the teenage boys supporting June in the vaudeville act, has been secretly practicing a dance duet, hoping to break away from Rose’s failing enterprise. Louise has a secret crush on Tulsa and watches him rehearse the routine, at the end of which he pulls her in to join him, raising her hopes that maybe he’ll take her away with him. Alas, this is not to be as, in the subsequent scene, the devastated Louise learns that Tulsa has eloped with June. The current revival gives Tulsa’s song a new arrangement—more up-tempo and rhythmic, as opposed to the traditional romantic treatment. Instead of a swoony Astaire-Rogers pastiche, the number, choreographed by Camille A. Brown, now feels like a goofy comic duet, which destroys the powerful sense of Louise being swept into a suddenly hopeful connection. In the text, Tulsa reaches out to Louise at the climax of the number, shouting, “Give me your hand!”—a heart-stopping moment given what we know of Louise’s hopeless infatuation. The revival dropped this line. The result is so misguided that I think the audience completely misses the song’s powerful subtext, which then kills the payoff in the next scene.
 
Herbie is a no-fail role, and the always reliable Danny Burstein, while perhaps a decade too old, was excellent. As Louise, Joy Woods had many strong moments. She convincingly evolved from mousy, neglected teenager to stunningly gorgeous star, although the montage sequence in which that transition happens was awkwardly executed at the performance I attended, with botched timing. Wolfe, famous for working on shows in scene order, may just not have gotten around to streamlining this scene by the time the show opened. (To be fair, this montage has always been the most problematic part of the show, constantly revised and reworked from production to production.) I wish that in the latter part of the montage, and in her final acting scenes, Woods would have trusted the material and allowed herself to do less—a tactic that the real Lee, who mainly just embodied elegance and confidence, employed frequently. Woods did convey a sense of coming into an acceptance of her beauty. And she made a gutsy choice to play the big scene before “Rose’s Turn” with a great deal of anger, which paid off in my opinion. That anger felt earned.
 
Many fans confess that they cry throughout Gypsy, which baffles me. I’ve seen it countless times and always acknowledge its genius, but it always leaves me a tiny bit cold. It thrills me but doesn’t move me the way that Carousel or The Most Happy Fella or Sunday in the Park with George do. Perhaps it has something to do with one’s personal relationship with one’s parents—unresolved or resolved. Frank Rich singles out the song “If Momma Was Married” as a palimpsest for familial trauma. I agree, it’s a tremendous song. I just feel a step outside of it. This is not a criticism. There’s not a moment in Gypsy that isn’t vivid and exciting and intense.
 
But there’s something more about this show. Like all great works of art, it changes as we change. One often reads that each new revival has uncovered various levels of darkness or complexity in the show, but I would argue that those levels were always there. When we’re young, we see the show as a passionate cri de coeur against the tyranny of controlling parents. Everything at that age is very black and white, which is exciting. But when we’re older, everything becomes greyer. The motivations of the characters become more nuanced. Gypsy is a Shakespearean show in that it can be read in multiple ways, all of which are valid and all of which are emotionally powerful. You can’t really say that about its Tony rival, The Sound of Music. Don’t get me wrong: I love that show and could talk for hours about its artistry. But Gypsy is something different. It’s a slippery, dangerous, volatile musical—and there aren’t that many of them.