Gypsy

Majestic Theatre, NYC, January 1, 2025

Reviewed by Chip Deffaa

Photos by Julieta Cervantes

If you see only one Broadway show this season, see Audra McDonald in Gypsy! McDonald is an American treasure, a magnificent artist with a complete command of the stage. If anyone has ever written a greater musical than Gypsy, with a book by Arthur Laurents, music by Jule Styne, and lyrics by Stephen Sondheim, I’ve not encountered it. Director George C. Wolfe has staged this revival with the care, love, understanding, and attention to detail that I’ve long come to expect from him. This production is not to be missed.

In recent years, I’ve seen so many Broadway revivals that have failed to deliver the goods. They’ve been cheapened by excessive downsizing or distorted by needless revisions and so-called improvements, and I’ve often left theaters in something close to a state of mourning. I’ve wondered if we’ve lost the ability to do justice to the great American musicals. But this wonderfully textured and thoughtful revival of Gypsy—a model of its kind—restored my faith. It held me from the first bar of the music.

The lights dimmed. I found myself listening to and savoring a full-sized 25-piece orchestra playing one of the greatest theatrical overtures ever written. What a gloriously rich, natural, and nuanced sound that orchestra (conducted by Andy Einhorn) achieved. This is what a Broadway orchestra should sound like. Sometimes in revivals they try to get away with an orchestra half the size of the original and hope that if they crank up the amplification enough, no one will notice. But you can never make 12 musicians sound the same as 25, and you wind up hearing more amplifier than music.

This revival has used the classic, original orchestrations by Sid Ramin and Robert Ginzler, as well as the original dance-music arrangements by John Kander (augmented by some new orchestrations and arrangements by Daryl Waters). I really luxuriated in the music of that familiar overture. Then I had to tap on the shoulder and “shush” the fellow sitting in front of me, when he started chatting away with his guest as if he considered the overture to be some kind of unimportant “filler” until the actors on stage began speaking their lines. (Incidentally, the fellow I “shushed” certainly should have known better because he’s a Broadway performer himself. But I did not want to miss even one measure of that grand overture.)

Audra McDonald had me from the moment she made her entrance as she marched down the aisle to the stage, calling out “Sing out, Louise!” It’s one of the strongest entrances by a character in musical theater, and it gave us an immediate sense of who “Mama Rose” is. In Gypsy, the book scenes are every bit as important as the musical numbers, and McDonald played “Mama Rose”—the quintessential stage-mother—with such conviction that even before she got to sing her first song, “Some People,” I knew I was witnessing a masterful Broadway performance. It was big, it was human all at once, and it was utterly believable from start to finish. I have always thought McDonald was a sublime singer from the very beginning of her career. (It was actually Carol Channing who first informed me about her. She told me of “a Juilliard student named Audra McDonald with a once-in-a-generation voice” that Channing had total belief in.) But it took me time to also appreciate what a superb actor—not just a superb singer—McDonald was.

McDonald’s “Mama Rose” felt very real to me; I left the theater feeling I’d witnessed profound artistry. Were there some blemishes in McDonald’s performance? Of course. Every artist will have some, and I’ll get to those later. But overall, I knew I’d witnessed an exceptional performance, one of the most memorable in my more than 60 years of theater going.

I’ve seen many different productions of Gypsy in many different places with many different stars. The show has been a tremendous longtime favorite of mine. On Broadway, I’ve seen Mama Rose played by Patti LuPone, Bernadette Peters, Linda Lavin, and Jana Robbins. In regional productions, I’ve seen the role played by Betty Buckley (Paper Mill Playhouse), Karen Mason (Westchester Broadway Theatre), and Leslie Uggams (Connecticut Repertory Theatre). I’ve learned there are many ways of making the character work (or occasionally not work, as in one overly earnest, humorless interpretation by a Hofstra University student who simply didn’t have the experience needed to bring “Mama Rose” to life). Mama Rose is an exceptionally demanding role, and McDonald gave us a beautifully shaded and nuanced interpretation.

After the show, I asked the family sitting next to me and my guest what they thought of Gypsy. The family’s young daughter, who appeared to be just 10 or 11 years old, told me she liked the show but was confused by one thing. She asked me, “Was Mama Rose a good mother or a bad mother?” I loved this young girl’s uncertainty; she was left pondering that question. McDonald, to her great credit, had done justice to both sides of that character; she was both the mother who clearly loved her kids, and the mother who was often oblivious to them because she so badly wanted them to “succeed” to fulfill her own needs. McDonald’s Mama Rose was tough, overbearing, and self-centered but often warm and oddly likeable, even when she behaved so badly that some people in the audience literally gasped out loud. She gave an unforgettable performance.

I must acknowledge that the score and McDonald’s voice were not always a perfect fit. The show was written for Ethel Merman; composer Jule Styne and lyricist Stephen Sondheim tailored the songs to Merman’s very specific (and very well-known) strengths, making sure that key lines would fall in the strongest part of Merman’s brassy belt. (Other great Broadway songwriters, including Cole Porter and Irving Berlin, had likewise tailored songs to Merman’s specific strengths when they wrote for her.) McDonald’s voice is considerably different from Merman’s. She’s such an effective, adroit singer and actor that this difference, most of the time, didn’t matter. She put the songs over, in her own way, with a tremendous wallop. She used her lower register brilliantly and stayed in character, speaking or singing, most of the time. But there were some moments when she had to go from her chest voice to her head voice during which the character of her voice changed; she was suddenly singing in her beautiful head, and she sounded then more like a refined, cultured, classically trained singer than like the tough, pushy, street-smart, hardened character that Mama Rose is.

I considered those brief moments to be minor blemishes in an otherwise near-perfect performance. They didn’t much bother me—any more than it bothered me when I heard Frank Sinatra occasionally hit a note harshly in concerts that I reviewed years ago for The New York Post. You look at the overall context; in an evening filled with absolutely masterful moments, it hardly matters much if some imperfections occur along the way.

Throughout the performance McDonald clearly had the audience in the palm of her hand. Well before she had finished the show’s climactic number, “Rose’s Turn,” she had the entire audience standing, applauding, cheering, and whooping so loudly that I couldn’t hear her final notes. I heard the audience erupting with boundless enthusiasm.

There’s much more I want to say. Danny Burstein as the long-suffering “Herbie,” was right on the money. If Lesli Margherita, who gave the best interpretation of stripper Tessie Tura that I’ve ever seen, doesn’t win some award, I’ll eat my hat. But you shouldn’t be spending any more time reading a review of this production. You should be buying tickets—now!