ON THE TOWN… EXPERIENCING “AUDRA”/“GYPSY”

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By CHIP DEFFAA

A friend and I are standing outside Broadway’s newly renovated Majestic Theater, looking forward to seeing “Gypsy.” He’s staring up at the marquee with a sense of wonder. He says: “I’ve never seen a marquee like that before.”

The marquee displays only two words: : “AUDRA,” “GYPSY.” But—for me at least—those two words are enough. McDonald, 54, is one of the theater’s most respected and revered artists. This is her 14th Broadway show. She’s won the Tony Award six times. And I’d never want to miss any show she was in.

I’ve followed her career from its start. (It was actually Carol Channing, some 30 years ago, who first told me about her, who told me of “a Juilliard student named Audra McDonald with a once-in-a-generation voice.” And Channing–a superb judge of talent, who didn’t throw compliments around freely—had total belief in this newcomer.) I remember, too, when McDonald made her nightclub debut, at Joe’s Pub; I was there on opening night, reviewing her for the New York Post. McDonald’s performance that night remains the greatest nightclub debut I’ve ever witnessed. So, I’ve been admiring McDonald’s gifts for a long time. And tonight, we’ll be seeing her play the quintessential stage-mother, “Mama Rose” in “Gypsy”—one of the most demanding roles in the musical-theater canon.

My friend, who’s an aspiring singer/actor, early in his career, tells me that he’s never before seen McDonald on stage. He asks me: “Do you think I’m going to like this show?”

“We’ll soon find out,” I tell him. There’s no way of knowing. McDonald is a master artist. But no artist, no matter how great, is necessarily right for every role. “Gypsy”–with music by Jule Styne, lyrics by Stephen Sondheim, and book by Arthur Laurents–is as well-written as any musical in existence. But that alone is no guarantee that a revival will be successful; over the years I’ve seen my share of highly anticipated revivals that, for one reason or another, simply didn’t work. So I can’t predict what we’ll be seeing tonight. Then I ask my friend: “But surely, you’ve seen ‘Gypsy’ some place before?” He shakes his head, no; this is all-new territory for him.

I can’t imagine “Gypsy” not being part of one’s life. For almost as long as I can remember, the original Broadway cast album, starring Ethel Merman, has been one of my favorite albums. Every note was committed to my memory in boyhood. I remember when my parents—whose love for Broadway I inherited–went to see Merman in “Gypsy.” They thought the show was great. And—even more important to me as a boy—so did the aged, ex-vaudevillian who mentored me as a boy, Todd Fisher. And he had actually worked with Gypsy Rose Lee (known then as Louise Hovick), her sister June, and their Mama Rose, back in vaudeville. He had photos and clippings. The way he spoke about them made them seem very important to me, and I wanted to know more about them. And when “Gypsy” originally opened on Broadway in 1959, you heard its songs everywhere—on the radio, on TV. The music was part of our popular culture.

Over the years, I’ve seen “Gypsy” many different times, in many different places. It’s one of my all-time favorite musicals. On Broadway, I’ve seen “Mama Rose” played by such performers as Patti LuPone, Bernadette Peters, Linda Lavin, Jana Robbins. In regional production I’ve seen “Mama Rose” played by such performers as Betty Buckley (at Paper Mill Playhouse), Karen Mason (Westchester Broadway Theatre), Leslie Uggams (Connecticut Repertory Theatre). I enjoyed the original motion picture adaptation starring Rosalind Russell and the later made-for-TV film version starring Bette Midler. I’ve learned there are many different ways of making the character of “Mama Rose” work (or occasionally not work–as in one overly earnest, humorless interpretation by a Hofstra University student who simply didn’t yet have the life experience needed to play this complex role).
As we stepped into the Majestic Theatre—one of Broadway’s grandest houses, now impeccably restored—I wondered what we were in for. I was excited, but also a little nervous. In the past 10 years, I’ve seen too many revivals that disappointed me in one way or another–productions with downsized casts and orchestras, cheap-looking sets, and needless revisions. Productions that simply did not measure up to past productions of the shows that I’d seen. So, I’ve gotten a little gun-shy.

Still, there’s a part of me that’s happy simply to stepping inside of a Broadway theater. And the Majestic sure looks magnificent. As my friend I take our seats, I’m happy to see that a couple of Broadway performers I know are sitting, by chance, right in front of us. (I say hi to them.) And sitting next to us is a family with a young girl—she looks like she’s maybe 10 or 11—who says she’s thrilled to be seeing her first Broadway show.

The lights dim. I lean forward in my seat as conductor Andy Einhorn starts the overture. And I’m reveling in the sound. (First impressions sure do matter, and this production could not be off to a better start.)

I’m listening to—savoring–a full-sized 25-piece orchestra playing one of the greatest overtures ever written. And what a gloriously rich, natural, and nuanced sound that orchestra is getting. This is what a Broadway orchestra should sound like. Sometimes, to cut costs, producers of a revival will try to get away with an orchestra half the size of the original one, and they hope that if they crank up the amplification enough, no one will notice the difference; but you can never make 12 musicians sound the same as 25, and you wind up hearing more amplifier than music.
This revival is using the classic, original orchestrations by Sid Ramin and Robert Ginzler, and the original dance music arrangements by John Kander (augmented by some new orchestrations/arrangements by Daryl Waters). And I’m just luxuriating in the music of that terrific overture.

Then the fellow sitting in front of me—an actor I’ve enjoyed in Broadway shows—starts chatting away noisily with his guest, as if the overture were just some unimportant background music. I tap him on the shoulder and “shush” him to be quiet. He quiets down. The overture is as much a part of the show as any words that will be spoken or sung on the stage; and I do not want to miss even one bar of this music. What a gift for melody Jule Styne had!
And Audra McDonald has me—100%!–from the moment she makes her entrance, striding down the aisle to the stage, calling out: “Sing out, Louise!” It’s one of the best entrances by a character in musical theater, and gives 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 plays “Mama Rose” with such conviction that even before she gets to sing her first song, “Some People,” I know I am witnessing a master Broadway performance. It’s big and it’s human all at once—and it’s utterly believable, from start to finish. I have always thought McDonald was a sublime singer, from the very beginning of her career. But it took me time, I must confess, to fully appreciate what a superb actor—not just a superb singer—McDonald is.

She’s really an American treasure—an artist with complete command of the stage. She communicates clearly, strongly, Rose’s fierce ambition and drive. She’s domineering and bossy one moment, and then unexpectedly charming, almost endearing the next moment—if that’s what’s required now for her to get what she wants.
There’s poignance in the courtship, if you want to call it that, between Rose and the devoted, if hapless, “Herbie” (Danny Burstein, giving an excellent performance). He’s looking for a life-partner. She’s looking for someone who can aid her in her quest to make her daughter June—and later, her daughter Louise—a star. They both see, or want to see, that they’re a good fit for one another, as they sing “Small World.” (And this production restores a few introductory lines to this song that were cut prior to its original Broadway run, that make the transition from talking to singing a bit smoother. I’m delighted to hear the restored lines.)

I’m held, unexpectedly fascinated by a story that I know so well, as Rose’s blind ambition eventually helps make her daughter Louise—now calling herself “Gypsy Rose Lee”—a star in the world of burlesque. The mother is angry, unfulfilled because she hasn’t gotten the recognition she feels she deserved.

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. He tells the overall story clearly. He gets the comic elements in the story, and he gets the tragic elements. (Both are equally important.)

And Wolfe helps actors in supporting roles, as he often does, make the most of their moments. I’ve never before seen anyone find as much in the character of stripper “Tessie Tura” as Lesli Margherita does here. It’s a brilliant turn that gets every moment just right, and credit must be given both to actor Margherita and to director Wolfe. The line delivery, the body language, the blocking, all have been exquisitely coordinated, fine-tuned. And a small role, which could easily have been treated as a one-dimensional stock character (the stereotypical “dumb broad”) becomes an unforgettable performance that should get Margherita an award nomination or two. (I’ve enjoyed seeing Wolfe similarly bring out the most in supporting characters, working with just such exacting care, in other shows, going back to, say, Mary Testa in “On the Town.”) Margherita gets every laugh that’s in the script, plus some that aren’t in the script–such as slowly spreading her legs at exactly the right moment in the scene; the staging is wonderfully precise. Any aspiring director could learn from watching Wolfe’s work.

And virtually every line spoken or sung in the show is clear as bell. These days, that’s extraordinary. And again, Wolfe deserves credit. The first obligation of a director is make sure the story is told clearly; and that includes making sure that actors are not slurring or mumbling or garbling any lines, but are delivering their lines clearly. And you can’t take that for granted. I can think of some shows in which my guests were repeatedly asking me things like “What did she say?” “Did you catch that line?” And all I could do was shrug because the actors were not articulating the words clearly enough. In this revival of “Gypsy”—nearly three hours long—I noted only one line that was not delivered quite as crisply and clearly as it could have been (“I’m not Fanny Brice”).

I also want to compliment the sound designer, Scott Lehrer; the sound throughout was natural, never over-amplified. It sounded the way a show should sound. (And that’s rarer than it should be these days, too.) And I loved Santo Loquasto’s evocative set designs.

I’m very glad I saw this production and would love to see it again. McDonald’s “Mama Rose” felt very real to me. By night’s end, I felt I’d witnessed profound artistry.

Were there some blemishes in McDonald’s performance? Of course. Every artist will have some. No production is entirely perfect. Let me talk about that for a bit now.

The score and McDonald’s voice are 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 writing for her.)

McDonald’s voice is considerably different from Merman’s. Now, McDonald is such an extraordinarily adroit singer and actor that this difference, almost all of the time, does not matter. She puts the songs over, in her own way, with a tremendous wallop. She uses her lower register brilliantly, and stays in character—whether speaking or singing—the overwhelming majority of the time.

But there were some moments in the show when she had to go from her chest voice to her head voice, where the character of her voice changed. She was suddenly singing in that beautiful, ethereal head voice that served her well in shows like “Carousel” and “Ragtime,” but does not serve her so well here. Moments when she sounded—just briefly, just a couple of times—more like a refined, cultured, classically trained singer than like the tough, pushy, street-smart, hardened character that “Mama Rose” is. And I wish she could have given us a coarser delivery in those moments, or could have sung alternate notes, or could somehow avoided that classical-recital sound.
I consider those brief moments to be relatively minor blemishes on an otherwise near-perfect performance. They didn’t much bother me—any more than it bothered me when, say, 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. That’s part of being human. But those moments were there–the only “blemishes,” for want of a better word, that I noted in an otherwise exceptionally rewarding performance.

McDonald, I might add, clearly had the audience in the palm of her hand throughout the show. Well before she finished the 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 an audience erupting with boundless enthusiasm.
Overall, I felt I’d witnessed an exceptional performance, one of the more memorable ones in more than 60 years of avid theater-going, McDonald may well win her seventh Tony Award for this. “Mama Rose” is an exceptionally demanding role. And McDonald gave us a beautifully shaded, 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’d just seen her first Broadway show—told me that she liked the show but was confused by one thing. She asked me: “Was Mama Rose a good mother or a bad mother?”

And I loved this young girl’s uncertainty; she was left pondering that question. And that’s as it should be. Television tends to spoon-feed its viewers, making it all-too-obvious who is the good guy (who’s clearly “all good”) and who is the bad guy (who’s clearly all bad). Great theater—and “Gypsy” is great theater—can challenge us more, even as we let it entertain us.

McDonald, to her great credit, had done justice to both sides of Mama Rose’s character—Rose was both the mother who clearly loved her kids, and the mother who was often oblivious to her kids, because she so badly wanted them to “succeed” to fulfill her own narcissistic needs. McDonald’s Mama Rose was tough, overbearing, self-centered; but also, often warm and oddly likeable—even when she behaved so badly that some people in the audience literally gasped out loud.

As we left the theater, my guest said: “What a great way to start 2025. If I were writing the review, it’d be just one sentence: This is the best show I’ve ever seen.”

“That’s all you’d write?”

“I’d keep it short—like that marquee that simply says: AUDRA, GYPSY.”

(And if you’re thinking of going, dear readers, I might add that January and February are always a great time to get theater tix. A lot of potential audience members choose to stay home on cold wintry nights—especially if it snows a bit. And you can often get very good seats, at good prices, to the very best shows.)

— CHIP DEFFAA