Have a Real Good Time with This Essential Guide to Gypsy's Broadway Legacy

Ethel Merman, Angela Lansbury, Tyne Daly, Bernadette Peters, Patti LuPone and now Audra McDonald: The Broadway stars of Gypsy represent a Who’s Who of stage divas over the past 60 years. One of the greatest musicals ever written, Gypsy is also one of the most meticulously documented, notably in memoirs by lyricist Stephen Sondheim and librettist Arthur Laurents. So, clear the decks! Clear the tracks! You’ve got nothing to do but relax—and marvel at this (stage) mother of a musical that took just four months to write.

THEY HAD A DREAM
By the time Gypsy Rose Lee—born Rose Louise Hovick—published her memoir in 1957, her career as a burlesque striptease artist was long over. Her brash, ambitious mother, the original Rose, had died three years earlier, opening the way for Gypsy to write a tell-all with no risk of being sued. The blue-chip producing team of David Merrick and Leland Hayward bought the rights and asked Cole Porter, Irving Berlin and Betty Comden & Adolph Green to write the score, all of whom said no.

Jerome Robbins agreed to direct and choreograph only if his West Side Story collaborator Arthur Laurents signed on to write the book. Laurents couldn’t figure out how to make Gypsy’s story stage-worthy until he met a woman who claimed to have been the elder Rose’s lover. Suddenly, Laurents could picture his protagonist: “a larger-than-life mother, a mythic mesmerizing mother, a monster of a mother sweetly named Rose.” West Side Story lyricist Stephen Sondheim was then approached to compose the score, but headliner Ethel Merman wasn’t willing to trust her “blazingly recognizable persona,” as Sondheim delicately put it, to an unknown.

Unwilling to be pigeonholed as a lyricist, Sondheim declined to join the creative team until his mentor, Oscar Hammerstein, convinced him that writing for a star would be a valuable experience. Enter Jule Styne, prolific composer of Gentlemen Prefer Blondes and Bells Are Ringing, among other Broadway musicals. This unlikely pairing of an old-school tunesmith and a brainy young wordsmith ended up working perfectly. “Knowing that Steve wanted to write the whole score, I decided that I would never pull rank on him,” Styne said in Sondheim & Co. “And God, we had a ball.”

HERE SHE IS, WORLD! 
Billed as “a musical fable,” Gypsy dared to put forward an unlikeable leading character—although every actress who has played Momma Rose finds reasons to defend her. Loosely based on the childhood of Gypsy Rose Lee and her younger sister, actress June Havoc, the show compresses the elder Rose’s colorful love life into the sympathetic character of Herbie, a loyal talent manager and father figure. Sondheim worked closely with Laurents to create multi-dimensional characters. As he noted in Finishing the Hat, “For both Arthur and me, Rose was that dramatist’s dream, the self-deluded protagonist who comes to a tragic/triumphant end.” New York Times critic Frank Rich went further in his rave review of the 1989 revival starring Tyne Daly, declaring, “Gypsy is nothing if not Broadway’s own brassy, unlikely answer to King Lear.”

In addition to introducing crowd-pleasing songs like “Together Wherever We Go,” Styne and Sondheim’s score makes clever use of repetition. Baby June’s opening vaudeville number, “May We Entertain You,” returns in the second act as “Let Me Entertain You,” underscoring shy Louise’s first striptease. The titanic 11 o’clock number “Rose’s Turn” reprises snippets of “Some People” and “Everything’s Coming Up Roses” and ends with six shouts of “FOR ME” (as in, the person for whom all those roses should be blooming). Sandra Church and Jack Klugman co-starred with Broadway superstar Merman as Louise and Herbie.

The show ran three-and-a-half hours in its Philadelphia tryout due to Robbins’ insistence on using jugglers, acrobats and comics in production numbers that were eventually cut. On Broadway, after just one preview, Gypsy opened to mostly favorable reviews on May 21, 1959. It was shut out of the Tony Awards in favor of The Sound of Music and closed on March 25, 1961, a relatively short run chalked up to the unpleasantness of Momma Rose.

MOMMA'S GOT THE STUFF 
Unlike Funny Girl (another Jule Styne musical), in which the ghost of Barbra Streisand scared off all comers for more than half a century, the modestly successful 1962 movie adaptation of Gypsy did not preserve Merman’s performance. Rosalind Russell played Rose alongside Natalie Wood (who did her own singing, unlike in West Side Story) as Louise and Karl Malden as Herbie.

The show didn’t return to the Broadway stage until 1974, when Angela Lansbury reprised her acclaimed performance from a London production directed by Laurents. She set the standard for the tough-minded performances Laurents later elicited as director of revivals starring Tyne Daly (replaced by Linda Lavin) in 1989 and Patti LuPone in 2008. All three of Laurents’ Roses won Best Actress Tonys; Laura Benanti and Boyd Gaines also won Tonys in 2008 for playing Louise and Herbie. Sam Mendes directed a softer take on the role by Bernadette Peters in 2003, a controversial choice even though Peters herself grew up with a stage mother. Bette Midler brought Gypsy to CBS-TV in 1993, and Streisand spent decades trying to remake it for the big screen, ultimately thwarted by Sondheim’s insistence that she should act or direct, but not both. (Filed under “It Might Have Been” is a 2015 report that Barbra planned to co-star with Lady Gaga as Louise and John Travolta as Herbie.)

LuPone—who played Louise as a teen in her hometown on Long Island—made headlines in January 2009 when she stopped the show during “Rose’s Turn” to yell at an audience member taking flash pictures. That indelible moment was captured, not surprisingly, by other people secretly recording Patti’s fiery performance.

AUDRA'S TURN
Only an actress of Audra McDonald’s renown and stature could launch a revival at the newly renovated Majestic Theatre with a marquee that simply reads “Audra Gypsy.” Adding to the excitement is the presence of Tony Lifetime Achievement Award winner George C. Wolfe as director, offering Broadway audiences the first new take on the show since Arthur Laurents died in 2011 at age 93.

The six-time Tony-winning actress credits the late Gavin Creel, a close family friend, for planting the seed for her Gypsy. As she told Broadway.com’s Paul Wontorek, Creel pulled her aside after Thanksgiving dinner and said, “You need to play Rose. It should be a Black woman, and honey, you have to do it.” Creel also pressured Wolfe, who tapped Camille A. Brown to create all-new choreography, Tony winner Danny Burstein to play Herbie and Joy Woods and Jordan Tyson of The Notebook to play sisters Louise and June. “You’re going to see this iconic story of a mother who has ambitions and dreams and a desire to make sure her daughters aren’t subjugated to an unfulfilled life,” McDonald explained. The script is the same, but, she said, “Certain lines may hit different; hearing a Black woman say, ‘I was born too soon and got started too late’ may resonate in a different way.”

Wolfe, who directed McDonald in the 2016 musical Shuffle Along, praised his leading lady’s intrinsic truthfulness on stage: “She just keeps digging and digging, and she can’t lie,” he told Broadway.com, “so it is fun and thrilling when you work with somebody like that.” Whatever one might say about Rose’s mothering, Wolfe added, “She confronts painful truths about herself and comes out on the other side. That’s classic drama. That’s the stuff of the Greeks, of Shakespeare, of American plays at their best. It’s the story of wanting to be more than society tells you you can be.”