By James V. Ruocco
The overture begins.
The actor's take their places.
The lights come up.
The story slides into view.
A wave of excitement - on stage and off - sweeps the theater.
It's impossible to look away.
In less than four or five minutes, "Gypsy," the popular 1959 Broadway musical about a domineering stage mother's valiant attempt to turn her children into top-billed vaudeville stars of the Orpheum Circuit shifts into gear with the gusto, shimmer and pizzazz of something great while, at the same time, carefully exposing one mother's hardened obsession with showbiz, backed by songs, dialogue, characters, scene changes and events that brilliantly mirror the flawless, wry, sustained, breathtaking style of the classic American 1950s musical.
Fused with deftness, structure and commitment and lovingly intermingled with the vintage, vaudevillian, immersive, indoor 1877 Victorian-style environs of the Goodspeed Opera House itself, "Gypsy" time warps back to the days of early vaudeville and burlesque and unfolds with real breakthrough and dash, appropriated by a resilience and sustained sense of drama and humor that is truly breathtaking.
It soars.
It snaps.
It engages.
It pops.
It celebrates.
This is a major Goodspeed production, much like last year's "42nd Street" that showcases its riches, sings it songs, gallops through a forgotten timeline and scrutinizes the entertainment industry with just the right amount of scope and inquiry necessary to make it fly and resonate. It also unfolds with a certain freshness and honesty that respects and honors the original libretto by Arthur Laurents.
Based in part on the 1957 book memoirs of real-life striptease artist Gypsy Rose Lee, "Gypsy" is the story of a stage mother, who, after realizing that life has passed her by, decides to live her life through her two daughter's June and Louise - one with talent and the other, with no talent at all.
Told in two acts, the musical charts Lee's early childhood days in theatre when she toured the vaudeville circuit with her sister June and how, years later, she became America's most celebrated stripper, a showbiz fluke that propelled her to stardom with Minsky's Burlesque.
Billing herself as a high-class stripper more prone to tease than strip, Lee referred to herself as "an ecdysiast," which, in her eyes, was a more dignified way of describing her chosen backdoor profession.
Then and now, one of the most joyful things about "Gypsy" is the musical score, which from start to finish, is done right on every level. The Goodspeed production confirms that notion.
It's edgy. It's clever. It's satisfying. It's dramatic. It's humorous. It's passionate. It's driven. It's limelight ready.
Penned by Jule Styne (music) and Stephen Sondheim (lyrics), the "Gypsy" songbook is coupled with transitions, spins, arcs, music and lyrics that brilliantly echo the thoughts, moods, ideas and values of the onstage characters who get to bring them to life, night after night, performance after performance.
They are: "May We Entertain You?" "Some People," "Some People (reprise)," "Small World," "Baby June and Her Newsboys," "Mr. Goldstone, I Love You," "Little Lamb," "You'll Never Get Away From Me," "Dainty June and Her Farmboys," "Broadway," "If Momma Was Married," "All I Need Now Is the Girl," "Everything's Coming Up Roses," "Madame Rose's Toreadorables," "Together, Wherever We Go," "You Gotta Get a Gimmick," "Small World (reprise)," "Let Me Entertain You" and Rose's Turn."
At Goodspeed, musical direction for this revival falls into the more than capable hands of Adam Souza, a conductor and keyboardist whose Goodspeed Musicals credits include "42nd Street," "Cabaret," "Rags," "Brigadoon," "A Grand Night for Singing" and "Because of Winn Dixie." Here, as in last season's "42nd Street," Souza 's spin on a classic American Broadway musical is enlivened by his innate sense of theatricality, his pop and zing, his rhythmic shading, his melodic investment, his mixing and coalescing and finally, the grace and charm he brings to the iconic Styne and Sondheim score.
Backed by strong performances all around (the vocals are outstanding), Souza and his well-honed orchestral team produce a sound that is smooth, beautiful, excitable and musically pleasurable.
Yes, the music and lyrics are familiar. Yes, it's obvious who is going to sing what and when? Yes, pretty much everyone in the audience can hum the lyrics to "Everything's Coming Up Roses," "Let Me Entertain You" and "Together, Wherever We Go."
Regardless, Sousa, as musical director, brings a spark and newness to the material, which, despite familiarity, benefits greatly from his emotional, committed continuity, his melodic flicker, his perched enhancement and the obvious delight that comes from uncovering a new detail or two within the iconic score itself.
As with "42nd Street," "Gypsy" abounds with showstoppers aplenty. It's a task that Souza and his orchestral team fulfill with festive, blaze of glory, recreation.
Among them: "May We Entertain You?" "Dainty June and Her Newsboys," "You Gotta Have a Gimmick," "Together, Wherever We Go," "All I Need Now Is the Girl," "Everything's Coming Up Roses" and "Mr. Goldstone, I Love You."
With several acclaimed Goodspeed musicals to her credit - "The Music Man," "Anne of the Green Gables," "Bye, Bye Birdie," "Oklahoma!" - Jenn Thompson is back in the director's chair, as both storyteller and orchestrator. An instinctive, adventurous director who takes chances, navigates things stylishly and finds incredible veins of truth and emotion in everything she builds and creates from day one in the rehearsal hall right through to opening night on the main stage, Thompson brings total commitment and seamlessly woven force and balance to her staging of "Gypsy."
She creates. She embellishes. She experiments. She negotiates. She programs. She delivers. As director, she also avoids routines. She avoids repetition. She doesn't copycat. Instead, her ideas and thoughts take comfort in originality, lament and a full-bodied richness that flickers with fanfare, revelation, illumination and atmospheric dynamic.
"Gypsy," by all accounts, is a loving, nostalgic paean to old Broadway. But when Baby June and Baby Louise take center stage to perform the musical's thrilling opening number "May We Entertain You?" it's more than just another vaudeville routine. June, in turn, craves attention, in pretty much the same way as Baby Jane Hudson did in "Whatever Happened to Baby Jane?" She flirts with the audience (drilled coaching from her mother, of course), hogs the spotlight, giggles, shrieks and squeals with ear-splitting glee and begs everyone in the theater for thunderous applause until she's satisfied with their ovation-worthy reaction.
It's a jaw-dropping moment - fun, obnoxious and rushing - and one that sets the stage for the musical events, dances and story that follows. It also allows Thompson to dig deep and deliver something more profound and edgy than just your standard show biz rags-to-riches biography with a programmed happy ending.
She succeeds swimmingly.
Here, as with her staging's of both "The Music Man" and "Oklahoma!" the fizzy energy, the quality of playing, the allure and gleam and the evolution of the actual musical narrative are served up by Thompson with maximum achievement, honed individuality and airborne thrust and glide. It's all very beautiful to look at - crisp, animated, absolute - offset by grand theatricality and primed, breathtaking choreography, the latter of which is executed with vaudevillian finesse by Patricia Wilcox in several of the musical's big production numbers including "All I Need Now Is the Girl," "Baby June and Her Newsboys," "You Gotta Have a Gimmick," "Broadway" and "Dainty June and Her Farmboys."
Elsewhere, the implementation of boys for Baby June's traveling act via an imagined moving car is a prime piece of staging; the dancing cow with a deadpan "Moo" during the buoyant "Farmboys" number is a stroke of genius; the time warp advancement of younger actors into their older selves during the encore of "Baby June and Her Newsboys" gallops with driven, exciting, strobe light flourish; and lastly, the troupe's Act II segue into the seedy world of burlesque and the desperate lives of striptease artists Mazeppa, Electra and Tessie Tura is vamped and readied with bumps, grinds, tilts and swerves that bring the house down with rip-roaring laughter and applause.
Lost youth, missed opportunities and plentiful dozes of sadness and regret are achingly intertwined in Judy McLane's triggered, emotional portrayal of Rose Hovick, the outspoken, manic stage mother of Gypsy Rose Lee and June Havoc. It's an admirable, gutsy portrayal of "a pioneer woman without a frontier" that smartly reflects the character's blindness toward the cruel realities of the entertainment industry, the dropped dreams and hopes, the delusions, the struggles and the harsh reality that the big break everyone is waiting for will probably never come.
As "Gypsy" evolves, she nicely captures the obsessiveness of her hard-nosed character, her reliance on showbiz dreams and her belief in second changes and eleventh-hour situations. Vocally, she gets to perform some of the best show tunes on record from "Some People" and "Small World" to "Everything's Coming Up Roses" and "Rose's Turn." But she does the latter without the big-belt sound of Ethel Merman who originated the role on Broadway and the hard-edged stamina and angst of Rosalind Russell who played the role in the 1962 movie. It's a creative choice that sometimes lightens the overall effect of the material but doesn't detract from Rose's race and hunger for the spotlight, her motherly clawing, her fixation on new acts or her final comeuppance at the end of Act II when she bares her soul completely during the exhilarating, fiery show biz anthem "Rose's Turn."
Philip Hernandez brings plenty of leading man charm, poise and definition to the pivotal role of Herbie, Rose Hovick's love interest and agent/manager of her progeny's traveling road show. He sings beautifully and in his many scenes with McLane, creates a magical, intuitive rapport that sings, resonates and catches fire. But, unlike Jack Klugman who played the part in the original 1959 Broadway musical and Karl Malden who assumed the role in the 1962 film musical adaptation, his Herbie is more of a laid-back second banana than a fierce competitor for Rose's heart and an at-odds survivor in her fabled world of show business.
In the lead role of Louise Hovick, the young woman with no talent who later finds stardom as striptease artist Gypsy Rose Lee, Talia Suskauer delivers an exquisite, beautiful, nuanced performance similar in style to that of Sandra Church who created the role on Broadway and Natalie Wood who played part in the glossy 1962 film adaptation. Absolutely perfect on every level, she charts her character's transition from gawky tomboy to reawakened, lovesick butterfly with a natural, evolutionary ease that blossoms from scene to scene and song to song offset by a breezy charm, sensibility and musicality that lights up the stage and heightens the Cinderella aspect of the story with the luminosity and spirit reflected in the musical's original libretto. She also intuitively conveys the character's sudden discovery that she is not only beautiful ("I'm pretty mama") but after entering the world of burlesque as a novice finds herself seduced by her own success story, its glamour, its position, its name-dropping antics and its ability to open doors to an industry that previously shunned and ignored her.
Looking very much like a young Natalie Wood when she played the part of Gypsy Rose Lee back in 1962, Suskauer turns "Let Me Entertain You" into the big showstopper it was intended to be. She also finds the right mood swing, warmth and dramatic range for both her heartfelt rendition of "Little Lamb" and the ever-so-delightful "If Mamma Was Married" duet alongside Laura Sky Herman who plays her teenaged sister June.
She's only on stage for approximately 25-30 minute but Emily Jewel Hoder, as Baby June, makes such an impression in the role, her big star turn, erupts into a bigger star turn like no other, always leaving you wanting more. Satirically laced with a full-fledged mindset of scene-stealing obnoxiousness, ego and center stage cuteness, Hoder pretty much owns every scene and musical number she appears in. It's the "younger star" performance of the season. And Hoder - Simply AMAZING.
As the grown-up Dainty June, Laura Sky Herman tackles the part of the once bratty, self-centered child star, with truth, intuition and mirrored spectral. Like Miller, she's a natural fit for the role, crafting an affectionate, determined performance of impish delight, headache and deep, desperate yearnings. Vocally, she has great fun in all of her character's musical numbers using her emotion-filled, perky voice to find the exact meaning behind every lyric of Styne and Sondheim's sunny, playful musical score.
It's a plum role for any actor and Michael Starr, in the role of Tulsa, the boyish, dreamy-eyed dancer from Dainty June's washed-up vaudeville act, sets the Goodspeed stage ablaze with "All I Need Now Is the Girl," a hypnotic song-and-dance routine that magically showcases his character's desire to form his own act and take it on the road.
Starr, in turn, puts his own personal stamp on this iconic musical number, his head held high with expressions of heated energy and longings that glitter and gleam throughout, matched by brilliant, athletic choreography that celebrates Tulsa's dance journey, his fancy footwork and his fervent desire to rise to the top, even if it means branching out on his own.
As Tessie Tura, Mazeppa and Electra, the three striptease artists with no talent who've made themselves a home in the sleazy world of sideshow burlesque, Valerie Wright, Romelda Teron Benjamin and Victoria Huston-Elem, play out the gaudiness, kitsch and red-light splendor of "You Gotta Have a Gimmick" with an illuminated newness and brazen wickedness that nearly blows the roof off the Goodspeed Opera House. It's such unabashed fun, one wishes that there was an encore of two.
One of the greatest Broadway musicals of its time, "Gypsy," at Goodspeed, soars and roars with excited sentiment, playful abandonment and brash and brassy opinion.
It's timeless. It's impressive. It's grand. It's powerful. It's inspired.
It's got everything you could absolutely hope for in a musical - songs, story, characters, dancing, star turns, popularity - laced with powerful moments, great direction, convincing storytelling and a theatrical incandescence that Godspeed Musicals is famous for.
This is theatre - real musical theatre - amped to perfection and simply priceless in execution.
And boy, do we need it now.
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