The next show was the one I'd been most excited about, the latest revival of possibly the best musical after GUYS & DOLLS, GYPSY. A perfect marriage of great score & book and in Rose a role considered the King Lear for musical comedy actresses and here it was Patti LuPone's turn. It had it's opening night while we were there - we walked past the cordoned-off cameramen and the red carpet - so all the ingredients were there for an unforgettable event: the cast on a high from their great reviews 2 nights before and a sold-out Saturday evening audience buzzing to see a hit.

For the uninitiated GYPSY is the rags to jewelled-pasties story of the famous stripper Gypsy Rose Lee and her fearsome, driven stage mother Rose with music by Jule Styne and lyrics by Stephen Sondheim, a book by Arthur Laurents and choreography by Jerome Robbins. Originally a vehicle for Ethel Merman in 1959 it has since been played on Broadway by Angela Lansbury, Tyne Daly and Bernadette Peters, all have been nominated for the Best Actress Tony award although only Lansbury & Daly won.
Laurents has directed this production and unsurprisingly the book here is shown to be the real motor of the show. The character's inner lives are brightly spotlit. All the main protagonists have dreams that drive them - Rose needs her children to become stars to make up for her own mother leaving her, Louise wants the notice and love her mother lavishes on younger sister June, Herbie wants Rose to stop dragging her children around the dying vaudeville circuit and marry him and June dreams of getting away from her suffocating mother and becoming an actress.

The show also boasts the best ever Broadway overture which is given it's due by the curtain rising on the orchestra who are seated at the back of the stage behind a scrim betraying this production's origin as a semi-staged production last year as part of the Encores! series from which the current production of CHICAGO also sprung. The sets are minimal which also helps focus on the characters.

Leigh Ann Larkin was effective as June - peppy and high-kicking 'on stage', sulking offstage and visibly chaffing at Mama's apron-strings, biding her time until she can run away to become the actress June Havoc.
One of the greatest songs from the score is "You Gotta Get A Gimmick" sung by the strippers Mazeppa, Electra and Tessie to Louise when her act is booked into a seedy Burlesque house by mistake and it was socked across the footlights by Lenora Nemetz, Marilyn Caskey and Alison Fraser. Again, Laurents gave each character a real personality - electifyin' Electra visibly crumbling and barely able to walk and Fraser's Tessie showed a self-awareness and genuine warmth to the struggling Louise. Nemetz also shone in a great featured role as a sarcastic secretary to a producer.
I was a bit disappointed in Boyd Gaines as 'Herbie'. I was never engaged by him and felt he played the role too softly - I mean the original was Jack Klugman! But maybe that is because he was easily overshadowed by the two female leads.

Laura Benanti was excellent as Louise, believably moving from a shy, gawky teenager aware of her limited talent - and not overdoing the pathos - to the terrified girl who is press-ganged by her mother into stripping in a Burlesque show when the top-of-the-bill spot is available to the self-assured and seductive Queen of the striptease Gypsy Rose Lee. Louise's famous solo moment when she sees herself in the dressing room mirror before going onto strip - "Mama I'm pretty... I'm a pretty girl" was genuinely moving and for once the confrontation with Rose at the end of the show seemed to be an equal fight between a mother and daughter.
And of course there was Patti LuPone as Rose. From her first noisy appearance through the stalls during her young daughters' audition to her final glance over her shoulder at an empty stage, she was in total possession of the character - or visa-versa. I must be honest and say Patti LuPone didn't surprise me, I got the performance I was expecting from her but I am glad I saw her at this stage of playing the role.

She made no attempt at softening Rose's unlikeable traits and even when being flirtatious with Herbie or a producer to get her girls a better slot on the bill she still had a core of steel and the pugnacious stance of a driven human being. She never relaxed but then Rose never relaxes - not when there is still the chance of star billing for her daughter. Even Rose's moments of humour had a desperate quality about them.

Rose has her two great moments at the end of each act. When June walks out on the act, she appears numb while Herbie and Louise reason with her that now it's time to forget show business and settle down but this only awakes in Rose the possibility of molding Louise into a star and launches into "Everything's Coming Up Roses". This famous song soon loses any upbeat associations one has with it when seen out-of-context, in context it's a song of scary self-absorption - Rose isn't even aware that Herbie and Louise are staring at her in shock - and LuPone delivered a searing version of it. She built and built and as she sang the final "Everything's Coming Up Roses for me and for...." she let out a howl of triumph on "youuuuuu" as the curtain descended. It was an electrifying moment of theatre which had the lights coming up on an audience giving thunderous applause.

Knowing what was going to be unleashed I watched the final confrontation between Rose and Louise in her dressing room - Rose angry that the now-famous Louise is shutting her out of her life and Louise responding that Gypsy is her own creation and that she is paying her mother back for years of neglect. Rose leaves incensed and alone on the stage finally let's loose with "Rose's Turn". Mocking Gypsy's strip routine she parades across the stage bumping, grinding and letting go of all her pent-up rage. But the song becomes a musical nervous breakdown with Rose finally confronting her own sense of abandonment by her mother, by June, by Herbie, by Louise and ends with another howl but this time of pain not triumph.

LuPone gave a truly scary performance of the song - cue *utter* bedlam by the audience with nearly a 3 minute standing ovation. But "Rose' Turn" is undercut by an important second scene between mother and daughter as Louise has been watching her mother from the wings. However the audience going insane totally threw this important coda off-kilter - the more LuPone did extravagant curtsies and blew kisses to the audience in Rose's head, the more the real audience clapped. Eventually Laura Benanti appeared slowly clapping from the back of the stage and the start of the scene was inaudible for most of the audience shuffling and taking their seats again. Grrrrr... like, they could have held back for the curtain call that was only minutes away.

So that was GYPSY. London has not seen a production of it for over 30 years. There was talk of Sam Mendes' production with Bernadette Peters transferring but nothing came of it. It would be great if this one finally put this wonderful show back in the heart of the west-end.