50 Favourite Musicals: 1c: GYPSY (1959) (Jule Styne / Stephen Sondheim)

The 50 shows that have stood out down the years and, as we get up among the paint cards, the shows that have become the cast recording of my life. So here we are...  a year and 10 months in the making and we have reached the stage musical that is my favourite ever - and I cannot name one out of the four shows that I have left to consider.

I have tried every criteria, every angle and there is simply no way I can say that one of the four is better than the other.  So let's go... my Top Four Number One's (in alphabetical order)

First performed: 1959, Broadway Theatre, NY

First seen by me: 1989, St. James Theatre, NY

Productions seen: four

Score: Jule Styne / Stephen Sondheim

Book: Arthur Laurents

Plot: Based on Gypsy Rose Lee's memoir and set against the decline of vaudeville, the unstoppable Rose travels around the country with the song-and-dance act featuring her daughters June and Louise.  Rose is obsessed with making June a star - whether she wants it or not - while Louise is overlooked emotionally.  However when June suddenly marries and quits the act, Rose switches her ambition... now Louise will be a star.  But as she can't sing or dance, how can she become a star?

Five memorable numbers: ROSE'S TURN, YOU GOTTA GET A GIMMICK,  EVERYTHING'S COMING UP ROSES, IF MOMMA WAS MARRIED, "GYPSY" OVERTURE

Despite being one of the greatest musicals ever written, there is one imbalance that every production confronts: the title character is not the one the show is built around, nor cast with a star.  Arthur Laurents was faced with adapting Gypsy's memoir while she was still alive which might explain why the character of Louise seems slightly blank.  However Louise comes into her own midway through the second act and become a match for her mother towards the end.  This is a difficult ask as Rose is always cast with powerhouse performers in a role that is proven to be one of the biggest in musical theatre so whoever is cast as Louise has to be able to step up to this.

David Merrick produced the original Broadway show as a vehicle for Ethel Merman that was to be directed and choreographed by Jerome Robbins, his first musical since WEST SIDE STORY.  But choosing a composer was more problematic: former Merman composers Irving Berlin and Cole Porter both declined saying they couldn't see how to approach it, so Robbins and Laurents asked their WEST SIDE STORY lyricist Stephen Sondheim as they knew he wanted to be the sole composer of a show.  But Merman refused to trust an untried composer as her last Broadway show had been written by unknown writers and she disliked the experience intently.  While happy for Sondheim to be lyricist, she asked for the music to be trusted to Jule Styne, composer of GENTLEMEN PREFER BLONDES and BELLS ARE RINGING.  Sondheim wanted to quit as he did not want to just write lyrics but his mentor Oscar Hammerstein II advised he accept as it would be an ideal chance to write for a specific - and unique - star.  As it turned out, Styne was ego-free and they collaborated well together.  Like GUYS AND DOLLS, GYPSY is a seamless show where the score and book work in a perfect relationship, the songs springing naturally out of the action and always moving the plot forward.  What GYPSY also has is one of the greatest overtures for any Broadway show, running at just over 5 minutes, it bounces you around the show's wonderfully varied moods, I particularly love the section where the gentle ballad "Small World" skips along only to be elbowed out of the way by the sleazy, strutting burlesque strip music.

The original production received 8 Tony Award nominations but lost them all to either THE SOUND OF MUSIC or FIORELLO!  Of the five actresses who have played Rose on Broadway, all have been Tony Award-nominated with Angela Lansbury, Tyne Daly and Patti LuPone winning.  Lansbury also won the London Critic's Circle Award for Best Actress, the first time it had been given to a musical actress.  For the last revival of GYPSY in London, Imelda Staunton rightly won both the Olivier and Evening Standard Awards.  It is incredible to think that between Angela Lansbury in the London premiere and Imelda Staunton in it's first London revival it was a wait of 40 years... did no one think Julia McKenzie would have been a perfect Rose in the 1980s or 1990s?  I first saw GYPSY onstage in New York when Tyne Daly made the show a personal triumph in her first theatre role after finding television fame in CAGNEY AND LACEY.  I then saw Lynda Baron deliver an excellent performance in a production at Cheltenham in 1993 but then had to endure a long wait until 2008 when we saw Patti LuPone - oddly enough at the same theatre as Tyne Daly and with the same director, the book-writer Arthur Laurents.  We saw her the Saturday after her opening night - it was a surreal experience to be seeing it so soon after the critics had ordained it as The show to see - the audience screaming and clapping at everything that moved, even the dog playing Chowsie.  Patti LuPone is always an experience best seen onstage and she certainly took no prisoners, making no attempt to sugar-coat the monster in Rose, but ultimately she didn't surprise me... I got the performance I was expecting from her.  Imelda on the other hand...

Under Jonathan Kent's direction, Imelda Staunton inhabited Rose from the inside out: her tenacious, terrier-like, attack on the world to make one of her daughters a star, the tough-as-nails exterior covering up a damaged child's vulnerability, it was all there; at various points Rose is described as "always being in the middle of a sentence" and "a pioneer woman without a frontier" and that's what Imelda delivered. But truly hair-raising was how she took on the two act-closing solos where any actress playing Rose has to go from 0-to-100 in as many minutes.  Discovering June has rejected both her and the act, Rose switches her dreams to unprepared Louise by declaring "Everything's Coming Up Roses".  Staunton's Rose was so caught up in her vision that she hugged Louise to her only to cast her aside as she went for her scorching final note, button-holed with her twirling her coat around, off to start her burning new mission.  Laurents' book really comes into it's own in the final section of the musical: Louise is now Gypsy Rose Lee, the top-billed star at Minsky's Burlesque Theatre, and Rose sneaks backstage where she is not permitted.  They finally confront each other and when Rose angrily demands an answer to why she did all the fighting and pushing to get Louise her stardom, Gypsy coldly retorts "I thought you did it for me Mama". Alone on the empty stage, Rose finally releases her long-bottled-up rage at all those who have walked out on her with the scorching "Rose's Turn".  This legendary number - a mental breakdown performed to a bump-and-grind beat - is what the whole show has been building to and any actress playing the role has to be up to it's tricky challenges.  Imelda totally nailed it: the sarcasm, the anger, the despair and the mania that she had hinted at earlier all came together in an all-too-human performance.  Resisting the temptation to chew the scenery, Staunton kept it in check which made it all the more thrilling.

The remarkable thing about Laurents' book is how each of the major characters are nursing a dream:  Rose wants her daughters to have the fame and stardom denied to her, Herbie wants Rose to marry him and give up struggling to achieve her dream, Louise wants stability and the attention she is missing, June wants to break away from her mother's tyrannical grip and live her own life - even Tulsa, the dancer Louise secretly has a crush on, has his dream of being a successful dancer onstage with a female dance partner.  The only ones who don't are the three strippers Mazeppa, Tessie and Electra: they have done it all and they are past dreaming.  But what they can do is educate Louise to the secret of being a successful stripper in the magnificent "You Gotta Get A Gimmick"  I have yet to see a production where this number doesn't raise the roof.  GYPSY is a musical that, like GUYS AND DOLLS, is a tribute to the Broadway musical's Golden Age and how a collaboration between genuine artists all working to a common goal can make a timeless classic.

Merman, Russell, Lansbury, Daly, Midler, Peters, LuPone, Staunton... I mean, I know someone is going to be disappointed.  So I am going to go for the clearest video I can find which happens to be Imelda Staunton with Lara Pulver and Peter Davison in the whole last scene of Act I which leads up to "Everything's Coming Up Roses".  Until I saw it within the context of the show I never realised that what sounds otherwise like a gung-ho song of optimism is actually a song of pure delusion on Rose's part - just watch the subtle shifts in Imelda's performance as she works through the song and her physical manhandling of Louise; Louise is just a prop for Rose to get her revenge on June who has abandoned her,  It's a perfect example of Laurents' excellent book and Styne and Sondheim's perfect score serving each other to give us an unforgettable experience.