I was recently reminded just how entertaining and emotional Gypsy is when I streamed it from London's Savoy Theatre which starred Imelda Staunton as the driven stage mother "Rose" back in 2015.
[Photo Collage: Gypsy 2015 Savoy Theatre. Imelda Staunton as "Rose," Lara Pulver as "Louise," Dan Burton as "Tulsa" ]
Stephen Sondheim wrote the lyrics and wanted to write the music, but Broadway diva Ethel Merman preferred the veteran composer Jule Styne. Still, Sondheim looks back on Gypsy with immense satisfaction. The chapter of his memoir about Gypsy concludes
Jule Styne supplied the atmosphere of both the milieu and of musical theater itself.... Jule's score was redolent not only of vaudeville and burlesque but of the old-fashioned, straightforward, character-driven musical play, the model that Hammerstein had pioneered, of which Gypsy was one of the last examples and probably the best. (Sondheim, Finishing the Hat, New York: Knopf, 2010. p. 57)
Playwright Arthur Laurents held off on adapting Lee's memoir to the stage until he found something dramatic to top the inevitable striptease number. He got what he wanted in the stripper's mother, as Sondheim explains:
Rose was that dramatist's dream, the self-deluded protagonist who comes to a tragic/triumphant end. When an audience knows more than the character does, every line of dialogue and lyric has an edge.... [The viewers] wait in suspended anticipation of the inevitable moment when the character will be forced to face the truth. They think: I get it, why doesn't he? If they care enough about him, every moment of the evening is freighted, and when he finally does get it, it's both devastating and satisfying (56).
Before they wrote, Laurents took Sondheim to see a class at the Actors Studio. Laurents wanted his friend to appreciate how "subtext" is a silent "counterpoint" to dialogue that "keeps the text alive." For Sondheim, this was a revelation. He cautions writers, however, "you have to have something worth not saying."
What they're not saying in Gypsy is that Rose is living through her children's lives. Bullying, flirting, and conning people to keep her cutesy act on tour years past its sell-by date, she keeps her daughters and a raft of orphan dancing boys in perpetual childhood without lives of their own (compare Into the Woods, Witch and Rapunzel). It's all about Rose.
For Laurents, the thrilling montage of ever-glitzier strip routines for "Gypsy Rose Lee" sets up the dramatic moment that tops it, when Louise realizes that she has become the adult who must now take care of her parent. Sondheim observes that this is something everyone will experience but not something we like to think about, and that may be why this perfect show wasn't as big a hit as some with more palatable themes (Sondheim in Craig Zadan's Sondheim and Co., New York: Macmillan, 1974, p. 59)
Sondheim gives us the origin story for the spine-tingling finale called "Rose's Turn." Director-choreographer Jerome Robbins had imagined a ballet in which Rose would be confronted by all the characters in her life. But he'd run out of time. When Robbins called a meeting to find a Plan B, only Sondheim showed. Sondheim writes, "It was like every shimmering nighttime rehearsal scene I'd ever loved in the movies," in an empty theatre with just a piano and one lightbulb.
I suggested to Jerry ...the songs we'd heard all evening, colliding in an extended surreal medley consisting of fragments of the score. He asked me to improvise what I meant....As I pounded out variations on the burlesque music, Jerry clambered onto the stage and started to move back and forth across it like a stripper, but a clumsy one: like Rose doing a strip. (77)Ethel Merman, Broadway comedy star making her dramatic debut, was uneasy about the music, Sondheim recalls. "'It's sorta more an aria than a song,' she commented doubtfully, halfway between a question and a complaint."
Yet Merman nailed it, and "Rose's Turn" has been a show-stopper ever since. much-imitated in its collision of songs. Cabaret comes to mind, and Sondheim's own Follies. For Hamilton, Lin-Manuel Miranda suspends time to replay key phrases from Alexander Hamilton's life before Burr's bullet finds him.
Directing a revival of Gypsy years later, playwright Laurents improved on the finale by having "Rose" bow over and over until Louise steps on stage in silent witness. The theatre goes quiet, and still Rose is bowing: our applause was a sound in the character's demented brain.
Sondheim makes no comment about his lyric for "All I Need is the Girl," so I'm stepping up to peel the layers off a favorite number of mine.
- Layer 1, Song: Sondheim and Styne have created a song-and-dance number in the vein that Fred Astaire mined so memorably in "Top Hat and Tails," "Steppin' Out with My Baby," and "Shine on Your Shoes." The music swings and the lyrics sparkle with rhymes both tricky and natural. The character sings
Once my clothes were shabby,
Now, with his "striped tie" and "hopes high," all he needs to complete his outfit "is the girl." In the last lines, the meaning of the title turns around:
Tailors called me "Cabbie,"
So I took a vow,
Said,"This bum'll
Be Beau Brummel."And if she'll say,
"My darling, I'm yours," I'll throw away
My striped tie and my best-pressed tweed.
All I really need
Is the girl! - Layer 2, Character: "Tulsa," one of the grown-up "boys," rehearses this song for a nightclub act that he dreams of doing. Louise watches. In the world of the play, Tulsa presumably has learned the song from radio or sheet music; it's not the character singing his thoughts the way other songs in the score are. Still, the lyric fits him, a young man with ambitions to step out and have a life of his own.
- Layer 3, Context: The number is both literally and figuratively a breath of fresh air. Near the end of Act One, following scenes in shabby rooms and gaudy stage sets, this number is set under the night sky behind the little troupe's lodging. It's also one of the rare scenes free of Rose, who sucks up all the oxygen in any scene.
- Layer 4, Subtext: Louise, always self-effacing, always relegated to the background, is being drawn into the action. Tulsa tells her how he imagines putting a flower in his lapel, how the light hits, and, at a climax, how "she" appears upstage "dressed all in white." Tulsa takes Louise's hand and brings her into the dance. Elated, she's living the lyric; she thinks she's "the girl." But we can tell: Tulsa barely even knows she's there -- she's just a prop for his fantasy.
So, the layers are many, and watching them tear away gives this showbiz show its distinctive feel of impending doom. Let me conclude, then, with a couple of Sondheim's happiest bits of lyric fun. First, "If Momma Was Married," a duet for the two sisters mid-way through Act One, with deliciously interwoven rhymes, which include references to comedienne Fanny Brice and Alfred Lunt's family of actors:
BOTH: Momma, please take our advice!That Rose is notoriously cheap enough to need someone else to buy the rice for her wedding is a nice touch. Then, there's the song for three strippers who teach young Louise "You Gotta Get a Gimmick." Sondheim writes admiringly of Frank Loesser and Irving Berlin, how their jokes land even on multiple re-hearings. I'd say the same about this song, especially this rhyme: "If you gotta bump it, / Bump it with a trumpet."
LOUISE: We aren't the Lunts.
JUNE: I'm not Fanny Brice.
BOTH: Momma, we'll buy you the rice,
If only this once
You wouldn't think twice!
[See my Sondheim Page for a curated list of my many, many posts relating to Sondheim, his collaborators, and his competitors.]
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