New Musical on Broadway

Gypsy (book by Arthur Laurents; music by Jule Styne; direction and choreography by Jerome Robbins) opened to breathless rave reviews. Burbled the Herald Tribune's Walter Kerr: "Best damn musical I've seen in years." Said Brooks Atkinson of the Times: "Most satisfactory musical of the season." The critical fan-farenade for what is, at best, a so-so show would be a puzzler if the answer was not blazoned on the marquee. The answer: Ethel Merman. They all love Ethel, but the love is sorely tested in her latest role as the most monstrous stage mother ever seen on stage. Gypsy is inspired by Gypsy Rose Lee's autobiography, but Ecdysiast Lee remembered Mama with the same refined, opera-length-glove finesse that she brought to her stripping. Mama played by Merman is forbiddingly, tiresomely brassy, a kind of Orpheum-circuit Medea. At curtain's rise, Mama Rose has already devoured three unshowbusinesslike husbands and is panting to staff the vaudeville stages of the early 1920s with child labor, notably her little daughters June (Actress June Havoc in later life) and Louise (Gypsy). What follows is a kind of Dante's tour of the tank-town circuit, in which Mama Rose's aging small-fry troupe beds down in fleabag hotels, gobbles chow mein breakfasts, and endlessly reprises corny routines and lyrics straight from Mama's potboiling hand. Ordeal by stage mother drives gentle would-be husband No. 4 (Jack Klugman) to the suitcase-packing point of no return, and June elopes with a chorus boy. And just when Mama Rose's star-making dream seems footlight-years away, the Big Break comes for Gypsy-Louise in a Kansas burlesque house, where she begins by taking off Mama's apron strings.

There is no more potent musicomedy fuel on Broadway than Ethel Merman, and she powers Gypsy with 50 million lbs. of personality thrust. But the show merely quivers on the launching pad. Its book is drab and uninventive; its songs are also-rans, though the trumpet-tonsiled Merman voice is always in the winner's circle. Jerome Robbins' dance spoofs are designed to show how funny-awful vaudeville was, and by sheer glut and garishness turn pretty gaudy-awful themselves. A Mermanly try at playing up Mama's spunk and jollifying her sadism fails when the script itself belatedly acknowledges that Mama is a bundle of neuroses and no fun to be with. Sandra Church's Louise is poignant and luminous as she works free of sister's shadow and mother's wing.

Its title notwithstanding, Gypsy is a singularly sobersided affair until midway in Act II, when a trio of tassel-tossing campaigners bump, grind and bring down the house in an indelicate air for the G-string called You Gotta Have a Gimmick. Burlesque may have killed vaudeville, but a lot more of it might cure Gypsy.

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