So Dread the Rose

By T.E. Kalem

GYPSY

Music by JULE STYNE

Lyrics by STEVEN SONDHEIM

Book and Direction by ARTHUR LAURENTS

The passage of 15 years has not altered Gypsy: it is still gaudy-awful. This musical is studded with implausibilities, and blighted by a cast of thoroughly unappealing characters. At the apex of the show is Mama Rose (Angela Lansbury), a witch of a stage mother. With a maniacal will and monstrous gall, she catapults her two daughters, first as children and later as young women, across the buckling vaudeville stage in pursuit of the mirage of stardom.

Rose's favorite, "Baby June" (Bonnie Langford/Maureen Moore), who later became June Havoc, is a cloying cutesie-pie of a girl. Her elder sister, "Baby Louise" (Lisa Peluso/Zan Charisse), later known to the world as Gypsy Rose Lee, is a sad lump of numbed shyness. The act Rose cooks up for them is what killed vaudeville. With an unbelievable lack of show-biz savvy, Rose follows each failure with a minor variation on it. The audience is supposed to laugh at children and teen-agers making fools of themselves in public.

Larynx Lashing. As for Rose's vaunted stop-at-nothing spunk, all that can actually be seen is a Medea-of-the-footlights horribly maiming her children. The fact that the two girls later achieved star billing is scarcely redemptive. Advance reports had it that Angela Lansbury had humanized the role, a palpable impossibility. What she has done is to inject a kind of self-kidding, campy humor into the part that jarringly negates Mama's imperious drive. Her song attack is curiously similar to that of Ethel Merman's, the original Rose, and though she valiantly lashes her larynx, Lansbury simply cannot sound the classic Merman brass.

The choreography has more spoof than snap to it, and the Styne-Sondheim score is innocuously springy and clever. Rather like Rose's ubiquitously served chow mein dinners, Gypsy is not a show that will stay with you after the curtain drops. "

qed T.E. Kalem

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.