Gypsy

Broadway is usually too expensive and overproduced for Sarah and me.  But we were told sternly by people who should know that we must see the current revival of Gypsy starring Patti Lupone.  They were right:  it was easily the most profound experience I’ve had on Broadway.

Somehow I had never seen Gypsy before; I think I was unimpressed with “Everything Is Coming Up Roses,” the only song from the show that is a jazz standard.  So during the first fifteen minutes I was just horrified. It was like being at a supremely over-priced talent show or something. 

But as the show moved along, I began to feel my eyes begin to water uncontrollably.

Unusually for the form, the power of Gypsy lies perhaps not in the songs (Jule Styne or  Stephen Sondheim) but in the book by Arthur Laurents, which conjures the most thickly-textured emotions imaginable in musical theater. 

The reviews and buzz have concentrated on Lupone, who is indeed astonishing.  No praise is high enough. And the other performers, especially Laura Benati and Boyd Gaines, are great too.

But crucial to Gypsy’s powerful effect is the old-fashioned simplicity of the staging, which was done by the 90-year old Arthur Laurents himself.  At some point I was aware of a strange loop beginning to happen between the foreground of the performance and the background of the actual performer’s lives.  (How true this is confirmed in the cast notes, where most of the performers thank their mother.) 

The production subtly encourages these meta qualities by never turning into something grandiose.  The thread is gently spun out and the emotional lives of the characters grow and grow.  No one is a villain and no one is a hero.  It is just like life, and at the end I could barely get up from my seat.