Everything's Coming Up Rose

Mark Steyn is one of many scholars and enthusiasts who call Gypsy "The greatest of all Broadway musicals," (Babies, 101). Frank Rich simply called it his "favorite" musical in The New York Times when reviewing the 1989 Broadway revival. Today, it is widely accepted as one of the greatest achievements in the history of Broadway and its components are often cited separately as the greatest book, the greatest score, the greatest overture, and the greatest role.

The last of those is perhaps the most persuasive, for Rose has become the most coveted role in musical theatre. Ethan Mordden compares it to the Great Roles of opera which give enthusiasts "an endless gallery of great singers of the past that grows larger with each generation, a thousand performances to attend... [and] variants to recognize." (Roses, 251). Perhaps this explains why Gypsy is receiving a new Broadway mounting (its fifth) less than five years after its most recent bow on The Street.

By now you've probably heard the story of how the latest revival made its way to Broadway. The author of the book, Arthur Laurents, having previously directed two Broadway revivals of the show himself, nixed Patti LuPone when Sam Mendes approached her to star in his 2003 revival but while the eventual production with Bernadette Peters lasted a year on Broadway, it won no Tonys and reviews were decidedly mixed. Then in 2006, LuPone stealthily appeared in a triumphant concert staging of the show in Chicago and the following year, Laurents decided to relent and take advantage of the more likely Rose of her generation while giving Broadway a final Laurents staging of the show.1 So after a limited run at New York's City Center last summer, this week Gypsy is back on Broadway.

However it got here, the effect of giving us two Broadway Roses in so short a time, both of whom are among the foremost Broadway belters of their generation, is to give us an opportunity more potent than ever to compare Rose against Rose. It also illustrates how large the role looms over Broadway, with it now seeming almost necessary for great singing actresses of a certain age to tackle the part.

At the time of the Peters staging, many were able to compare her to another recent Rose. Betty Buckley, who replaced Peters in her Tony-winning role in Song and Dance and replaced LuPone in London in Sunset Boulevard (after another LuPone casting controversy), had come close to Broadway with her Rose at the Papermill Playhouse in 1998. In discussing that production, John Clum said Gypsy had become "the Norma of musicals, the ultimate diva challenge." He goes on to say, "I have not experienced an audience response like the one at Betty Buckley's Gypsy since the grand diva nights at the Met." (Boys, 170-171). This was echoed by Ken Mandelbaum's memory of another Rose, Angela Lansbury; "For 'Rose's Turn,'" he recalls, "she ... received perhaps the longest ovation I've ever witnessed for a single musical number." Buckley received a rave from Brantley in The Times, but Mordden gossips that Laurents told Buckley she was "execrable" in the role, ending any hope she would go on to play Rose in New York or London. (Corpse, 191). Still, clearly Rose has become the grandest of diva Broadway roles, winning new fans (and dissenters) with each new performance.

One difference between Rose and the Great Roles of opera, however, is that there will always be The Progenitor-- The Original, "real" Rose. Ethel Merman's performance as Rose is legendary and inescapable. Her performance of the songs is preserved forever on the Original Broadway Cast Album while her performance on stage exists only in fifty year-old memories, the writings of those who saw her, and a few tantalizing live recordings which lurk in some private collections. With only these ephemeral tools, it is impossible to compare Merman's performance closely with Roses in the here and now, so the legend that she was and is the greatest of them all becomes difficult to dispute and as Mordden says, "each new Rose [will] be compared with Merman in search of the true Rose of the world" (Roses, 250-1).

Great Opera roles, written as they were, mostly before the age of recording technology, do not have Original Cast recordings. Broadway Cast Albums, however, preserve a portion of an original performance; a performance on which a role is "made." And Gypsy was tailored specifically to Merman's talents by its authors, and it has come to be regarded as the greatest of the star's personal triumphs.

When she opened in Gypsy in 1959, Merman had been working on Broadway for almost thirty years. Since her auspicious debut in Girl Crazy in 1930, she had won raves in a series of triumphs including Anything Goes, Annie Get Your Gun, and Call Me Madam. She had not only debuted many of the greatest hits for Irving Berlin and Cole Porter, she had also worked with many of the best comedians in the business including Jimmy Durante and Bert Lahr, and her own comedic skills had been compared by critics to the likes of Fanny Brice.2

Over the years, it has been posited that other Roses have found greater depth than Merman ever could in Rose. (Laurents says Sondheim called her "a talking dog" (Original Story By, 378)). Nevertheless, Merman and Rose are forever linked. Without Merman, there would be no Rose, for the project was assembled as her vehicle. It was Merman who demanded Jule Styne be brought in to write the score, and her trademark "shouting" and bulldozer personality are all over the role.

Today's audiences know Merman mainly through cast recordings, however in the early 30's, Merman did appear in a handful of Hollywood musicals, and in 1936 got to recreate her role as Reno Sweeney on screen in Anything Goes. The show was drastically altered in its film incarnation, however, and after appearing in a few other films (most notably, Alexander's Ragtime Band), Merman went back to Broadway and did not make another Hollywood film until she reprised her Tony-winning role of Mrs. Sally Adams in the Fox adaptation of Call Me Madam in 1953. The following year, she appeared in an original movie with a score of Berlin hits, There's No Business Like Show Business. Though she appeared in other films and made frequent television appearances, these were her last two major Hollywood musicals. The film version of Call Me Madam made a number of changes to the material, but it retained most of the score, and even a fair amount of the Lindsay-Crouse dialogue, making it the closest we can come today to seeing what Merman might have been like in one of her Broadway roles. Though it would be more than five years before she would appear in Gypsy, her film performances as Mrs. Adams and Molly Donahue in There's No Business... can help us imagine what she might have been like as Rose.

Opening night notices of Gypsy were excellent, with Walter Kerr famously dubbing it, "The best damn musical I've seen in years." Though most of the reviews focused on Merman, notice was also made of the other creators, with Frank Aston describing Merman's climatic 11 o'clocker: "Jerome Robbins puts her in a spot, with the whole stage open about her. Jo Mielziner's lamps paint changing letters against the background. And Miss Merman lets go in the best song Jule Styne and Stephen Sondheim have prepared for the evening, "Rose's Turn" . . . . The ker-whalloping Gypsy is a sophisticate's dream (Aston, qtd in Opening Night On Broadway, ed. Suskin, 276).3

The production had opened in May of 1959, a month after the Tony Awards so Gypsy had to wait almost a year for its own awards night, only to be completely shut out of the 1960 awards, with the final Rodgers & Hammerstein show, The Sound of Music tying the Pulitzer-Prize winner Fiorello for Best Musical, and Mary Martin taking Best Actress over Merman. (Asked about her feelings on the loss, Merman reportedly quipped, "How are you going to buck a nun?")4

Merman played Gypsy for another year after the Tonys and took it out on a triumphant tour of the country immediately after closing in New York. 5 Merman famously lost the role of Rose when Gypsy was made into a film, however, and Rosalind Russell had to be dubbed by Lisa Kirk for most of the vocals in the film which also starred Natalie Wood and Karl Malden. Merman had been promised the movie and was livid over its loss, and most of the show's creators disowned the movie and later barred other proposals to remake it, citing the disastrous results of the first attempt. 6 Looked at today, though we can bemoan the loss of a film preservation of Merman in her greatest role, the film is less terrible than it may have appeared in comparison to the original Broadway production and though the 1993 Bette Midler television production was more faithful to the show, the performances are not nearly as good as in the original film. (Laurents referred to the Midler version as a "dud, " (Art, 138)). It is also just possible that in the long run, Merman's loss has been Rose's gain. If Merman had gotten to preserve her Rose, it might have made it impossible for others to reimagine the role, the way Brando's Stanley and Yul Brynner's King have stunted all other interpretations. But it is also possible that Merman would not have been shown to best advantage in a film Gypsy. For a light film like Call Me Madam, Merman's somewhat stage-bound manner feels appropriate, but perhaps on film her Rose would not have appeared as excellent as it did in the theatre. It is impossible to know, but now all we have is the Merman myth; the legend of her great performance as Rose is probably greater than any real performance could ever be.

After the film, other actresses including Ann Sothern and Vivian Blaine played Rose in stock mountings. In the early 70's, after several proposals to bring Gypsy to London with Merman reprising her part fell through, Angela Lansbury was eventually able to triumph in a new production of the show. With Laurents as director, Lansbury's interpretation helped solidify Gypsy's reputation as one of the truly great shows for the vast difference of approach and staggering depth Lansbury brought to the role revealed that Rose was a character rich enough to be played in many different ways. Laurents also took the opportunity to fine tune some moments in the show, perhaps most notably the transition from the end of Rose's Turn to the final scene. Laurents described the new approach to Craig Zadan:

"At the end of the number she bows and you can feel the audience standing and screaming--but it's so strange. Why is Angela Lansbury taking a bow at this stage of the game? It's the first bow she takes in the show. And she has a rather demented look in her eye. On the third bow, all the lights go out except for a spot on her. And then a spot picks up Gypsy as she walks on . . . and the audience stops applauding . . . but Rose keeps bowing. Then you realize that it was all in her head. It's very spooky. You see, now the last scene doesn't seem tacked on." (Zadan, 55-56).

At the end of the clip below, it's possible to glimpse the moment described.


After triumphing in London and on tour in the States, Lansbury took Broadway by storm, winning her third Tony as Rose.

The 30th Anniversary Revival which came to Broadway in 1989 is now further away from us than that revival was from the Lansbury revival, and further than the Lansbury was from the Merman original. Still, the '89 revival which starred Tyne Daly is the Gypsy close enough in many of our memories that it is still the most readily comparable to the "latter day" Roses of Buckley, Peters, and LuPone. Daly was an accomplished stage and television actress not known for her singing, and she was the least vocally secure of all the Broadway Roses. Nevertheless, her Rose received raves from several critics, most importantly from Frank Rich in The Times, and she became the second Broadway Rose to win a Tony. The production didn't last when Daly's replacement, Linda Lavin (who was fascinating in the role) failed to get good notices, but triumphed again when Daly brought the show back for a return engagement. 7

In the spring of 2003, when the Mendes-Peters revival began previews, there were rumors of problems with the production; the set and costume design was rethought, and the star became ill and began to miss performances. Many predicted disaster, but Peters managed to open in the show and received a rave from Brantely in The Times. Michael Kuchwara in the Associated Press and Clive Barnes in The Post also sided in favor of the production. Kissel in The Daily News, Isherwood in Variety, and Linda Winer in Newsday were negative. On the strength of Peters's name, the production ran just over a year on Broadway.

When LuPone opened in the City Center incarnation of the current Gypsy, she received negative reviews from both critics at The Times, Brantley and Isherwood, but Kuchwara, Variety, The Daily News, The Post, and Newsday were all raves and other critics including Terry Teachout and John Simon also printed enthusiastic reviews. We will know very soon if their opinions have changed for the latest incarnation.

But whether or not the current revival is deemed a success, rest assured, we have not seen the last of "Mama" Rose.
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1 Many, including Laurents, felt that Peters had overcome some of the negative advance publicity and unlikely casting that plagued the 2003 production, but reviews were mixed and Laurents was unhappy with the direction. In July of 2004, Laurents said, "[I]n 2003, there was a new Rose alive on Broadway: Bernadette Peters! Brilliant, original, totally unlike any of the others. Well, each of the four was unlike the others. Unfortunately, the physical production in 2003 was misconceived and hurt the show more than people realized.. " (Art, 138). A somewhat fuzzy outline of the events surrounding LuPone's casting in the Laurents production appeared in an article by Jesse Green in the NYT but LuPone had previously discussed it in a 2004 interview after the Peters revival had closed. (In an interview in the Spring 2005 issue of The Sondheim Review, LuPone also mentioned that Lonny Price had proposed an Encores! production of the show for her which had also been nixed by Laurents).


2 Burton Rascoe, World-Telegram opening night review of Something For the Boys, January, 1943, "[H]ere's a gal with the comic genius of Fanny Brice (or nearly) in the days when Miss Brice was playing in the Ziegfeld shows." Also See John Chapman's Daily News opening night review of Annie Get Your Gun, May, 1946, "[Merman] is a better comedienne than she ever was before, with some of the earthy humor of Fanny Brice..." (Both qtd in Opening Night On Broadway, ed. Suskin, 628 and 53).

3 Kerr's quote became a major part of the ad campaign. For other review excerpts, see Opening Night, Suskin, 276- 279 and Mandelbaum, "The Best Damn Musical," Broadway.com.

4 Qtd for instance in Merman: A Life, Kellow, 188.

5 Kellow, 191, Mandelbaum, "The Best Damn Musical." Merman's tour was followed by a second national company starring first Mitzi Green, and later Mary McCarty. Bernadette Peters made an early appearance in that company.

6 "Not for all the money in the world will we let them make another film version of `Gypsy,' " said playwright Arthur Laurents. The first time Hollywood filmed the Broadway musical, it was "lousy," said composer Jule Styne, referring to the 1962 Warner Bros. adaptation that starred Rosalind Russell and Natalie Wood. Neither of the stars sang their roles in the Mervyn LeRoy-directed movie and critic Pauline Kael labeled the interpretation "extremely unpleasant." "Broadway Creators Nix Gypsy Pix," David Fox, Los Angeles Times, November 3, 1989.

7 For further insight into this production see Mandelbaum, "Thirtieth Anniversary," Broadway.com.