| On Thursday evening, the curtain goes up on one of the year’s most highly anticipated Broadway revivals. In “Gypsy,” the six-time Tony winner Audra McDonald follows in the footsteps of Ethel Merman, Angela Lansbury, and Patti LuPone by playing Momma Rose, perhaps the most notorious stage mother in history. The title role belongs to one of Momma Rose’s daughters, but the matriarch is the real star, a captivating mess once described in The New Yorker as “the kind of narcissistic mother who is always there when she needs you.” In the nineteen-forties, before the musical was written, The New Yorker published a series of pieces by its real-life namesake. Gypsy Rose Lee was by then a fully grown woman, a celebrated burlesque dancer and a writer with a droll perspective on her unconventional upbringing. In “Just Like Children Leading Normal Lives,” Lee recalls her youth on the vaudeville circuit: constantly on the road, lying about her age, engaging in photo ops expertly manipulated by her mother. In one memorable instance, Lee and her sister are caught shoplifting; their mother doesn’t react like an ordinary parent, and the girls’ new teacher is reduced to silence. But perhaps the educator shouldn’t have been surprised by Momma Rose’s priorities. “Miss Tomkins had a desk with a globe of the world on it,” Lee remembers. “The globe was a prop from another act.” | 
No comments:
Post a Comment