Theater: The Right Turn

Patti LuPone is the greatest living performer in the American musical theater. Perhaps that’ll read as embarrassingly fanlike and fawning—the kind of hyperbolic encomium one would expect from those fey, rose-bearing audience members I spotted attending the Broadway revival of Gypsy, in which she stars. But it’s her thorns I love the best.

Although LuPone is playing Rose, one of the most terrifying female characters in the musical theater, roses are inappropriate to honor her performance. As she plays her, Rose—the ultimate pushy stage mother; the ogre deriving vicarious thrills from making her daughters into vaudeville successes (one became actress June Havoc, the other stripper Gypsy Rose Lee); the maternal monstrosity whose psychological destruction arrives at the end, in the Jule Styne-Stephen Sondheim song “Rose’s Turn”—is well beyond flowers. Venus Fly Traps would more easily suffice. In Gypsy her Rose is cyclonic and torrential, a tsunami of wildly histrionic gesticulations, vocal quirks and teapot-dome-sized tempests when simply shouting would do fine. LuPone inhales the scenery—she doesn’t gorge on it. But the result is that LuPone reaches Rose’s core: If she were a nuclear plant, she’d be doing laps in the plutonium pool.

I’ve only seen two of the prior Roses on Broadway—not Ethel Merman in 1959, not Angela Lansbury in 1974, but I did see Tyne Daly in 1989 and Bernadette Peters in 2003. And I feel LuPone has synthesized what was salient (or said to be) about those performer’s interpretations: Merman’s brass tacks and bombast; Lansbury’s vulnerability; Daly’s cool ambisexuality; Peters’ sensuousness. In the song “Have an Eggroll, Mr. Goldstone,” a throwaway number in which Rose thanks the man who’ll get her kids on the Orpheum circuit, watch LuPone act—not sing—“Have a lichee, Mr. Goldstone” if you want to gauge her level of detail as Rose. In addition to an airtight production by book writer Arthur Laurents—and once again being delighted by Jerome Robbins’ original choreography—Gypsy is LuPone’s purest triumph.

No one’s acting is any less detailed than LuPone’s. Boyd Gaines has reinvented the role of agent Herbie as more than a milquetoast: He’s a manly, gutsy guy who loves Rose for her psychosis, not in spite of it. His fancy-free Act 1 numbers with LuPone—“Small World” and “You’ll Never Get Away From Me”—are life lessons in limning subtext.

In “You Gotta Get a Gimmick,” three strippers—Alison Fraser as Tessie Tura, Lenora Nemetz as Mazeppa and the incomparably deadpan Marilyn Caskey as Electra—take the whole idea of subtext and turn it on its head. The number functions not only as comic relief but also as a plot mechanism to get Louise, Rose’s hitherto untalented daughter, into the world of burlesque. This production has what I think is the finest version of this hilarious number, and I could sit through it 500 times and always locate something new.

As June—Rose’s more traditionally talented daughter—Leigh Ann Barkin turns “If Momma Was Married” into a fatwa against Rose, which is at once chilling and inventive. That song is also a duet with Louise, and it isn’t just how Laura Benanti sings “Little Lamb” or yearns to be held by Tony Yazbeck’s Tulsa during the dance solo “All I Need is the Girl” that may win her a Tony for playing the role. It’s Benanti’s radiation of empathy. It’s her capacity to show Rose love that’s wholly unearned. Yes, give LuPone her Tony, but also give it to Benanti. It’s her turn, too.

Open run. St. James Theatre, 246 W. 44th St. (betw. Broadway & 8th Ave.), 212-239-6200; $42-$117.