Gypsy

This is, without doubt, my favorite overture of all time. Styne: "Do you know how I had to fight for that overture? Jerry didn't like it. All I know is that when the trumpet player started playing that strip music, the audience went crazy. We were a hit even before the curtain went up."

The play encompasses a period from the early 1920s to the early 1930s. On either side of the stage are cards which display the location where each scene takes place. First up is the Uncle Jocko Kiddie Show in Seattle. Jocko is auditioning tots and has ordered all the stage mothers to clear the theatre. June and Louise, two young amateurs, sing this song:

Sondheim on Arthur Laurents: "The major thing I got from Arthur was the notion of 'subtext'. What that means, simply, is something to give the actors to act. Lyrics, as well as scenes, without subtext, tend to be shallow or surface." The subtext of this song is that Rose needs 88 bucks and if her father won't give it to her willingly, she'll steal his gold plaque and hock it for the money.

Sondheim: "Ethel worked very hard, and she told us that we could put anything into the show up until one week before the opening. Thereafter, she would not change a single word, gesture, move or anything. Two weeks before the opening I thought that SOME PEOPLE needed a verse because the dialogue that precedes the song is on a high pitch and the song starts low. It needed the verse to bring it down. The cue-in is clumsy and it would have helped the song a lot. After it was written, however, she said she felt it was too angry and she refused to learn it."

Dissatisfied with the small time show business available in Seattle, Rose plots to break into the big time. She has had a dream about a new act for her children and tries to hit up her unsympathetic father for the money she needs to fund it:

During the last part of this song, Rose takes from the wall her father's retirement plaque made of gold and sets off to hock it to fund her dream. Sondheim provided the voice of Rose's father on the original cast album.

June and Louise manage to hitch a ride (Rose emerges after the car has stopped to pick them up) and the three head for L.A. En route Rose "kidnaps" the driver's son and two other little boys to serve as chorus boys for the new act Rose has in mind. In L.A., the girls are about to rejected during an audition when Herbie puts in a good word with the theatre manager. Herbie used to be an agent but now sells candy to theatre owners. He has taken a shine to Rose and has checked with her kids to see if she is married. Rose is attracted to him as well but sees him more as an entree into show business for her kids. She sings to Herbie:

Sondheim: "Jule was appalled when in SMALL WORLD I wrote a line that said, 'Funny, I'm a woman with children.' Jule protested, 'Well, that means no man can sing the song!' And I told him that if I make the song general, then it's got no texture for the show at all." (In fact, Johnny Mathis had a huge hit with SMALL WORLD.)

This was the number used to audition Jack Klugman for the role of Herbie; he was not a singer and struggled with the number. Klugman: "I was very self-conscious until one day somebody told me that Steve was going to parties singing YOU'LL NEVER GET AWAY FROM ME and when he'd get to 'Ah, Rose,' he'd stop and say that he couldn't do it as well as Klugman could . . . that when Klugman does it, it's so real and has so much feeling." Klugman even offered to quit the show, feeling that Sondheim would be able to write a better lyrics for someone with a big singing voice, but Sondheim told him, "No. What you're doing is right. I don't want a musical voice. I want a person I can believe."

Sondheim on a song called MAMMA'S TALKING SOFT sung by the kids in counterpoint to SMALL WORLD : "The number was cut because one of the little girls was afraid of the height of the scenery and cried every time she got up there, and there was no other way to stage it.

There follows a patriotic salute to Uncle Sam; during this number, the lights flicker so that the dance step the children do appears faster and faster. I believe the device used is called a lobsterscope and it causes images to strobe so that it looks like a speeded up film with frames missing. It's quite an impressive effect and while it is in progress the young actors are replaced by their older counterparts in identical costumes. The placard at the side of the stage has been changed from Baby June and her Newsboys to Dainty June and her Newsboys.

The troupe is staying in two rooms at a run down hotel in Akron. Although it is their day off and a chance to sleep late, Louise gets up early because it is her birthday. Since Rose doesn't pay the boys, they have had to steal things from the five and dime to give her presents. Rose's present is a lamb which will go into the act as part of a new barnyard routine she has dreamed up, complete with a cow costume. In honor of Louise's birthday, Rose has somehow produced a cake and is heating up chow mein and egg rolls for breakfast.

The hotel manager, smelling food, arrives to holler at Rose for cooking in her room, which is forbidden. He suddenly notices that the room has more people and animals then are allowed as well. Rose manages to push him alone into one of the two rooms and shout as if he has attacked her. Thwarted, he leaves just as Herbie shows up with Mr. Goldstone, the booker for the Orpheum Circuit. Herbie, acting as agent for the troupe, has gotten a booking on the Orpheum Circuit.

Sondheim: "There's one big laugh in GYPSY where Rose, who's trying to book her act, changes from fierce one second to smiling good nature the next when she finds out that the act is finally booked, and she sings, HAVE AN EGG ROLE, MR. GOLDSTONE. The trouble with that song is that once that line was started and there was a big laugh, it was all over, there was nothing else to say, and I had to fill out two or three minutes of plays on words. If you could stop that song after the first line it would have brought down the house."

During out of town tryouts, when the show was 45 minutes too long, Robins cut LITTLE LAMB. Styne asked him to put it back and Robbins refused; Styne then threatened to withdraw the entire score and so LITTLE LAMB went back in the show.

The act arrives in New York, where Herbie, Rose, Louise and June eat at a posh Chinese restaurant. The others can't prevent Rose from scraping the leftover food into cartons and stealing the silverware. Herbie tries to talk Rose into giving up the act because the Depression and talking pictures are killing vaudeville, but she is set on June headlining on Broadway. Herbie threatens to walk out, and Rose sweet talks him:

This is one of Jule Styne's "trunk tunes", supposedly written for a movie that never got made called PINK TIGHTS. It was originally called WHY DID YOU HAVE TO WAIT SO LONG but Sammy Cahn had never completed the lyric. At the time, Sondheim didn't know that Leo Robin had also written lyrics for it under the title I'M IN PURSUIT OF HAPPINESS for a TV version of RUGGLES OF RED GAP. If Sondheim had known about this completed lyric, he never would have agreed to work with this wonderful tune.

Sondheim and Styne wrote a song for Klugman called NICE SHE AIN'T but when they presented it to him a week before the show was going to New York, Klugman decided against tackling it.

The new act, the one with the cow Rose dreamed about, auditions for a crack at Broadway. The introductory music is the same as the old act, except the boys are dressed as farmers instead of newsboys, and Louise is now the front end of the cow.

The Broadway producer wants June but not the act, and Rose doesn't want to give up her control of her Baby. June marvels that Louise is never jealous of her, but Louise feels she has no talent and just longs for a home. June reveals she hates the act, pretending that she's younger than she is, but she longs to be an actress. They both want their mother to marry and settle down, Louise so she can stop performing and June so that she can get out from her mother's control. They sing:

This number seems to stage itself; the lyrics and the spoken lines seem to indicate what the performers should do. I am reminded of the anecdote Sondheim tells of working with Jerome Robbins when he was trying to stage MARIA from WEST SIDE STORY. Sondheim learned from Robbins: "Those of us who write songs should stage each number within an inch of its life in our own heads when we write... I mean, really plot everything in detail...[The director and the choreographer] may not use anything in your blueprint at all, but they have something to work on, something to build from. And so you're collaborating with them." And this number seems a classic example of this. It's also an amazing blend of Sondheim's lyrics and Laurents' dialogue melded together into a seamless whole.

This song has so much going for it, besides the wonderful Jule Styne melody and Sondheim's perfect lyrics. It's all about longing to make it in show business, which I'm convinced everyone in the world can identify with, it's got the subtext of Louise, who has a crush on Tulsa, just happy to spend some time with him and then, oh bliss, right at the end he asks her to dance with him for the last couple of bars. In the film, Natalie Wood wears the back end of the cow costume (from the Dainty June and her Farmboys number earlier). This is not indicated in the Laurents play, but in the film Natalie Wood is so delicate and beautiful and perfect in this huge cow costume, it's quite touching.

Paul Wallace played Tulsa, one of the chorus boys Mama Rose has hired. These chorus kids are so interchangeable to Rose, she knows them only by the city where they joined the troupe. However, Tulsa has plans beyond being in the chorus, his own nightclub act a la Astaire.

OK. Well, you see, I pretend I'm home getting dressed for a date. I take a comb; I comb my hair. I take a flower, smell it, and put it in my lapel; And then I spot the audience!

I start easy. . . Now I'm more--debonair. . . Break! Then I sell it here. . . I start this step, see, and build it--and double it. She appears all in white! I take her hand--kiss it--and lead her on the floor. . . This step is good for the costume. . . Astaire bit!

This is a Jule Styne number that had been thrown out of HIGH BUTTON SHOES in 1947 when it was called IN BETWIXT AND BETWEEN. Sondheim decided to restrict the lyrics to images of traveling, children and show business because the scene was a railroad station and was about a mother pushing her child into show business. Laurents on Jerome Robbins' reaction to the song: "He didn't like the title. He was in utter dismay, and he said, 'But that's her name!'"

At a train station, Herbie and Rose wait for Louise and June to show up. All the chorus boys have suddenly quit, and they won't tell Herbie why. Louise runs up with a note from June. She has secretly married Tulsa and they have run off to perform his act. Herbie once again proposes to Rose; like the chorus boys, he thinks there is no possibility of the act going on now without June. But Rose is not ready to give up on her dream; she decides to transfer it to Louise.

This is one of the most powerful first act curtains I've ever seen: The absolute steamroller quality that Ethel Merman brings to this number. The total despair of Herbie and, especially Louise, who has for a brief moment thought she could escape from the grind of show business where she knows she is second rate, only to have that escape snatched away by her mother's relentless need to succeed.

The act, including the same inappropriate newsboy introduction, has been reconstituted as Mme. Rose's Toreadorables, with Louise in a blonde wig, surrounded by a chorus of girls. Louise is even worse doing the splits and baton twirls than she was as a backup to June. Rose refuses to give up, however. The cow is still in the act as well. Louise tries to tell her mother she is not June and putting her in a blonde wig won't make her June, she wants to give up, but Rose insists things will work out because Louise is not alone, she has her mother and Herbie. (This number appeared only in the initial release of the film, and has now disappeared from subsequent releases.)

Louise comes up with the idea that the chorus girls should dye their hair blonde and be called the Hollywood Blondes. Louise alone will be dark haired because she's the star. Louise wants the act to be called Louise and her Hollywood Blondes; Rose insists it be called Rose Louise and Her Hollywood Blondes.

By accident Herbie books the reconstituted act into a burlesque house that mainly features strippers. Rose wants to leave immediately but Louise points out that they're broke and need the money. Rose reveals she's had a dream of defeat and asks Herbie to marry her. They decide to get married when their two-week date in burlesque is over. Herbie intimidates the stagehands to clean up their language while the troupe is in the theatre. They meet Tessie Tura, the stripper whose dressing room they'll be sharing. When Louise mentions they've been touring the country like gypsies, Tessie suggests she name herself Gypsy Rose Louise if she ever takes up stripping. Two other strippers, Mazeppa and Electra enter the dressing room. They assume Louise is a stripper, but she tells them she has no talent. Tessie says no talent is a prerequisite for stripping.

At the end of their two week run in burlesque, Herbie is all set to marry Rose. Rose however has heard that the featured stripper has been arrested and the theatre owner is in dire need of a replacement. She volunteers Louise. She tells her all she has to do is walk around the stage and drop a shoulder strap. It's the star spot. Rose asks Louise not to walk out like June; at least not until she's a star. She pins up Louise's hair to make her look classier. She gives the conductor the old LET ME ENTERTAIN YOU music for the strip. Herbie has gone into the alley to throw up and now returns to tell Rose he's leaving. Louise, dressed in an outfit she had been sewing for Tessie, sees herself in the mirror and discovers she's a pretty girl, giving her the confidence to go through with this.

(This number was staged very cleverly to make the audience initially identify with Louise: the floodlights are directed toward the audience to make them feel as if they are on stage.)

Louise is now Gypsy Rose Lee, a success in burlesque, a world famous headlining French-speaking stripper. Rose is no longer welcome back stage but that doesn't keep her away. She and Gypsy have a fight over Rose's continuing domineering ways, which winds up with Rose asking why did she go to all this trouble to make Louise a star? Rose imagines herself center stage, a star in her own right:

The way this was staged, the actress playing Rose takes her bows to tumultuous applause from the audience, but after that applause dies down, she continues to bow, so it becomes clear that the applause is all in her own head. Gypsy comes out of her dressing room and has a momentary rapproachment with her mother, lending her her mink coat, as they leave the theatre together.

Laurents: "ROSE'S TURN was an explosion for which the character had been heading throughout the play. It's an emotional summation in words and music. . . Merman was marvelous in rehearsal. She was very professional and very willing. You couldn't have asked for any star to act better than she did. But she did balk when I brought in an addition to the last scene where she would say, 'I did it for me.' She didn't want to say it. But that was one of the necessities . . . to have her face herself and admit that . . . and to have the girl admit that it wasn't talent, but her mother who got them there. They have to give it to each other."

Sondheim: "GYPSY says something fairly hard to take: that every child eventually has to become responsible for his parents. That you outgrow your parents and then eventually they become your responsibility . . . they become your children. It's something that everybody knows but no one likes to think about a lot . . . the last scene is what the play is about--the unpleasant truth of it. I think it's quite moving. But it's not very cheerful."

Laurents on the staging of the Angela Lansbury revival: "Rose, in her daughter's fur coat, turns and looks at the runway and the lights start to come up . . . and as she looks at them, they go out. Rose is through. It's very lonely and sad. She misled her life and she's the only person in the show who never gets the recognition she wants. "

Sondheim: "GYPSY holds up so well because it's about people. I believe it's one of the best shows ever written . . . the last good one in the Rodgers and Hammerstein form."