Curtain Up! It’s Patti’s Turn at ‘Gypsy’

By Ben Brantley

Watch out, New York. Patti LuPone has found her focus. And when Ms. LuPone is truly focused, she’s a laser, she incinerates. Especially when she’s playing someone as dangerously obsessed as Momma Rose in the wallop-packing revival of the musical “Gypsy,” which opened on Thursday night at the St. James Theater.

In July, when an earlier version of “Gypsy” starring Ms. LuPone had a limited run as part of the Encores! summer series, this powerhouse actress gave a diffuse, narcissistic performance that seemed to be watching itself in a mirror. She was undeniably Patti with an exclamation point, the musical cult goddess, offering her worshipers plenty of polished brass, ululating notes and winking sexiness. But Rose, the ultimate stage mother of Gypsy Rose Lee’s memoirs, was as yet only a wavering gleam in her eye.

What a difference eight or nine months makes. And yes, that quiet crunching sound you hear is me eating my hat. As directed by Arthur Laurents, this latest incarnation of “Gypsy,” the 1959 fable of the last days of vaudeville, shines with a magnified transparency that lets you see right down to the naked core of characters so hungry for attention that it warps them.

The notion of a bare soul only flimsily disguised is appropriate to “Gypsy,” which features a book by Mr. Laurents, music by Jule Styne and lyrics by Stephen Sondheim. The title character, after all, is a burlesque queen, embodied here in the charming flesh of Laura Benanti, who obliges with examples of the ecdysiast’s art in the second act.

But the most transfixing stripteases are characters peeling down, by seductive degrees, to their most primal selves. What’s revealed isn’t nearly as pretty as a young Minsky dancer’s body. But its raw power should be enough to silence any naysayers (myself included), who thought that 2008 was way too early for yet another Broadway revival of “Gypsy,” which had been staged less than five years ago with a revelatory Bernadette Peters.

The 90-year-old Mr. Laurents, who directed two earlier revivals of “Gypsy” (with Angela Lansbury and Tyne Daly), has had nearly half a century to ponder characters he helped bring to life. The accumulation of decades seems only to have sharpened his vision of the fractured family at the show’s center: Rose, the smothering mother determined to make a star out of at least one of her children; Herbie (Boyd Gaines), the gentlemanly candy salesman and reluctant theatrical agent who loves her; and her two daughters, June and Louise (played as adults by Leigh Ann Larkin and Ms. Benanti).

For there is very little sentimental mist here. The show’s flat, scrappy look (with sets by James Youmans and costumes by Martin Pakledinaz), relying heavily on hand-painted scrims and backdrops, summons a world with the depth of torn paper and the glamour of disintegrating curtains.

If we are always aware of the shabbiness of the cut-rate vaudeville circuit through which Rose drags her increasingly discontented brood, we are also aware of the double-edged romance with which she invests that world. From the get-go, Ms. LuPone exudes a sweet-and-sweaty air of hope and desperation, balancing on an unsteady seesaw.

Watching that balance shift is a source of wonder, amusement and even pity and terror. If in the Encores! version of “Gypsy,” Ms. LuPone seemed to be trying on and discarding different aspects of Rose as if they were party hats, she has now settled on a single, highly disciplined interpretation that combines explosively contradictory elements into a single, deceptively ordinary-looking package.

It’s as if the new wig she wears here — a ’30s-style mop of recalcitrant curls that is a vast improvement on her blunt bowl cut of last summer — had forced her to internalize her many ideas about what makes Rose run. And while Rose may be a dauntingly single-minded creature, Ms. LuPone now plays her less on one note than any actress I’ve seen.

This Rose begins as a busy, energetic, excited woman, and you can’t help being infected by her liveliness. You understand why Herbie would be smitten with her, and for once, his description of her as looking “like a pioneer woman without a frontier” fits perfectly. But every so often a darker, creepier willpower erupts, as involuntary as a hiccup.

In Rose’s two great curtain numbers, “Everything’s Coming Up Roses” and “Rose’s Turn,” the darkness takes over so completely that you feel that you’re watching a woman who has been peeled down to her unadorned id. In “Rose’s Turn,” in particular, Ms. LuPone takes you on a guided tour of all Rose’s inner demons, from sexual succubus to shivering infant. (Be warned: they will live in your head for a while.)

A great Momma Rose is usually enough for a thoroughly compelling “Gypsy.” But this one has so much more. Mr. Laurents and his cast have applied the same careful analysis to all the major characters. As a result we become newly sensitized to “Gypsy” as a sad story of colliding desires, of people within an extended family vainly longing for love, for security, for recognition from one another. And this production makes us painfully aware of the toll exacted by repeatedly missed connections.

I have never, for example, seen a Herbie as palpably in love or in pain as the one the excellent Mr. Gaines provides.

Nor has the relationship between June, on whom Rose has pinned her highest ambitions, and the neglected Louise ever been as fully drawn as it is by Ms. Larkin and Ms. Benanti. Their duet, “If Momma Was Married,” becomes a vibrant voyage of gleeful self-discovery between two alienated siblings.

Ms. Larkin brings out the toughness in June that marks her as her mother’s daughter. (She’s hilarious furtively flashing her sex appeal behind Rose’s back.) And Ms. Benanti, in the performance of her career, traces Louise’s path to becoming her mother’s daughter out of necessity. The transformation of the waifish Louise into the vulpine Gypsy Rose Lee is completely convincing. And you’re acutely aware of what’s lost and gained in the metamorphoses.

You see, everyone’s starved for attention in “Gypsy.” That craving, after all, is the motor that keeps showbiz puttering along. And Mr. Laurents makes sure that we sense that hunger in everyone, including the delightfully seedy trio of strippers who initiate Gypsy into their art (Alison Fraser, Lenora Nemetz and Marilyn Caskey) and Tulsa (a first-rate Tony Yazbeck), a member of Rose’s troupe who dares to strike out on his own.

Styne’s score, one of the best for any show ever, is given full due by the orchestra (though I don’t see why it’s been left onstage à la Encores!). But I was so caught up in the emotional wrestling matches between the characters (and within themselves), that I didn’t really think about the songs as songs.

When Ms. LuPone delivers “Rose’s Turn,” she’s building a bridge for an audience to walk right into one woman’s nervous breakdown. There is no separation at all between song and character, which is what happens in those uncommon moments when musicals reach upward to achieve their ideal reasons to be. This “Gypsy” spends much of its time in such intoxicating air.

GYPSY

Book by Arthur Laurents, suggested by the memoirs of Gypsy Rose Lee; music by Jule Styne; lyrics by Stephen Sondheim; directed by Mr. Laurents; choreography by Jerome Robbins, reproduced by Bonnie Walker; music director-arranger, Patrick Vaccariello; sets by James Youmans; costumes by Martin Pakledinaz; lighting by Howell Binkley; sound by Dan Moses Schreier; production stage manager, Craig Jacobs; orchestrations by Sid Ramin and Robert Ginzler; dance arrangements by John Kander; music coordinator, Seymour Red Press. Presented by Roger Berlind, the Routh-Frankel-Baruch-Viertel Group, Roy Furman, Debra Black, Ted Hartley, Roger Horchow, David Ian, Scott Rudin and Jack Viertel. At the St. James Theater, 246 West 44th Street, Manhattan; (212) 239-6200. Running time: 2 hours 30 minutes.

WITH: Patti LuPone (Rose), Boyd Gaines (Herbie), Laura Benanti (Louise), Leigh Ann Larkin (Dainty June), Tony Yazbeck (Tulsa), Marilyn Caskey (Electra), Alison Fraser (Tessie Tura) and Lenora Nemetz (Mazeppa/Miss Cratchitt).

Jonathan Kent’s production of this fabulous musical, unseen in the West End for over 40 years, has got even better since its Chichester debut last autumn. Since the show is about Momma Rose’s attempt to turn her progeny into vaudeville stars, it sits perfectly in a traditional proscenium theatre.