The Majestic, where Phantom of the Opera reigned for decades, is now home to Broadway royalty, Her Royal (Audra) McDonald, winner of a record-breaking six Tony Awards and an inevitable contender for a seventh for the latest revival of Gypsy. Likened to Arthur Miller, Tennessee Williams, and even King Lear the musical (book by Arthur Laurents, composed by Jule Styne, lyrics by Stephen Sondheim) has a star turn fit only for a queen, as Rose, the ultimate stage mother, pushes and prods her young daughters June (later actress June Havoc) and Louise (later famed stripper Gypsy Rose Lee) to stardom in the waning days of vaudeville. She herself doesn’t get very far despite herculean, soul-destroying effort but Laurents and company found in her story a perfect metaphor for the American dream, in its fleeting highs and terrible lows. For the performer playing her Rose is the pinnacle, and now McDonald has scaled the mountain.
For musical theater buffs Gypsy is less a show and more an obsession, with every detail of every staging parsed and dissected. It’s like a three-hour gymnastics or ice skating routine at the Olympics–will every mark be hit, or exceeded? I’m a little out of my league here, in that McDonald is only my third stage Rose, after Bernadette Peters and Patti LuPone. (Ethel Merman originated the part in 1959, which Rosalind Russell played in the movie and Bette Midler on TV, but those don’t really count. I would like to see the recent “proshot” of Imelda Staunton on the West End.) I’ve seen enough to know that McDonald is in enviable, formidable company.
Good news: She earns her keep, as does the entire production, directed by her past collaborator George C. Wolfe, who also has a half-dozen Tonys on his mantle. Gypsy is so perfectly crafted it’s difficult to reinterpret, though there is new and sizzling choreography by Camille A. Brown. That McDonald, Wolfe, and much of the company are Black or mixed race is also new (Danny Burstein, himself a great theater star here playing Herbie, the long-suffering manager of Rose’s ragtag act, is half-Costa Rican). This Gypsy breaks the color bar is subtle ways, with nods in Santo Loquasto’s scenic design to the “Chitlin’ Circuit” that Black performers played in the segregation era, Louise’s Josephine Baker-styled stripper outfits (via costume designer Toni-Leslie James) when she finds her true artistry, and some of McDonald’s phrasing choices. I remember being baffled when McDonald played Mother Abbess on TV in the live Sound of Music a decade ago and people unused to non-traditional casting were trying to justify why a Black woman was in Austria back between the world wars. People, it’s for the same excellent reason that she’s playing Rose now: Audra McDonald is the GOAT of musical performers and Rose is the GOAT of female characters. It’s her turn for “Rose’s Turn.”
I wish I photographed me and my critical brethren holding up scoring placards throughout the show. No, we didn’t–but if we were, I have to say that McDonald’s “Some People” was maybe a 7, as her voice, not that of a belter, slid around the lyrics. From then on in, though, the numbers improved, and everything was coming up roses (sorry). Let me be honest here: LuPone remains “my” Rose, in part because she and her Louise, Laura Benanti, played together so memorably. But I have every confidence that McDonald and Joy Woods, her Louise, will harmonize. Burstein, always good, of course gets high marks, which is not to minimize the accomplishment; in lesser hands Herbie could be colorlesss, but he finds the hues in his devotion to Rose and her girls as he negotiates each beatdown they endure on the road. Jordan Tyson is a winning June and Kevin Csolak, fresh from the Tony-winning The Outsiders, is kinetic as Tulsa, the dancer she adores. The “You Getta Get a Gimmick” strippers (Lesli Margherita, Lili Thomas, and Mylinda Hull) get the laughs.
With timeless material to work with, the bar is set high for the 11 0’clock number of all 11 0’clock numbers. Rose, cast aside by Louise (who attained all the dreams she had for herself), adrift in a showbiz world she no longer understands, wrathful, fearful, takes the stage for the psychodrama that is “Rose’s Turn.” We hold our breath…and Audra delivers the song, in all its bitter glory.
10!
Broadway Briefs: Christmas has come and gone but John Lee Beatty’s handsome set keeps the season going at the Hayes for the Second Stage presentation of Cult of Love. That it’s more than a bit stale now is an appropriate mood for Leslye Headland’s play, where traditional carols sung with New England-style gusto by the starry cast collide with knife-edged confrontations over religion and other hot-button topics over the course of the worst. Christmas. Eve. ever. As snow comes down we’re inside a Dahl house (that’s the name of the family) where everything seems to be in order, but in fact order is rigorously maintained by matriarch Ginny (Mare Winningham), who has one eye on husband Bill (David Rasche), who seems to be slipping into dementia, and the other on her restless brood and family members. Christianity is the bond that held the kids together in the (maybe not so) good old days but everyone’s come unglued in adulthood. Mark (Zachary Quinto), a divinity student abruptly turned lawyer, has soured on faith and the law; Evie (Rebecca Henderson) is a caustic lesbian who bristles at family pushback for her life choices, like settling down with her politely bemused wife Pippa (Roberta Colindrez); Johnny (Christopher Sears) is a recovering addict who shows up late with the young woman he’s sponsoring, Loren (Barbie Ferreira); and the youngest, squishily pregnant Diana (Shailene Woodley), is…off in her own universe, attended to by husband James (Christopher Lowell), perhaps some sort of saint with her weird fits and speaking in tongues, or just an everyday pain in the ass dropping doctrinaire opinions on motherhood and gay rights.
Umm, Merry Christmas? Not hardly, as under the assured direction of Trip Cullman this follows the template of family-in-crisis comedy-dramas, where you laugh until you don’t. Over the course of 100 brisk minutes the characters (including Mark’s impatient wife Rachel, played by Molly Bernard in a fine had-it-up-to-here performance) test the limits of faith, love, and drugs amidst visits to the punchbowl for liquid courage. All the actors bring a lot to this particular party, with the stage veterans enlivening every mark they hit and newcomers Ferreira and Woodley in particular finding new depths as actors in live performance.
Like Cult of Love Jonathan Spector’s Eureka Day, now at the Friedman under the auspices of the Manhattan Theatre Club, has had regional productions and appeared Off Broadway besides. Thus the Tony nominating committee has deemed it a revival, which seems misguided, given the brevity of the run in a small house in the before times of 2019, some rewriting and the topicality of the subject matter. As a less-than-truthful president pushes a less-than-honest huckster to be the nation’s top health official here we have a play about a highly progressive (and highly self-satisfied) day school in California finding itself at a rare loss for words when confronted by a mumps outbreak, setting off a roiling debate about vaccine requirements. How “2025” can you get?
The play transpires in 2018 and Todd Rosenthal’s set took me right back to the progressive elementary school in Brooklyn my kids went to at that time, which a fellow parent criticized (without naming it) in an Atlantic article. Too sensitive, too feelings-centered, the journalist scolded, not enough education. Though he overplayed his hand he had a point (the 70s and 80s weren’t terribly touchy-feely for us kids, so that emphasis was surprising) which Eureka Day, a resonant satire, takes to its breaking point. Here the executive board members of a well-funded private school (in Berkeley, no less), used to long meetings where everything is woke-talked to death, are ill-prepared for crisis. Gender-neutral pronouns and such, the armor of a certain kind of leftist, are of no use as kids fall ill, tempers flare, and a comic slugfest (as polite as can be at first) ensues among Rumi-quoting principal Don (Bill Irwin), founding parent Suzanne (Jessica Hecht), the well-to-do Eli (Thomas Middleditch), naive new member Carina (Amber Gray), and single mom Meiko (Chelsea Yakura-Kurtz). Two of these characters are having an affair; one, worse, is anti-vax. (They are all brilliantly acted, with Hecht as always spellbinding, layering in dimension after dimension.)
As one grenade after another is lobbed the show, broad at first then more incisively focused, coalesces around an online town hall, where a panoply of parents converge with opinions and emojis (pictured). Spector, director Anna D. Shapiro, and the design team stage a tour de force onscreen onstage as everything collapses into screamingly funny comic chaos, in what may be the scene of the season. Equally effective is the Gordian untangling of the plot at the end, with the stranglehold of language dispelled if not broken. Bravo, Eureka Day. Post-Christmas is Broadway’s slow season and both this and Cult of Love are worth unwrapping if you’re in New York this winter.
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