Gypsy
Opening Night: March 27, 2008
Closing: March 11, 2009
Theater: St James Theatre
A consummate show-biz musical suggested by the memoirs of stripper Gypsy Rose Lee. She was once just plain Louise, the awkward daughter of an unstoppably ambitious stage mother. When her pretty sister runs away from the family’s minor vaudeville act, Louise tries to fulfill her mother’s dreams. But it’s not until trouping with Mama dwindles to appearing in burlesque, that Louise finally finds pleasure in the spotlight. The vibrant score includes “Some People,” “Let Me Entertain You,” “Together,” “Everything’s Coming Up Roses” and “Rose’s Turn.”
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May 2, 2003
YOU can tear down the black crepe, boys. Take the hearse back to the garage, and start popping Champagne corks. Momma’s pulled it off, after all — big time. Playing a role that few people thought would ever fit her and shadowed by vultures predicting disaster, Bernadette Peters delivered the surprise coup of many a Broadway season in the revival of ”Gypsy” that opened last night at the Shubert Theater.
READ THE REVIEWApril 22, 2014
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. A great Momma Rose is usually enough for a thoroughly compelling Gypsy. But this one has so much more.
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April 22, 2014
Much the same production, directed again by author Arthur Laurents, opened last night at the St. James Theatre. Gypsy – with its wrenching and brilliant lyrics by Stephen Sondheim and its brassy-bravura music by Jule Styne – belongs on Broadway for as long as people need musicals.
READ THE REVIEWApril 22, 2014
This Gypsy is as serious as a heart attack, and about as subtle. It’s also campy and clamorous, by turns brighter and less buoyant than the version Laurents helmed off-Broadway last summer with the same principal actors.
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April 22, 2014
This is not your everyday canned tuner; in this production it’s an incisively acted musical play with as much emotional resonance as showbiz pizzazz.
READ THE REVIEWApril 22, 2014
Has the stuff Broadway dreams are made of: an electrifying leading lady and bangup supporting cast (kids included), making good on the show’s implicit vow to entertain you and make you smile.
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April 22, 2014
"Though this essentially modest production has the lingering scent of a summer stockpot, its virtues are such that few will care.
READ THE REVIEWApril 22, 2014
Patti LuPone gives a Tony-worthy performance in this splendid revival of the classic 1959 musical about a monstrous stage mother.
READ THE REVIEWApril 22, 2014
The intensity of LuPone’s electrifying portrayal lights up the theater like a mega-watt marquee. Long may she blaze.
READ THE REVIEWApril 22, 2014
In one of the more puzzling and dispiriting developments to reach Broadway in some time, Arthur Laurents’s staging of the acid-etched 1959 valentine to show business has managed to shed nearly everything that made its previous iteration — a keenly anticipated three-week run last summer at City Center — so cherished.
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