Patti LuPone in ‘Gypsy’: Light the Lights, Boys! Mama Rose Hears a Symphony
By CHARLES ISHERWOOD
Published: August 15, 2006
RAVINIA, Ill., Aug. 12 — No tuba, Mama Rose?
None needed, thank you. Granted a temporary sabbatical from the ghoulish marching band in Broadway’s “Sweeney Todd,” Patti LuPone got to leave the brass octopus behind in New York. Playing the indomitable antiheroine of the musical “Gypsy” for the first time in a trio of performances over the weekend here, Ms. LuPone was backed by what is surely the most deluxe band ever to play vaudeville and burlesque, the Chicago Symphony Orchestra. That little outfit doesn’t require any assistance in the musical department.
Ms. LuPone has become something of a fixture at the Ravinia Festival outside Chicago. Over the last five years she has appeared in a series of staged concert performances of the musicals of Stephen Sondheim, often in the company of Michael Cerveris, her co-star in “Sweeney Todd,” and Audra McDonald. (The Ravinia production of “Passion,” featuring all three, was later seen in New York and broadcast by PBS on “Live From Lincoln Center.”)
This summer she was starring solo, tackling what is arguably the most demanding female role in the Broadway canon. Even had she undertaken it in less lustrous circumstances, Ms. LuPone’s reckoning with this formidable part would be a noteworthy theatrical event (“the character she was born to play,” declared the Ravinia Web site, not without reason). And with this sumptuous orchestra behind her, performing the ebullient score by Mr. Sondheim and Jule Styne for the first time, it naturally became a musical one, too.
Neither of these essential participants disappointed. Ms. LuPone sang with exciting power and warmth, and the 47-piece orchestra played with a textural clarity that made you sit up and take notice, even during the underscoring between scenes.
Under the veteran Broadway maestro Paul Gemignani, the score retained plenty of jazzy punch where needed, but the suppleness of the orchestra’s technique — a sinuously sexy violin solo here, the jokey trill of a flute there — revealed the intricacy that underlies its infectiousness. Inspired by Mr. Sondheim’s sharp, sometimes slashing lyrics and the canny book by Arthur Laurents, Styne reached an artistic zenith in his music for this bleakly comic musical about the corrosive allure of showbiz and the havoc it wreaks on an already tattered family.
In contrast to some of the previous Ravinia productions and the standards at the Encores! series in New York, this was not a stripped-down presentation of “Gypsy” but a fully staged performance, with a fine array of costumes by Tracy Christensen, plush lighting design by Kevin Adams, simple but smart sets by Tony Straiges, even a little lamb (possibly a little goat, cast against type). Lonny Price, who has directed Ms. LuPone in all of her Ravinia appearances in Mr. Sondheim’s works, staged the production effectively and essentially traditionally, even without a proper proscenium, meaning that the wings loomed so far off to the sides that the actors all but sprinted off and onstage at times.
Ms. LuPone would surely have preferred to prepare for a role of this stature unencumbered by the strain of a nearly yearlong run in a Broadway musical. (She missed three weeks of performances of “Sweeney Todd” for rehearsals and performances in Ravinia, and returns to the show for its last weeks on Tuesday; it closes on Sept. 3.) She is not the first actress to play both Mama Rose and the bloodthirsty Mrs. Lovett of “Sweeney Todd.” Angela Lansbury, the original meat-pie-maker, starred in the first Broadway revival of “Gypsy” in 1974.
But I’d wager that Ms. LuPone is the only major performer to face the challenge of inhabiting both of these magnificent monsters all but simultaneously. So even had she delivered a less impressive performance, Ms. LuPone’s achievement would have been remarkable. And, watching her alternately friendly and frosty Mama Rose with her cackling Mrs. Lovett in mind, you couldn’t help but notice psychological affinities between these two superficially divergent characters.
Both are animated by a peculiar combination of maternal affection and killer instincts. Both go to nearly inhuman lengths to seek their ends (in the case of Mrs. Lovett, entirely inhuman). Mrs. Lovett is looking for undying love in the arms of a sociopath, but is Mama Rose’s dream of warming her empty heart in the heat of the spotlights trained on her daughters any less deluded — or destructive?
Ms. LuPone conveyed, at various points, all the conflicting impulses of this loving but hurting, self-denying but selfish character: the hungry-eyed intensity of Rose’s backstage vigils, the calculating mind behind the cajoling exterior, the bursts of spontaneous affection, the bewilderment as she is abandoned by everyone she loves. And just as she transformed the inelegant Mrs. Lovett into a persuasive seductress, Ms. LuPone made of Mama Rose a forcefully sexual woman. The playful ballad “Small World,” one of Rose’s more innocuous songs, became an intimate and irresistible seduction.
Fine as it was, Ms. LuPone’s performance was not a fully integrated one; both vocally and dramatically, there were lapses into the mannerisms that can mar the integrity of her work. But Mama Rose isn’t a particularly well-integrated woman now, is she?
Interestingly, and perhaps surprisingly, the highlights of Ms. LuPone’s performance were not the big set pieces: “Some People,” “Everything’s Coming Up Roses” and the climactic breakdown, “Rose’s Turn,” none of which reached the hair-raising emotional pitch you might have expected. Ms. LuPone was more effective, and more moving, as the misguided but loving stage mother than as the ravenous ego in song.
Supported by fine work from Jack Willis, as Rose’s perpetually put-off suitor, Herbie, and Jessica Boevers, who charted the growing maturity of Rose’s daughter, Louise (Gypsy Rose Lee), with unusual sensitivity, Ms. LuPone’s Mama Rose expressed such warm comfort in the company of her makeshift family that her blindness to their needs became more pitiful.
And when she lurched into the razzle-dazzle histrionics of self-display, she was magnetic but somehow empty, like a woman possessed by an alien spirit, driven by hungers she could not understand and would never be able to sate.
Correction: Aug. 16, 2006
A theater review yesterday of “Gypsy” at the Ravinia Festival misstated the festival’s location. It is Highland Park, Ill., not Ravinia, Ill.
