Day in the Life of an Idiot

https://plaidadder.tumblr.com/post/786760049132552192

plaidadder:

luckydiorxoxo:

Audra McDonald performs a piece from the Broadway show #Gypsy at the 2025 #TonyAwards

Yeah, we saw this last night and WOW. We’re seeing this production this summer abd we cannot wait.

Here is some context, behind a cut tag, for those who are not part of my family and maybe don’t know Gypsy! the show.

Keep reading

OK, so I have seen Audra McDonald in Gypsy! now, and I have further thoughts about her “Rose’s Turn.”

So first of all, the show is amazing and you should see it if you can. It is directed, I discovered through the playbill, by George C. Wolfe, who wrote a play back in the 1980s called The Colored Museum. The Colored Museum is made up of satirical vignettes attacking the stereotypes created for Black characters (and into which Black actors have been forced) throughout American theater history. The vignette I know best is “The Last Mama-On-The-Couch Play,” which starts out as a satire on Raisin in the Sun and goes to many different places after that. My point is that Wolfe is someone who had done a lot of thinking about the fraught relationship between Black performers and the entertainment industry long before he took on Gypsy!, a show which is about (apart from Mrs. P’s two favorite Great Themes, which are Motherhood and Ambition) American theater history. Specifically, it’s about the first few decades of the twentieth century, during which vaudeville was being killed by the movies (and, eventually, the Great Depression).

This isn’t the first time I’ve seen Gypsy! with an African-American Rose; but this production definitely put more thought into how Rose being Black might change what this story means. As many of the reviews point out, the fact that Rose favors June over Louise (the favoritism is constant, blatant, and clearly harmful to both children) is given a different context: June is played by lighter-skinned actresses who could pass as white, whereas Louise is played by actresses who could not. Rose’s favoritism is now inseparable from colorism, which she has internalized because the entertainment industry she’s trying to break into is so full of it.

In Wolfe’s production, this is emphasized in the transition sequence during which the child actors playing Baby June, child Louise, and the child backup dancers (“newsboys”) are replaced by the actors who will play them as adults. This sequence happens in every production of Gypsy!: the first time we see the patriotic closer of the Baby June act, the music extends past the applause and while the dance continues, we watch the new actors appear in costume to take the places of the child actors. Wolfe has made two important changes to this part of the show. First, we see how Rose actually recruits the child “newsboys” for Baby June’s act. They are all poor, hungry, talented Black children. But in the transition sequence, the child newsboys–each of them dressed as a famous American president–are replaced, not by their older selves, but by a group of white actors. When the adolescent Louise–Joy Wood, who was fantastic–comes in to replace the child Louise, Mama Rose pulls her out of line and tries to come up with a way to keep her in the act while hiding her from the audience. (She ends up giving Louise a flag and trying to get her to hold it so that it conceals her face.) The implication is that Rose has surrounded June with white performers in order to a) help her pass and b) get the act into better venues. The fact that Louise’s role in the ‘new’ show is as half of a pantomime cow–which, again, happens in every production–now reads as Rose’s strategy for hiding Louise’s blackness from the audience.

I would also like to note that although I’ve seen this show many times, this is the first production that brought forward something about the cow which was clearly part of Sondheim’s intention. In this context, for whatever reason, it finally dawned on me that Rose sees herself as the cow. The cow–named Caroline–is introduced in a comedy rustic bit, but then the farmboys transform into uptown Broadway swells and June comes out in white fur and rhinestones and they sing a song about how June’s leaving the farm to be a Broadway star. She gets on the train and ALMOST does it–but at the last minute, decides that she can’t go to Broadway because she can’t leave Caroline behind. This prefigures a heartbreaking scene in which Rose refuses to sign a contract that would make June a star because it requires Rose to stay away from her. It’s then a running gag for the rest of the show that everyone but Rose hates the cow and wants it out of the act.

And yet it never occurred to me before that Rose sees herself as the cow. By which I mean: she sees herself as a mute, self-effacing, nurturer who is always ignored and passed over and left in the background. She sees herself as a drudge for whom other people might have some affection only because she’s useful. This is so very much not how ANYONE else sees Rose–they see her as a terrifying force of nature before whose will they are helpless–that I guess it was hard for me to grasp; but Audra McDonald’s performance somehow made that legible to me. And once you understand that, you can understand Rose a little better. Her bombastic self-presentation is something she’s developed in response to being treated as if she doesn’t matter except in terms of what she can do for other people. In her final scene with Louise (now Gypsy Rose Lee), she says, “I just wanted to be noticed.” And by the time you get there, you can imagine exactly how unnoticed the child Rose was, and see her current bombastic persona as a way of forcing people to notice her.

So, again, that’s just by way of giving more context for Audra McDonald’s performance. Rose’s character is more complex and her situation is more complex and McDonald’s performance is…very intense. In her very first number–“Some People”–there is so much tension and suppressed anger and frustration in her that it always seems like she’s just about to explode. I thought, “Is she really going to be able to build on this? It seems like she’s already at 11.” And the answer is yes. She did. When Herbie finally gets it through to her that Mr. Goldstone has booked the act on the Orpheum Circuit, Rose is almost literally stunned. She’s so overwhelmed by the fact that she’s actually succeeded that for several seconds she is almost paralyzed. Eventually she works through it and we get to the usual manic celebratory mode of that song but it feels different. Another great use of silence and stillness is in the scene where Rose pushes Louise into her first stripping job. Herbie comes in over the moon about the fact that the act is closing and Rose is going to marry him (she’s already promised him that). Rose does not say anything in response to Herbie’s exclamations of joy. That lack of reciprocation can be played in a lot of different ways but I’ve never seen any Rose who communicated so fucking clearly and with such ominous intensity that she was desperately unhappy and did not want, even a little bit, to marry Herbie.

So, not to go through the whole show: “Rose’s Turn” live–at least as we saw it–is pretty different from the version she performed at the Tonys. It’s even more intense, and sometimes that comes out as Rose whispering/speaking/shouting instead of singing the lyrics. And those parts are so raw that you feel like well, she’s already completely broken down, her voice must be shot–but then she’ll take one of those spoken/screamed lines and turn it back into melody and it gets even more intense. People were on their feet and screaming for Audra McDonald before the song was over. And one of the cool things about that is…

OK, so “Rose’s Turn” is a soliloquy, but Rose is definitely playing to an imaginary audience. After the song is over, Rose takes a number of bows in front of the imaginary audience, and when Louise comes out to make it up with her, Rose is still bowing to the invisible people. When Louise asks Rose what the hell she’s doing, Rose says, “I was just working on some ideas for your new act.” (or something to that effect)

Here’s the thing, though: Rose’s audience may be imaginary but Audra McDonald’s audience is very real–and, by the time we get to the bows at the end of “Rose’s Turn,” VERY loud and VERY MUCH losing their minds over McDonald’s performance of that song. So for a while, Rose’s imaginary world finally becomes real and Rose finally gets all the applause she’s been denied all her life. It goes on for quite some time, especially since people who don’t know the show just assume that MUST be the end of it. The cheering was still going strong when Louise came out, and it took a minute for the audience to realize they were going to have to stop cheering so they could hear the end of the show. So everyone sat down…and when McDonald said the “just working on some ideas” line, it got this huge laugh–because the contrast between what we’d just seen and what Rose was trying to convince Louise of was just so absurd.

Anyway. This is how you keep the classics alive–by finding new things for them to mean. I feel really lucky to have seen this Gypsy!. I’ll go see it again next time there’s a production in my area and it will mean something different and I’ll enjoy that. But dang. This is one for the history books.

https://plaidadder.tumblr.com/post/786760049132552192