GYPSY and SHOW BOAT are back on stage. One shows you how to do a revival of a canon musical, and the other uses Audra McDonald to justify charging $100 a ticket.
When it comes to revivals, you gotta get a gimmick
In the new mountings of Gypsy and Show Boat, there’s some literal signposting. In the former, the little boys scooped up to become a part of Mama Rose’s (Audra McDonald) kiddie vaudeville act, headlined by her daughter June, hop around with the highway plaques denoting which cities they’ve traveled to on their odyssey towards the Orpheum Circuit. In the latter, various cast members carry large cardboard rectangles, waving them in a circle, as if they’re the carnival barkers at the Chicago’s World’s Fair, each imprinted with the name of whatever exotic exhibit in appropriately antiquated typeface. Call it a sign of the times.
These two transitions, despite their similar function, nonetheless land differently, both as isolated aesthetic moments — Gypsy’s signs are sorta kitschy, Show Boat’s are stark and bold — and in the context of what their productions seem to be doing, or not doing. There’s certainly enough signage in George C. Wolfe’s revival in Gypsy, sometimes towering above Rose, Louise, and the troupe, like a big billboard that taunts “Live like a rich man”, or sometimes hangs out like a ghost in the back like the list of rules on the door at a boarding house that includes “no cooking”. But their effects feel strangely feint, much like most of the directorial decisions; unmoored from time, muddy in color, forgettable. But in the new production/reworking of Show Boat by the Target Margin Theater and directed by founder David Herskovits and retitled Show/Boat: A River, the spare use of signs, though leaning a tad more academic in implementation, still hits with a brick: door-sized gaps in the stage-length white background have “white” and “Black” hovering above them, recalling Jim Crow segregation and seen from the audience’s seats as if they’ve been posted in reverse, while the actors who pass through the doors don and doff sashes that read “white” when they play a white character.
The two seemingly minor or esoteric details — do audiences ever really care about signage in musical shows? — still illustrate a kind of divergent technique to revive or reenliven stage shows that have been remounted time and again and the effort to make them fresh or justify their existence. Show Boat is one of the musicals that started it all, its 1927 Broadway premiere (based on the 1924 book by Edna Ferber, produced by impresario Florenz Ziegfeld, with music by Jerome Kern and lyrics by Oscar Hammerstein II) a new path in theatre as a proto book musical, deviating from the previously popular forms of operetta, light comedy, revues, and vaudeville. And Gypsy meanwhile perfected the form of a classic book musical, featuring book by Arthur Laurents, music by Jule Styne, and lyrics by a young Stephen Sondheim, thus gilding its place in Golden Age musical theater history with its 1959 Broadway premiere. The shows’ dual reviving is curious and almost amusingly coincidental: their historical/narrative timelines overlap, with Show Boat’s covering the 1880s and ambitiously spreading its wingspan into the 1930s while Gypsy picks up where Show Boat leaves off, beginning in the 1920s and ending in the late 1950s, with both examining/nostalgizing/mourning/anxiety predicting the history and state of the entertainment industry, from riverboat Blackface minstrel shows, to vaudeville, to burlesque, to Broadway, to the movies. And, inevitably, the story of the entertainment industry is the story of America itself.
But Gypsy and Show/Boat: A River have differing senses of fidelity as to how much they actually want to engage with those concepts, which are basically scrawled across both shows’ librettos. In a production dotted with large grey geometric shapes and flattened depth, the Star Spangled Banner (sometimes anachronistically featuring all 50 stars) appears in most of Rose’s designs for June’s numbers. In the transition from hyperenergetic Baby June to perpetually infantilized young adult Dainty June with her Newsboys, the flag hangs perpendicular, the a few giant stars sitting at the top while the stripes hang down and provide an entry and exitway for the Black boys to switch to being white young men. While the subtext here is juicy — the damning fatalism of a light skinned June (an amazing Jordan Tyson) only managing a modicum of success abetted by lily white chorus boys — it’s one of the few touches in a revival that plays fast and loose with to what degree it wants to incorporate a racial reality.
Conversely, no stars or stripes appear in Show/Boat: A River, but, in doing a show that was always interested in race in America (its executions throughout the years sometimes faltering in conveying that) it is emphatically concerned with race and performance in a fresh way that not only illustrates the original show’s critiques of appropriation, but put the artifact of Show Boat itself up for debate as to the “raciality” of its text. Controversially, Kern and Hammerstein commenced the show with the N-word sung by Black chorus describing exploitative Reconstruction Era labor practicies, the songwriters’ defense being that it was an ironic usage to comment on the tropes and cliches Black performers had to play and white audiences had become accustomed to. Here, Stephanie Weeks, who plays Julie (who is later revealed to be mixed race, but has been passing as white), steps out onto the stage and, without any microphone or audio amplification, speaks with careful precision the opening verses: “N-words all work on de Mississippi, N-words work while de white folks play.” The rest of the cast then comes out on stage and begins to sing the opening number “Cotton Blossom”, leaving the audience with a sense of discomfort, an extension and subversion of Kern and Hammerstein’s objectives, both from what they hear and how they heard it.
The notion of performance and theatrical history almost feels like an afterthought in Wolfe’s version of Gypsy, the production’s aspirations and interests seemingly beginning and ending with the thought experiment of Audra McDonald as Mama Rose. The take is Audra’s Rose is more ordinary and more human, but with all the hand waving and finger gesticulating in lieu of acting, this momma is more banal than bravura. She need not be a monster, as others like Ethel Merman or Patti LuPone have played her, but Rose’s uphill battle in a shifting cultural landscape (one that is apparently indecisive as to the effect of her race) should at least have the heel print of each step up the crumbling mountain of vaudeville.
While Camille A. Brown’s choreography is pleasantly energetic, each passing moment betrays a lack of interest or excitement in one of the reasons why Gypsy is so often revered as a crown jewel of the American musical theatre: its playful relationship with diegesis and which performances are “in the universe of the show” and which are for the audience. That it has an at best casual concern for how race is or is not a part of this production’s world seems only to undermine this revival’s acuity: beyond the thin, if even present, manner in which race impacts Rose, June, and Louise’s road to securing gigs, it does not even reveal itself in the minute and subtle aspects of code switching or the modulating of characters’ gestures or way of relating to other characters of other races. Perhaps most frustratingly, when Louise (a brilliant but underserved Joy Woods) does The Strip, she is apparently made to rush through it, sprinting from her first, impromptu gig taciturnly wading through “Let Me Entertain You”, to the final blossoming into Gypsy Rose Lee in a Garden of Eden setup that tries to channel the great Josephine Baker. In every other production, Louise is supposed to strip tease through each set up, giving the audience a bar of “Let Me Entertain You” as we see her grow into a legend and become a titan on par with her mother; here, Woods barely has time to make it from one setup to the other, only getting to do the bookends of the song, thus denying the audience the experience of watching the evolution of both her voice and her performance style. In an interview in the New Yorker, Wolfe says, “Burlesque is where the truth gets told.” As far as this production is concerned, that’s a lie.
These are both shows about bodies and spectatorship, who views what when, who performs where and for whom, and how these positions of object and subject are constantly shifting in a world of increasing images and decreasing senses of embodiment.
Which is not to say this author thinks that race or other identity marks need be a thing or a centerpiece of every new production that casts a non-white actor in a role or show that’s historically been cast as white, but Wolfe’s inconsistency with how, when, and why he wants race to change or shape the reality of the show strikes me as dull and feckless. It is neither color blind casting nor a production in which racial realities impact the world and trajectory of its characters, hovering indifferently in the middle, thus making the production itself feel fairly inessential.
In contrast, Show/Boat: A River will not let its audience forget about race as reality and performance. Herskowitz impressively eschews the didacticism of formal exercise — the production is very Brechtian, bare, and features almost no sets — by still encouraging his performers to engage with the heart of its characters and the soul of its music through a kind of naturalism, while simultaneously placing those performance techniques and habits into question. Much of the movement the actors make is gestural, with Julie and Magnolia frequently pantomiming or posing with their arms cresting over their heads. The performers toggle between the hearty and emotionally striking immediacy of naturalism and an alienating and invigorating deadpan affectless or sometimes very presentational style of performance, and occasionally within the same line or phrase. Suzanne Darrell as Queenie rereads a line in which she is being interrogated by a white racist about where she got her broach: first, it’s without affect, as if a rehearsal for the line in some ghostly netherworld. And then she does it again, with a Southern drawl, wide vowels, and big eyes, confronting the audience the how the text of the libretto casts Queenie as a Mammy stereotype. Elsewhere, the show’s inquiry into how white performers came to find success on the backs of Black artists and musicians finds itself in how different cast members perform one of songs that’s become a standard, frequently covered by white singers, “Can’t Help Lovin’ Dat Man”. Stephanie Weeks’ Julie modulates her voice such that it is slightly pinched when she first sings the song in the first act, and Queenie asks how Julie knows the song given that she primarily knows it from Black people. But when she sings it again in the second act, it’s throaty, molasses like. And when Magnolia, the white girl that serves as a kind of younger sister for Julie, performs it and makes it her headline song, the notes sit at the top of her throat, a small songbird who explicitly tells the music director that she traffics in music by Black people. The knowledge that all of these music was written by two white Jewish men, adapting a book by a white Jewish woman, eerily haunts the show as we watch.
No, not every revival of a many times revived, reworked, retinkered show need be a radical or inventive or deconstruction or whatever as Show/Boat: A River. It is true that Herskowitz has taken Show Boat, stripped it of its skin, turned it inside out, and yet, all the while, kept its beating heart intact. But that this version has a clear motivation to give audiences a new experience, to see a show that’s a firmament of musical theatre and performance tradition, anew, and to hopefully interrogate the piece itself, is what feels extraordinary and should be essential in any revival. It’s what’s so disappointing about the new Gypsy: it doesn’t appear to offer much that’s new. We already knew that Rose’s decisions — whether portrayed as monstrous or conniving or simply delusional in their ferocity of “love” — was detrimental to her children. That’s Gypsy 101. And we already know that “Rose’s Turn”, the 11 o’clock number, is supposed to complicate and problematize our feelings about Rose, whether as a song about dreams deferred or maternal heartbreak. You can get that from any random cover on Spotify. Where Show/Boat: A River illuminates a path for revivals to invite questions and news ways of seeing a treasured cultural artifact, Audra Gypsy simply works as a pitch to a Broadway producer to justify charging $100 a ticket. That’s entertainment, I guess.
