Audra McDonald delivers a captivating and critically acclaimed performance as Momma Rose in the new Broadway revival of the classic musical 'Gypsy'.
From the moment she emerges, stalking down the orchestra’s left aisle, exhorting to the stage, “Sing out, Louise,” Audra McDonald galvanizes our attention in the extraordinary new revival of the Stephen Sondheim-Jule Styne-Arthur Laurents musical. This is perhaps to be expected. Take the most decorated theater actress of her generation (six Tonys and counting), and put her in arguably the greatest musical theater role ever written, and surely some kind of fireworks will erupt.
Yet as high as the bar might have been for McDonald, 54, playing the infamously controlling stage mother Momma Rose, the actress delivers a performance that’s almost otherworldly. Her gorgeous, lyrical soprano voices finds new shadings to standards more commonly associated with the belting of. As a dramatic actress, her every gesture deepens our understanding of a monstrous, yet sympathetic character who, just when she might pull herself back from the brink of monomania, invariably makes the wrong choice. Musical theater performances, where characters break out in song every few minutes, never feel this psychologically credible, this deeply felt. McDonald’s work is, in effect, a blueprint for the entire production: classical, but ever-so-subtly innovative. In Depression-era Seattle, a single mother dreams for her two daughters the stardom that she could never attain herself. The odyssey that unfolds is at once a loving valentine to the age of vaudeville, and a kind of gender-reversed “King Lear,” about a relentlessly ambitious mother convinced she’s sacrificing everything for her ungrateful daughters, who increasingly want nothing to do with her. As directed by George C. Wolfe and choreographed by Camille A. Brown, the drama is as enveloping as the musical numbers are triumphant — everything click
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