WPCNR IN THE WINGS. Review by John F. Bailey. June 9, 2007: Mama Mia’s Karen Mason delivered a Broadway diva’s performance as Mama Rose, the domineering, controlling mother of the icon of ecdysiasts, Gypsy Rose Lee at Westchester Broadway Theatre Friday evening. Here is a musical about show business that moves with drive, and a talented lead in Ms. Mason who is a wow,
Karen Mason Brings the Audience to their feet with Rose’s Turn in Act II of GYPSY at the Westchester Broadway Theatre
All Photos by John Vecchiola, Courtesy, Westchester Broadway Theatre
Kellie Barrett as Louise (the ingenue) transforming into Gypsy Rose Lee in her city to city burlesque tour in Act II. Ms. Barrett captures the innocence and style that made Ms. Lee the Queen of Burlesque.
Ms. Mason fills the stage with a big, brassy edge and powerhouse cords that command with sweep, conviction and unmistakable Mermanesque moxie. But it is Ms. Mason’s stage. She’s all there in her blockbuster tune, Everything’s Coming Up Roses, and her bring-down-the-house finale, Rose’s Turn. She contraltos the love songs, Small World, (dueting with her foil Rick Hilsabeck as Herbie) and You’ll Never Get Away From Me with articulate intimacy and confidence that makes those songs new.
The full house Friday night was treated to the vaudeville life from Seattle to L.A. to Detroit to Wichita in the Depression as a showbiz struck mom pushes her daughters to elusive stardom. We lurch from railroad station to railroad station to seedy theatrical hotels, to brick walled stages of the majestic theatrical palaces of the distant vaudeville past.
Gypsy, the David Merrick/Leland Hayward mega musical of the early 60s, based on Gypsy Rose Lee’s memoir, has a gimmick and the gimmick is Ms. Mason who is rarely off the stage and delivers the role as Merman probably played it.
Jonathan Stahl as Uncle Jocko, with Alex Bradsell as Young Louise,(foreground, left) and Sophia Lebowitz (foreground, right) as Baby June in the first of three vaudeville numbers in Act One.
She is the domineering director of an ensemble who reworks the same vaudeville kid act three times in Act One (a spinoff of such child acts as the Foys and Cohans of the vaudeville era). Under Mama Rose’s direction the act is reworked twice in Act One much to the audience’s amusement – from a newsboy act featuring her two daughters Baby June and Baby Louise, to a patriotic act, to a farm act, using the same steps, to a toreadore number in Act Two when her daughter and her almost grown young people are playing the southwest.
Celebrating a Booking at Mr. Gladstone’s Theatre. Karen Mason is Rose, in blue, giving Mr. Gladstone (Johnathan Stahl) a cigar, with Sarah Peak as Dainty June, doing the split.
At first light, Mama Rose’s daughters have just flopped at an audition for Uncle Jocko’s Vaudeville show (a very funny sequence), and on the way out, they meet up with a candy salesman, Herbie, (the Jack Klugman role in the original Broadway production) played valiantly by Rick Hilsabeck, whose love for Mama Rose is consistently thwarted by her devotion to her daughters.
How brassy is Ms. Mason? When a producer’s secretary is on the telephone, she yells, “Don’t answer the telephone when I’m shouting at you.”
The Show reaches crisis at the close of act one when June, the sister with “talent” played with spunk, sass and winning coquettishness by Kayla Vanderbilt (in Friday’s performance) in the early newsboy act, to her sympathy-winning sister Baby Louise, created with genius “underplaying” by the young actress Rebecca Simpson-Wallack, where both ingenues sing Let Me Entertain You. Then by the older June, Sarah Peak, who is able to pull the transition from the child actress very believably and makes the same act just as entertaining in different costumes. The cow act is hysterical, even though it’s the same choreography in different costumes. We loved the dancing cow.
When June leaves to elope with one of the dancers in the act, Tulsa ( who has become a young man, wanting to break out on his own, Ms. Mason delivers one of the few missteps in an otherwise understandable performance. She snarls, snears with a very mean face saying of her younger daughter, “She’s nothing without me.”
This is unsettling and delivered with over the top ugly meanness, it’s shocking. This is a big time Direction mistake. She has to deliver that line with a sob – so the audience can continue feeling sympathy for the character – to feel the pain of a mother’s love – not hate. They have to fix that. But that’s a direction problem and a book problem. Still, it is a jarring moment in the show you never quite get out of your mind. That one moment makes the powerhouse ending of this production not quite believable. Just a sob, Ms. Mason, will do it.
Mama Rose decides she is going to make a star out her other daughter, Louise, played by Kelli Barrett, who mostly stands on the stage as a follower in the shadow of sister, and watches in Act One, and as the musical progresses, her underplay is a little too underplayed. She plays Louise as a spectator to her sister June’s stardom, without resentment. A very mousy girl.
She lets Tulsa whom she has a crush on run away with her sister June. She begins to get going with the role here by showing emotion. She is not quite believable as having the spirit to become the Gypsy Rose Lee we see, slithering and shimmering about the stage at the close of the show. A little surliness and pouting, tears and resignation please! She shows this in a touching soft and believable performance of Little Lamb on her birthday.
Jordan Nichols as Tulsa has a neat star turn singing All I Need is the Girl to Louise at the end of Act One, that is received very nicely. Ms. Barrett’s Louise, observing Tulsa, shows such a crush, you’re thinking that hey, maybe. But that is not to be. This is where Ms. Barrett begins to turn her character around.
Gypsy delivers not one, but three up-out-of-your-seat performances in the Second Act.
Kellie Barrett as Louise, Rick Hilsabeck as Herbie, and Karen Mason as Rose, trooping through Together in Act II on their last stop in Wichita, Kansas. Lobby still.
Act II opens at the Wichita Seven Wonders show in Wichita, Kansas. Herbie, the agent whom Mama Rose refuses to marry, but who keeps beating the hick towns for bookings for the aging act has booked the aging troop into a Wichita burlesque house. The act, with June having eloped, is now Louise and the Hollywood Blondes as the “Toreadorables.” However, the act does not work out because – well, you’ll see as Ms. Barretts’ Louise –comes alive with a dogged attempt to fill in for June. The second act delivers some good humor here.
Kathryn Kendall as Miss Cratchett, left. The showstopper, Inga Ballard as Mazeppa, and Ngaire Martin as Tessie Tura show off their gimmicks. A hilarious tour de force that the audience loves. Publicity Lobby Photo
Then, Mama Rose and Louise and the rest of the troop learn about the life of burlesque in one of the funny, but not-for-the-children audience as the three burlesque stars deliver a raunchy, flaunt and bump your body number, You Gotta Have a Gimmick, in which each stripper shows off her “gimmick.” Inga Ballard as Mazeppa, fractures the audience with her trumpet as her gimmick. (How do you strip with a trumpet, you’ll have to see). Kathryn Kendall as Miss Cratchett literally lights up the house, and Ann-Ngaire Martin as Tessie Tura, works ballet into her gimmick. This is not a number for the young ones. But there is no nudity. Stripper costumes, yes.
As luck would have it, it’s the last day of their booking and the troop is about to break up and the main stripper has not shown up. The manager of the theatre needs someone to go on. Mama Rose says Louise can do it. Here Barrett as Louise pulls it off. Once again she sacrifices. She was going to go back to school, and Mama Rose was going to finally marry Herbie. Instead, her Mother gets one more last idea for her.
To fill a contract, Louise urged by her mother, makes her first appearance as a stripper, emerging from ugly duckling into Ms. Elegance in a blue evening gown. (What have we here?) In her first strip, she tentatively removes a glove and shows a shoulder, and tries to sing Let Me Entertain You. It is painful to watch and Ms. Barrett really nails the audience with her feigned stage fright and tentativeness. We get in her corner.
With a little imagination, the director, Richard Stafford could have had planted cat calls from the audience turning to appreciation, so we, the audience would have an idea of the appeal of this first strip that resulted in more bookings. I mean there would have been catcalls at a burlesque house. But, apparently her shy act scores. This first strip is painful to watch. It takes talent for an actress to strip badly on purpose, and Ms. Barrett established an emotional connection with the audience for the first time as we feel the hesitancy of her first performance.
Ms. Barrett on her next stops polishes up her act, making us want to see more and more. But she never does show more and more. That was Ms. Lee’s appeal, too.
The new Gypsy, with Ms. Barrett finessing and vamping up her style, dances in sequential numbers in Detroit, Philadelphia and New York then Paris. Here Ms. Barrett shows off the long, long, long,long boa.
We watch Ms. Barrett polish her act as the international queen of burlesque, Gypsy. She gains confidence and glamour with each number, essentially the same but smashingly entertaining. Her “strips” are teases – strip sequences make full spectacular use of WBT’s elevating platform. Ms. Barrett has the legs and fills an evening gown deliciously and elegantly. Her provocative presence and sophistication steam up with each successive striptease sequence.
She showed excellent trouper’s poise, though having trouble with one costume change and gamely managing through it, (holding up her green gown almost having an equipment malfunction). Ms. Barrett shows progressively more confidence in each strip on the tour.
The show finishes with Mama Rose having a hard time handling Louise, now a star, and her success.
Ms. Barrett and her mother throw a great argument with Ms. Barrett’s Gypsy holding her own against her Mom (and showing signs of her mother’s iron will –supposedly developed on tour) in Gypsy’s dressing room in Paris.
The results set up the over-the-top finish when Ms. Mason belts out Rose’s Turn that brings the audience to their feet. She is terrifically entertaining and watching her, any young lady would want to have this kind of talent, or want to develop it.
We’ll let you decide if Gypsy’s end retrieves the overtones of smothering parenting.
WBT Turned Into a Vaudeville Palace by George Puello’s set. Photo by WPCNR.
George Puello and Steven Loftus have created impressive moving sets, including use of painted cityscape backdrops of the depression 30s, train stations, and the illusion of giant vaudeville houses. Lighting by Andrew Gmoser compliments, dazzles, enchants in what is Puello’s best staging we’ve seen in years at the WBT. George’s stagings are always good, but tonight’s show makes more of WBT’s hydraulic lifts and light gimmicks than any this reporter has seen. Mr. Puello seemed born again in his creative use of the WBT stage.
This is not a show for young children, though a talented troup of youngsters play splendidly in the first act. Gypsy is a history lesson that’s a real smash for 90% of the evening, and received a 3-minute standing ovation.
Westchester Broadway Theatre takes you back to the golden age of Broadway with these shows that are about 50 to 60 years old. Gypsy recalls a bygone era of great songs and dance and staging when pyrotechnics, electronics and production gimmicks were at a minimum and talent, a great feel good story came together and worked the emotions.
Gypsy is playing Tuesday through Sundays at the WBT through August 4. Learn more by going to their website, www.broadwaytheatre.com
