After all, Ms. LuPone became famous for her no-holds-barred portrayal of an actress of ravenous and ravening ambition in the title role of “Evita” three decades ago, and ambition is Momma Rose’s oxygen. What’s more, Ms. LuPone has lungs and larynx of brass to rival those of Ethel Merman, the rafter-shaking star of the original “Gypsy” in 1959, to whom Ms. LuPone has often been compared.
Yet in the enjoyable but unenthralling production of “Gypsy” that opened Saturday at City Center and runs through July 29, part of the new Encores! Summer Stars series, Ms. LuPone does not, for once, feel like an unstoppable force. As Rose, the child-flattening maternal steamroller with Broadway dreams, she seems to be still fiddling with the gears and looking over her shoulder when she needs to be plowing full speed ahead with blinders on.
There’s a lot to recommend in Ms. LuPone’s performance and even more in the production itself, directed by Arthur Laurents, who wrote the show’s book. Ms. LuPone has endowed the thwarted Rose with charm, sensuality, a sense of humor, a startling lack of diva vanity and even a spark of bona fide mother love.
Contrary to what you might have anticipated, Ms. LuPone is less a Rose of billboard-size flair and ego than the sort of pushy but likable woman you might compete with at the supermarket for that last perfect sole fillet. (You’d lose, but you wouldn’t hate her.) Ms. LuPone has given us a human Rose, with doubts and a nagging tug of self-awareness. But once you introduce such traits into Momma Rose, the air starts to leak out of her.
I do believe there’s more than one way to make Rose flower. Though I didn’t see Merman, I did catch Angela Lansbury (1974), Tyne Daly (1989) and Bernadette Peters (2003), and could happily defend the wildly different approaches of each.
What they all projected, though, was Rose’s ferocious, unswerving single-mindedness. Ms. LuPone, in contrast, seems to slide in her purposeful focus, the way her voice — more trombone than trumpet — famously slides around on notes.
She can’t resist playing jokes for jokes’ sake, giving lines a Mae West-style spin that, however amusing, puts a distance between star and character. And in singing Jule Styne’s adrenaline-stirring melodies, she never pursues a straight line, so that the great Act 1 finale, “Everything’s Coming Up Roses,” has a feeling of distracting, internalized restlessness.
Without a tidal wave of a Momma Rose, this production lacks the emotional momentum to be a transporting “Gypsy.” Nonetheless, anyone seeing “Gypsy” for the first time should have no difficulty understanding why this adaptation of the memoirs of the stripper Gypsy Rose Lee is the great American musical.
Like two hit revivals currently on Broadway, “Chicago” and “A Chorus Line,” “Gypsy” is an anatomy of the obsessions that draw people into show business and keep them there, even when they’re drowning. Neither as cynical as “Chicago” nor as touchy-feely as “A Chorus Line,” “Gypsy,” set in the dying days of vaudeville, is both clear-eyed and celebratory about the energy and egotism that feed even marginal forms of theater.
This exciting, double-edged quality is evident in every aspect of the show, to which a young man named Stephen Sondheim contributed the lyrics. Mr. Styne’s score melds razzle-dazzle audacity with a breath of wistfulness for the unobtainable. And as might be expected from an Encores! production, the orchestra (overseen by Patrick Vaccariello) gives life to that score with a fullness that itself justifies the price of a ticket.
Unlike previous Encores! fare, this one is presented not as a concert but as a full-dress production, with cheerfully seedy sets (by James Youmans) and costumes (by Martin Pakledinaz) that emphasize the quality of showbiz fable. The ingenious, plot-propelling choreography by Jerome Robbins, who also directed the original, has been appealingly recreated here (by Bonnie Walker). And Mr. Laurents, who directed the Broadway revivals of 1974 and 1989, obviously knows the show’s impeccably assembled mechanics better than anyone alive.
Which is not to say this production is mechanical. As brilliantly structured and paced as it inherently is, “Gypsy” doesn’t play itself. There’s enough complexity for wide variation in character and emphasis. And Mr. Laurents, while occasionally overdoing the comic broad strokes, also elicits refreshing insights from the supporting performances.
True, the strippers who initiate Gypsy into their art are the usual set of endearing cartoons (with Marilyn Caskey’s nearly comatose Electra the most endearing of all).
But Boyd Gaines, as Rose’s long-suffering beau and business partner, Herbie, is affectingly credible, and he and Ms. LuPone generate a relaxed sexual chemistry that explains why he stays with her. And Rose’s younger daughter, June, has never been more completely drawn, both as a child (Sami Gayle) and a young woman (Leigh Ann Larkin). There’s steel beneath the frills of this June from the beginning, and a shrewd ambition that eclipses her mother’s.
I have never been more conscious of the ambivalence between June and her sister, Louise, the hang-dog tomboy who grows up to be Gypsy Rose Lee. Laura Benanti, late of “The Wedding Singer,” is delicious in the title role. (The appealingly watchful-faced Emma Rowley plays her younger self.) Ms. Benanti invests even her early scenes with a tincture of latent ambition that makes her apotheosis as burlesque queen seem inevitable.
But the show’s surprising high point is when Louise and June finally sit down to talk — or this being a musical, sing — about the problems of life with Mother, in a version of “If Momma Was Married” that becomes an eye-opening moment of rival sisters discovering what they have in common, too late.
This “Gypsy” is especially good on shining a light on family frictions, and Ms. LuPone contributes beautifully to this dynamic. The early scene in which she sends both her young daughters to bed, focusing the beam of her affection exclusively on June, tells you everything you need to know about this prickly parent-child triangle and the problems it’s bound to generate.
Ms. LuPone has other such moments throughout. Her scenes with Mr. Gaines are uniformly excellent. (I’ll never forget her Rose, suggesting an abandoned army tank, standing in a dressing room after Herbie walks out on her.) And she brings a harrowing psychological nakedness to the big nervous-breakdown number, “Rose’s Turn.”
Given such moments, combined with Ms. LuPone’s dazzling performance in Mr. Sondheim’s “Sweeney Todd” two seasons ago, I suspect there’s still a first-rate Momma Rose waiting to emerge. For the moment we only have the preliminary sketch. Any halfway decent “Gypsy” — and this one is more than that — is a fine summer night’s diversion. But it needs a Momma Rose in full control to carry its audiences away.