Kenneth Hurren on the musical memoirs of 'Gypsy'
It is a long time since I enjoyed myself at a musical comedy quite as much as I did at the show called Gypsy, which arrived in London last week at the Piccadilly. Its importation from the United States, where it first enchanted the Broadway night back in 1959, IS said to have been delayed owing to a general conviction that to put it on anywhere without employing Ethel Merman in its central role would be folly of a grotesque order; but this misapprehension is firmly quashed by Angela Lansbury, almost from the instant of her first appearance as a formidable matron who erupts in the stalls, strides purposefully down the aisle and clambers on the stage which, in this opening scene, represents the Seattle venue of the sort of amateurtalent contest that might easily intimidate Hughie Green. It may he that Miss Merman, whose performances tend to flamboyance, While unquestionably an asset to any show, actually obscured the .basic, independent merits of this One; but I'm only guessing. The unassailable fact is that Gypsy gets along very well in her absence, and ,,that Miss Lansbury, though her singing voice is serv
iceable rather than authoritative, gives a vigorous, heart-storming performance that gets under the skin of the character with far more insight and conviction than we are accustomed to expect on the musical stage. Hers is not, of course, the title role. The musical (with book by Arthur Laurents, who has also directed this production) was ' suggested ' by the memoirs of Gypsy Rose Lee who, for the benefit of the unworldly, was about the only girl who ever found fame as a striptease performer. It was in a more innocent age than our own. The bold, explicit and gymnastic young women in the trade today are said generally to begin where Gypsy Rose Lee left off; and the habitues of the clubs and bars where they operate would doubtless give a brisk and raucous heave-ho to her ultimate, discreet display of three strategically placed clusters of rhinestones. It is clear that she never advanced any notion that would have been repugnant to a relatively broadminded nun, and that the essence of her exposure was her composure, but Gypsy was regarded as a pretty saucy lady back in the 'thirties. It is one of the holes in my culture that I have not, in fact, read her memoirs, but she seems to have taken a mildly amused view of her fame, to have been engagingly frank about the minuscule amount of talent required in her particular area of show business, and to have otherwise concentrated on life with mother, and that's what makes the show.
Mother (this is Miss Lansbury's part) is a woman dedicated to the vicarious realisation of her own lost show-business ambitions through her daughters whose stage careers she has evidently been promoting long before the aforementioned amateur-talent show. When we see them there, as their mother barges in to supervise their presentation, accompaniment and lighting (" Slap something pink on Baby June "), they are aged eight and six. The elder, Louise (the one who eventually turns out to be Gypsy), is only the second string at this point. Mamma's attention, along with the pink spotlight, is focused on Baby June, an unnervingly confident tot played by Bonnie Langford, whose rendition of the child's stage performance is a calculatedly ghastly parody of the earliest Shirley Temple (and, indeed, of the moppet that little Miss Langford herself was recently playing in Gone With the Wind) and is, in view ofher tender years and presumed unfamiliarity with the original model, astonishing, to put it mildly.
Most of the first half of the show is devoted to the grooming of Baby June for' stardom' and in the course of it, Miss Langford gives place in the role to Debbie Bowen, the changeover being handled in as neat a piece of stage trickery as you could wish to see. The act that Momma has built around her is totally dismaying, and the fact that it was booked at all confirms every suspicion I ever had about the death of vaudeville. June eventually abandons the troupe and elopes with a boy dancer (and later, though this is not in the show, becomes a movingpicture actress named June Havoc). Reeling from this serpent's tooth, Momma is inconsolable for, say, thirty seconds, before casting a speculative eye over the quaking Louise and feeling sufficiently encouraged to burst into 'Everything's Coming Up Roses.'
The pace slackens somewhat thereafter, but there remains a • pleasing inventiveness about the show as it Works its way around to the moment when, reacting gamely tO a fortuitous combination of circumstances, the cheerfully untalented Louise, who has hitherto been happiest when concealed from public view as the back legs of a dancing bull, summons the nerve to deputise decorously for a missing stripper, and is on the way to Minsky's, fame and fortune as Gypsy Rose Lee. Not the least gratifying element of her success is that it enables her to assert her independence of her mother. I'm just a little uncertain about whether Laurents has done the right thing by the integrity of the work in tagging on Momma's self-analytical reaction to rejection as a sentimentalised coda. There's no doubt, though, that the sequence rounds off Miss Lansbury's performance on a stunningly triumphant note.
Zan Charisse, who plays Gypsy, is another choice ingredient in the success of the enterprise, being as gifted as she is ornamental and thoroughly endearing. Barrie Ing ham is also pleasantly on hand for most of the proceedings as the troupe's persevering agent, making occasional wan attempts to break down Momma's resistance to marriage, which she seems to base generally on the grounds that" after three husbands it takes a lot of butter to get you back in the frying-pan "(a line that entertained me at the time, however indifferently it reproduces in print); and I should also mention a lad named Andrew Norman, who does a nice, stylish job with a song-and-dance number called, ' All I Need Now is the Girl.' There are other songs in the show that you'll probably recognise, for they've been around a long time, but I think you'll invariably be surprised by the ways they come into the action, of which — as in the case of all the best show songs — they are an essential part. The music is by Julie Styne (who also wrote the scores for Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, Bells Are Ringing and Funny Girl); and the lyrics are by Stephen Sondheim (whose most well-known previous work was West Side Story); it is a remarkably happy collaboration.
I come belatedly to, and haven't much to say about, Edward Bond's The Sea at the Royal Court, which, for this generally disenchanted dramatist, takes a fairly genial view of mankind: or, perhaps more properly, of the innate potentialities of human • nature, as opposed to the dis piriting conditions of society that we have allowed to be imposed upon it. Bond describes it as a comedy, but in this department he is not exactly an Alan Bennett or a Neil Simon, and I suspect uneas ily that his more profound in
tentions largely eluded my scrutiny. (I wish I could be certain, for example, why the play is called. The Sea and why it is set in Ed
wardian times.) The principal players are Coral Browne, Ian Holm and Alan Webb, who all im pressed me no end, not least because they all appear to grasp exactly what they're about.
For even more specialised tastes, the Umewaka Noh Troupe from Japan is at the Aldwych in the World Theatre Season, with selections from their ancient and stately repertoire. The stylised, ritualistic (and funereally slow) movements of the' actors ' clearly demand more esoteric knowledge than I possess, and the speech, too, seems peculiarly unnatural, encompassing a great many more burps, hiccoughs and grunts than I have ever noticed in ordinary Japanese conversation. I am not altogether surprised that this ' dialogue ' has defeated the Aldwych's usual system of instant, transistorised translation; and the East has rarely seemed to me more mysterious.
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