Under George C. Wolfe and Audra McDonald, Gypsy Is Revisited Through a Black Lens | Playbill

Special Features Under George C. Wolfe and Audra McDonald, Gypsy Is Revisited Through a Black Lens

From Josephine Baker to the Chitlin’ Circuit, the new Broadway revival explores the lives of early 20th century Black performers, without changing a word.

Joy Woods and Audra McDonald in Gypsy Julieta Cervantes

Where the human spirit resides, art will always abide; art always finds a way to survive, even in the harshest of climates.

George C. Wolfe’s Broadway revival of Gypsy, which has recontextualized the classic without changing the words on the page, is ravenous for such a survival story. Positioning living legend Audra McDonald as Madam Rose, a role many consider to be the greatest ever written for the musical theatre, the production is a rebirth for a musical revived with remarkable frequency. This is, after all, the third production of Gypsy on Broadway in the last 25 years, and the sixth since the musical’s premiere in 1959. How, then, has the current revival managed to uncover a fresh perspective without altering the show's foundation?

For starters, Wolfe’s production marks the first time Rose and her daughters have been Black in a Broadway production of the musical.

In Gypsy, Stephen Sondheim and Jule Styne extrapolated upon the biography of burlesque star Gypsy Rose Lee and her family. Positioning her ambitious mother Rose as the protagonist, audiences watch her clamor to book her daughters on the legendary Orpheum Circuit, which was renowned as the most powerful contract a vaudeville performer could attain in the early 20th century. Consisting of dozens of theatres studded across the United States, the Orpheum Circuit paid its performers top dollar, affording its stars a level of financial stability previously unheard of for the trunk-and-a-tune travelling performer.

That is, if they were white.

Danny Burstein, Joy Woods, and Audra McDonald in Gypsy Julieta Cervantes

“Black performers have always been a part of the quote, unquote, mainstream vaudeville circuit,” shares Caseen Gaines, an award-winning cultural historian whose book When Broadway Was Black is one of the most popular texts on early 20th century Black theatre in the United States. “However, they were present in a really limited capacity. The white vaudeville circuit would only book one Black act a night, in comparison to a dozen white acts.”

These isolated Black vaudevillians were held to a higher standard than their white counterparts for significantly lower pay than others on the circuit. Additionally, they were most often managed by the Theatre Owners Booking Association (or TOBA), a group of mostly white theatre owners, agents, and managers who controlled the limited access Black artists had to the so-called mainstream.

For precisely one decade, TOBA controlled the supply of Black artists to theatres across the country, while also managing the demand through their ownership of the theatres. From its founding in 1920 to its collapse in 1930, the association had a different name amongst its performers: “Tough on Black Artists.” While TOBA artists had the most access then-afforded to Black artists on the vaudeville circuit, they were paid less and generally had worse accommodations, which the performers had to pay for themselves, than white vaudevillians.

“If you're looking at where Gypsy is set in American history, Audra’s Rose would have been working the TOBA circuit,” Gaines extrapolates. “In the first act, TOBA was in reach. It's not unrealistic that this Rose would have dreams of her children's act maybe getting to play the Orpheum Circuit. It was possible. It was just incredibly unlikely. When Gypsy is performed by an all-white cast, it's supposed to be unrealistic that Rose would have this act on the Orpheum Circuit because the act is not really that great. Rose has delusions of grandeur. But for this production, knowing the societal landscape of the 1920s and the deliberate red tape that was placed around the Orpheum Circuit for Black performers… I think, in a way, it causes us to reevaluate: Is the act that bad, or is it that these doors are harder to open for a Black act? Is this Rose really delusional? Or is she a Black woman demanding respect for her and her children?”

Jade Smith in Gypsy Julieta Cervantes

In the century of segregation following the end of the American Civil War, Black artists fought tooth and nail for the right to make their art, and to make it well. From southeastern juke joints to Harlem’s Renaissance, Black America cultivated its own independent artistic identity, crafting creative communities that thrived in spite of institutional disenfranchisement. While many of these artistic honing beacons transformed in form and function following the Civil Rights Movement of the mid-20th century, their impact and cultural presence remains profound.

In response to the behavior of TOBA, and the deep struggles of the Great Depression, Black America devised a different vaudeville circuit, one operated for and by themselves: the Chitlin’ Circuit.

Operated by and for Black artists and audiences, the Chitlin’ Circuit was Black America’s direct response to the racist and discriminatory policies of the existing vaudeville circuits. Instead of bending to the requests of TOBA producers and programmers who wished to police their artistry, the Chitlin’ Circuit allowed Black artists the opportunity to create for themselves and for their community, without the heaps of stereotypical artifice and minstrelsy thrust upon earlier vaudevillians like Bert Williams, George Walker, and Ada Overton Walker.

The Chitlin’ Circuit was a home base for thousands of Black artists, serving as the central breeding ground for blues, jazz, rock, and soul musicians, as well as the dance traditions of tap, cakewalk, jive, lindy hop, and more. While many venues were strictly professional affairs, others were more akin to community-wide jam sessions, offering artists the space and the time to collaborate away from the prying eyes of white America.

Audra McDonald and Joy Woods in Gypsy Julieta Cervantes

Wolfe’s Gypsy, which has cast three Black women as the Hovick clan (McDonald, Joy Woods, and Jordan Tyson), transforms Rose Hovick’s desperation from a twisted stagemother-gone-mad scheme into a deeply emotional insistence that yes, her girls are good. They’re great, even. But in the power structure of white-dominated vaudeville, their chances to truly hit the big time are slim. McDonald’s Rose carries herself as though she has no choice but to blunt-force her way through the closed doors surrounding her, taking the brunt of the hit in order to clear a path for her children.

Or rather, clear a path for her child. For essentially all of the first act, Rose is laser-focused on her youngest daughter, June, and her shot at stardom. As played by Marley Lianne Gomes and Jordan Tyson, June is an undeniable force of energy on stage, dancing and belting her way through a Shirley Temple-esque ode to all things conservatively-cute. She waves the flag, blows a kiss, and does a series of hip-cracking high kicks, all the while smiling with post-show massage-necessitating ferocity.

“June reminds me of actors like Fredi Washington,” Gaines offers. “Fredi was a very fair-skinned Black actor who would often find that casting agents would want to put her in for white characters, primarily because she was so fair skinned that, to them, she would look out of place playing domestic servants or other stereotypical Black roles. This June makes me think about how someone with that skin complexion could and often would pass, in order to gain roles that would otherwise go to white actors. It's not that unusual what Rose is doing, and it's not that delusional.”

As Wolfe put it in an interview with NPR prior to the production's opening, channeling Rose’s perspective within the show: "There's only so far one can go in America if you are a certain color, so, let me change that and then I'll push this act further and I'll push my daughter further. And [June is] of a certain hue, so she's passable. I don't want to be a hit on the Chitlin' Circuit. I want to be a hit on the Orpheum Circuit."

Zachary Daniel Jones, Tony d'Alelio, Jordan Tyson, Kevin Csolak, and Brendan Sheehan in Gypsy Julieta Cervantes

In Wolfe’s production, what starts as an all-Black children’s act with Rose’s two daughters and four young boys rapidly transforms into what would appear to a 1930s audience as an all-white act, with a blonde-bewigged June surrounded by white male dancers as Louise is hidden away in the back half of a cow costume.

“George cast a number of Black actors to play the original set of newsboys, so within the context of the show, the act starts out with a very fair-skinned, possibly passing-as-white young girl, with a bunch of Black boys supporting her, which was not incredibly far-fetched for some white acts at that time. It's not usual, but it's not incredibly far-fetched. You see things like that in the '20s and '30s, in films like the Our Gang comedies,” Gaines explains. “And then, as time goes on, we see George demonstrate the difference between active voice and passive voice as a director. In the way the production is traditionally staged, the passage of time is just noted, sort of as something that just happened, as opposed to this revival, where the passage of time is noted by Rose's deliberate actions. She is making the choice to fire these Black boys as they grow into men, and replace them with white men. It is deliberate.”

Also deliberate is the casting of Herbie, Rose’s romantic partner and her daughter's agent.

When this revival of Gypsy was first announced, all that was known was that Wolfe would be directing McDonald, with no further casting or concept announced to the public. Rumors swirled, with several industry gossips insisting that it was going to be an all-Black production, and that Brian Stokes Mitchell (McDonald’s frequent co-star and a favored collaborator of Wolfe’s) would play opposite her. Such rumors were thrown to the wind when the final casting was announced, with Tony winner Danny Burstein cast as Herbie.

Zachary Daniel Jones, Brendan Sheehan, Audra McDonald, Andrew Kober, Danny Burstein, and Jordan Tyson in Gypsy Julieta Cervantes

“The casting of Danny Burstein is beautifully interesting to me,” Gaines enthuses. “We don’t discuss it much in the industry, but Burstein is of mixed race. His father is Jewish and his mother is Costa Rican. I think Rose recognizes that immediately… in the text, we know that June and Louise have different fathers. June is so light skinned, it could be assumed that her father was white... I think Rose sees who Herbie is almost immediately, and realizes that to other people, he could be a bit of a blank slate. White, mixed, he can be whichever she needs depending on the context.”

Burstein's position at the crossroads of Jewish and Latin American culture silently recontextualizes his sudden Orpheum breakthrough in the form of the presumed Jewish executive Mr. Goldstone. “Wolfe does all of this so beautifully in his direction, raising these questions and elevating these aspects of the book, without changing any words. This is still the Gypsy everyone knows, but through casting and his directorial choices, it feels different… Rose and Herbie are different, when they’re played by a Black woman and a mixed man, instead of two white people. And then, there’s the Josephine Baker of it all.”

While Gypsy is, at its core, Gypsy Rose Lee’s origin story, the musical has taken on a life of its own as Lee’s personal star has faded from view. Lee died in 1970, and in the 55 years since her passing, the musical's high popularity has overtaken her in pop culture, with most under the age of 50 only knowing her from the musical, if at all. For a sizable portion of Gypsy’s audience, the musical might as well be fictional. This knowledge gap opens up a space for fresh inspiration that Wolfe and his Louise, Joy Woods, have swept into with aplomb. 

READ: In Gypsy, Joy Woods Is Stepping Into Her Power

In this production, when Louise transforms from sidelined daughter to an enchanting burlesque star, there are distinct echoes of Baker’s Bronze Venus, both in her styling and choreography. In the Garden of Eden sequence, which represents the pinnacle of Louise’s artistic achievement, Woods sports evocatively coiffed marcelle waves, five-petalled botanical pasties, oversized earrings, and an attached hip peplum of ostrich feathers and leaves that call to mind Bakers famous banana skirt. In the scenes following the Garden of Eden sequence, Woods wears a beaded gold gown reminiscent of Baker’s off-stage wardrobe.

Joy Woods in Gypsy

“Her Gypsy Rose Lee is very Josephine Baker,” Gaines agrees. “I’ve always been struck, in every production of Gypsy that I have seen, how much Louise internalized over decades of living with Rose that she is not particularly talented, not particularly beautiful, not particularly sought after or worthy of being sought after. Josephine Baker spoke throughout her life about how she did not see herself as being particularly beautiful or particularly desirable or even particularly sensual. Baker never felt like she was the most talented person in a room, and neither does Louise. But talent is all about perception, and that’s something Baker, and eventually Louise, understand completely.”

Wolfe’s production has tightened a spotlight on Louise’s ability to create as well as survive. Her artistry in even the harshest of circumstances is brought to the fore, be it the beautiful costumes she sews for June in the back of frigid flophouses or the richly imagined burlesque routines that have catapulted her to the heights of society. Louise achieves Rose’s wildest dreams of stardom, not because of her, but perhaps in spite of her. As reframed by Wolfe, her mother's single-minded focus toward achieving a white-dominated metric of success prevented her from truly seeing her eldest daughter. And it is in the final scenes of the show, where mother and daughter finally witness one another, that Wolfe’s recontextualization journey comes to its raw conclusion.

As Rose forces her way into Louise’s dressing room, she is greeted by a startled white maid of Louise’s. As Rose attempts to put herself to work on behalf of her daughter, Louise stops her, gesturing toward the maid: “You don’t have to. That’s what I’ve got a maid for.”

Audra McDonald in Gypsy Julieta Cervantes

Audra’s Rose has much in common with Fences’s Troy, a Black father who could have been a baseball star had his race not prevented him from joining the major leagues. As Gaines puts it, “these are characters who are regularly thought of negatively, but when you actually examine their real life circumstances, you are almost forced to have compassion for them.” In that critically recontextualized scene, where Rose witnesses her daughter’s power for the first time, the weight of Rose’s own circumstances descend upon her. 

There is nowhere left to run, nothing left to do or fight. Her daughter had achieved the near-impossible and become a bonafide star, rather than the domestic worker white America likely would have forced her to be. In fact, white America now serves her, rather than the other way around.

As demonstrated in “Rose’s Turn,” McDonald’s Rose should have been the star. As played by six-time Tony winner McDonald, this Rose has the talent. But as she herself states late in Act Two, “I was born too early, and started too late.” In response to her artistic exile, she poured herself into a battle against society to prevent it from stealing the same opportunity from her daughters.

“This is a woman who, in another world, would be revered for doing all that she could for her daughters to survive, to succeed, to thrive, where she could not. Rose is a three-times-divorced Black single mother, the daughter of a railroad worker. She knows her daughters are going to have limited access to education, to job opportunities, to freedoms. She takes it too far, yes. But there is a way to interpret this performance as being the ultimate act of selflessness.” Gaines sighs. “She’s a mother who wanted the world for her daughters, and couldn’t bring herself to accept anything less.”

 
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