“Everything’s Coming Up Roses”
Composer:
Jule Styne and Stephen Sondheim
Singer:
Ethel Merman
Composers:
Jule Styne and Stephen Sondheim
Singer:
Rosalind Russell, 1962
Composers:
Jule Styne and Stephen Sondheim
Singer:
Shirley Bassey, 1965
Composer:
Jule Styne and Stephen Sondheim
Singer:
Angela Lansbury, 1989
Composrs:
Jules Styne and Stephen Sondheim
Performer:
Tyne Daley, 1989
Composers:
Jule Styne and Stephen Sondheim
Singer:
Bette Midler, 1993
Composers:
Jule Styne and Stephen Sondheim
Singer:
Bernadette Peters, 2003
Composers:
Jule Styne and Stephen Sondheim
Singer:
Ruthie Hensall
Composers:
Jule Styne and Stephen Sondheim
Singer:
Patti Lapone, 2008
Composer
Jule Styne’s and Stephen Sondheim’s Gypsy,
I must admit, is not at all my favorite musical, the fact of which I have loudly expressed over the years despite
my having seen the film version, Angela Lansbury and Patti Lapone on stage, and
the TV production with Better Midler.
Yet I love Styne and his compositions, and
both Howard and I know, personally, his lovely granddaughter, Caroline Styne,
who opened, with Suzanne Goin, the popular West Hollywood venue, Luques. And I
can never quite put down Gypsy, listening to its songs again and
again.
Part of the problem with the musical is that the most brilliant song, “Rose’s Turn,” is an almost impossible piece to perform, and is totally impossible for the audience to take home as a “best song,” although it is clearly one of the most consummate musical performances of the theater; Ethel Merman, Rosalind Russell, Bette Midler, Bernadette Peters, and Patti Lapone have all remarkably attempted it, but it still is not a hummable, take-home song. Memorable, yes, but not something except the most remarkable of singers might even tackle; it’s truly not hummable, not what I’ve ever demanded of any song included here, but still not one of my most memorable experiences: it’s a painful expression of life lost and talent ignored, and even the singer diminishes it with her “could have / would have” comment. She might have been great, but she wasn’t, and she knows it. And the song truly exposes those problems.
Once again, this musical is filled with
lovely and memorable tunes: “You’ll Never Get Away from Me,” “Little Lamb,” and
many, many more. And all of them make you want to cry.
But there is only one song that expresses
the fierce determination of the central character, Rose, who controls her
children so severely that both must eventually escape her handling of them.
That song, so very forcefully sung in the original production by Ethel Merman,
establishes not only her previous hold of her daughter, Baby June (June Havoc)
but her attempt to hold close her other daughter, Louise (the later Gypsy Rose
Lee). Merman sings it so utterly strong that you know she will most certainly prevail,
and her poor daughter will simply have to endure it. Well, that’s the plot.
Yet others such as Angela Lansbury, and,
particularly, Bette Midler, and Bernadette Peters sang it much more subtly and
ironically. Although the song never lost its powerful demands of the future,
Midler and Peters, particularly, were able to express the utterly insane
demands in which everything is
turning up “daffodils,” “Santa Claus,” etc, without actually mocking those same
simplistic tropes. We know that they are utterly impossible requirements for
the very untalented Louise, but we also recognize the powerful demands or her
desperate mother, desperate not only for her daughter to achieve her talent,
but to represent herself (best expressed in “Rose’s Turn”) her own mother’s
would-be achievements. It is perhaps one of the most painful songs ever sung, a
ballad to a future that is totally impossible to achieve, despite the frenetic
insistence of a truly mad mother. If the child does ever accomplish anything—and,
obviously Gypsy Rose Lee did—we already know it will be nothing of the kind
that the mother demands. And the sad truth, when this child becomes a
strip-tease artist, tells us about how Rose never could quite comprehend her
transformation into the lowest levels of American culture, even though Gypsy
Rose Lee struggled throughout her life to return to redemption through her
pretense of sexual sins. It was a pretense that is so sad that, today, we can
hardly assimilate it.
Gypsy
is a harsh and hard musical which I could never quite embrace. But its
aspirations, its desires are at the heart of the American experience, which, of
course, is the problem of the American experience. Yet, her emblem to
possibility, “Everything’s Coming Up Roses,” is something no one can truly
ignore.
Los Angeles, March
2, 2018
No comments:
Post a Comment