10. Reinvention. Apart from one or two of the really early things, Gypsy is the only musical in the course that I did not know at all before beginning work on it: not a note, not a line, not even the story. A computer glitch made me have to stop after watching the first act, and I had to wait a day before seeing the second. I found myself on tenterhooks wondering how it would all work out. And this feeling was not confined to the intermission. At many other points in the show, I found myself thinking that it would probably go in one direction, only to find that it went in quite a different one. Does this make the show unique, then, or the first of its kind? It is hard to tell, since I have never approached any other show with such an open mind. But it was enough to make me give up my original plan of setting this beside the other Jule Styne showbiz musical I originally announced, Funny Girl, and concetrate entirely upon working out why Gypsy itself made such a strong impression—if not unique, at least unique for me.

What is so unusual here is that these characters—especially the protagonist Rose Hovick, and her daughter Louise who would eventually turn herself into the burlesque star Gypsy Rose Lee—have more than one dimension. You don't just take what they are singing or saying, you wonder what is really going on in their minds. There is at least one number when Louise listens to her mother without saying much, but you wonder what she is thinking and how this will affect her choices further down the road. Gypsy introduced subtext to the American musical theater. I owe this point to the essay by Robert W. Schneider in the book Fifty Key Stage Musicals (Amazon link), but I'd like to think I'd have realized it for myself.

With most other musicals, I know at least one or two of the tunes in advance; I may have heard some of the lyrics; the book—the actual play that strings all these together—comes a distant third. This is the first musical I think of predominantly as a play. The script, by Arthur Laurents of West Side Story, would still be gripping in the straight theatre, except that it is set in the world of vaudeville amd that requires music. And Jule Styne certainly comes up with that music; time after time, he provides powerhouse numbers for the performers to deliver, but I doubt you would want to hear a concert selection of the tunes, as you do with Rodgers and Hammerstein or even West Side Story. Stephen Sondheim (also a West Side alumnus) provides lyrics that dazzle when they need to, but they never set up a conflict between cleverness and emotion. This is a "book show" if ever there was one. Even in the second act, which as usual has more dialogue than music, you don't feel any shift of medium, because it is the human story that has been absorbing your attention all along. rb.

The handout above gives a brief synopsis of the story. If you need more, there is a 7-minute summary here, illustrated with snippets from both movies of the show and several stage performances, including the 2016 London production with Imelda Staunton that I am mainly going to use. This summary comes from a long video essay called "The Twisted Accounts behind Gypsy," which goes into some detail on the lives of Rose Hovick and her performer daughters June Havoc and Gypsy Rose Lee, but the later sections might be better watched after attending the class. If you just want to know more about Gypsy Rose, try the nine-minute video here.

 
The script, videos, and images will be posted immediately after class.