MAT Does It Again With Gypsy
By John Swartz
Mariposa Arts Theatre produced another spectacular musical, but if you look for it, the reason for it’s success goes beyond the performances on stage.
Pursuit of stardom is often demoralizing. It’s constant hustle (in two senses of the word), endless preparation for auditions, and too many rejections can, and often do, damage one’s ego and mental health.
It’s seems to be worse when a child is being pushed by a parent (ask Macaulay Culkin about that). It doesn’t matter if it’s in show biz – all forms – child beauty pageants, cheerleading competitions (really, that is a thing), or hockey, parents push their kids to stand out, steal the limelight, and be stars. They never ask if the kid wants to, and fair amount of berating for poor performances is involved. Push, push, push.
Gypsy Rose Lee (born Rose Louise Hovick, Louise in the play Gypsy) was one of those kids. She wrote a book about her life with a domineering mother who had stars in her eyes. David Merrick read part of it, got the rights before he finished reading it, hired Jerome Robbins to produce, who hired Arthur Laurents to write a script, and then asked Stephen Sondheim to write lyrics and Jule Styne to write the music. Except for Styne, those three were the team behind West Side Story.
Mariposa Arts Theatre opened their version of the play Thursday night (runs to November 16). A usual, the execution of the play by MAT is spectacular.
You don’t have to like Rose (played by Finnie Jesson), the mother, whose story and control ends by play’s end, while Louise’s (Olivia Everett) continues (in real life) as Gypsy Rose Lee and achieves the stardom her mother dreamed of. There’s nothing like being second fiddle to a younger sibling (June played by Alyse Squirrel with the younger by Charlotte Holdsworth) who receives all of mom’s attention while being dragged along for the ride only to witness the favouritism, but at the same time having the relief you aren’t the focus of the constant judging and pushing.
By halftime, June has had enough and runs off to marry a boy from the ensemble (Tulsa played by Stephen Dobby), which threatens to ruin the whole company, but mostly Rose’s dreams of stardom. The gaze switches to Louise and with some retooling the success or failure is now on her shoulders.
In Rose’s mind the success isn’t on stage, it’s her genius making the show up. Rose is the real star and any failure of the kids is a reflection on her and their successes wouldn’t happen without her.
Until a fateful and unintended booking at a burlesque theatre blows momma’s dreams to smithereens. Maybe it should be mentioned the time setting is during the waning days of vaudeville. At first Louise is reluctant to make the best of a bad situation (refuse the booking and therefore the income) and takes the stage as a stripper, but soon blossoms when she is thrust on stage by herself, without the comfort of having a troupe of players beside her. It turns out she liked it and applause is a helluva drug.
Along for the trip is Herbie (played by Ted Powers), a disillusioned agent, ready to quite until he meets Rose, falls in love, and is a facilitator of continued bookings and a foil of sorts between Rose and the girls. That is until Rose makes the final push, at that point he develops a conscience and ends a year’s long engagement.
This play is really a moral tale, as was West Side Story, commentary in an entertaining form about bad behaviour, sprinkled with music and song. As with WSS the songs move the plot along, rather than being interruptions in the story telling.
On the music, the 21-piece 4th Street Jazz Project is the band. They are on stage the entire time. From the overture to halftime they played admirably under the actors doing the singing. They started out the second half that way, but as the second act unfolded, the musical accompaniment got louder competing with the singing.
It seemed to me the musicians maybe got more enthusiastic with the notes as the end neared. It’s not just a case of the house PA being too loud, and I’m not so sure the board operator bumped things up, but a case of louder sound going into a microphone means louder sound leaving the speakers. It wasn’t disastrous at all, but something to be aware of.
With the band on stage this presents a problem for director Josh Halbot (first time) and set designer and builder Brian Halbot – how to deal with the band being on stage all the time. You don’t want the band to distract attention and you have less stage to work with.
They got around this with maybe more set pieces to differentiate between scenes than MAT has ever had before and developing a backstage crew who could do set changes quickly without accident. I found watching them do their thing about as entertaining as the play itself.
The choreography, by Sheri Nicholls, is enjoyable, and the execution great. The entrance and performance of the Newsboys (all girls) was the first instance of the play with ensemble dancing and wearing white costumes only served to highlight how well the group worked in unison.
While the singing by all the main characters was really good, the acting really good, and the costumes noteworthy, to me the real success of this production is with the crew’s performance. If their attention to detail and execution of their assigned tasks was not as good as it was, the cast would have had distractions from their main function. We often focus our attention and heap praise on the actors without realizing there are dozens of people helping to make those performances stick in our minds.
New York critics almost universally call Gypsy the greatest musical of all time. I disagree. It certainly is a standout, but to my mind the work of the principal creators with West Side Story still remains the best.
Word to the wise; the first half is one hour and 40 minutes long. A trip to the head before it starts might be in order.
The play happens in Gord’s Room, so there is plenty of room for you, with evening performances Thursday, Friday and Saturday with 2 p.m. matinees Sunday November 10 and 17. You can get tickets online.
(Photos by Deb Halbot) Main: Anna Gagliardi as Electra, Laura Macdonald as Mazeppa, Stephanie Anderson (Wilson) as Tessie Tura in Mariposa Arts Theatre’s Gypsy
