Mainly on Directing by Arthur Laurents (read more books .TXT) 📕

was Louise's hand held out to June. Re-examining “Rose's Turn,” it was an image of Rose in the paint-smeared smock she wore in all the backstages of her life. She was saying “Here's Rose,” but she wasn't ripping the smock open to reveal that red strip dress because she wasn't going to do a strip then. Her “Here's Rose” was mocking the whole notion. That broke the mold the number had been frozen in. I asked questions that hadn't existed before. Since Rose had ridiculed Louise as “a cheap stripper,” why would she do a strip herself? Obviously, she has to take a pass at doing one or reference it some way; that's how the number is written. But how would she really feel about doing it?

When she angrily prowls the empty stage outside the star dressing room of the daughter who has no use for her, she rages: “I was born too soon and started too late!”—otherwise “I could have been better than any of you!”

A better stripper? Is that what Patti LuPone's Rose would mean? Her Rose is bigger; her Rose wants more, wants bigger, wants the world! She has contempt for burlesque; she sneers at it and at Louise when she says: “Here she is, boys!” When she snarls “Here she is, world!,” the grandiosity of addressing the “world” tells us she's lost reality. “Here's Rose!” That's what she's been getting to: Rose! In lights—big, bright lights! Rose demanding to be looked at and seen because she is finally, at very long last, the Star she was always meant to be. That madness Patti LuPone could play with frightening intensity at different levels at will. And boy, did she!

When the music changes for the strip, Rose switches in a flash to a sexual smile—of course she's sexy, no one's sexier—and opens the smock like a stripper, revealing that red dress. “Play it, boys!” she commands, and when she asks if they like what she shows them, the answering “Yes!” is from the whole world. She smiles and nods with disdain: of course they like it, she's got it. And then—candy for Patti—she switches again:

Starting like June with “Hello, everybody! My name's”—June's gone, fury is back—“Rose!” That harsh “Rose” is a reminder of who commands the attention around here; but the next minute, the star is gone and she's a girl laughing, a little mad, joking, playing games, flirting sexually, reveling in letting loose any way she can think of, letting go—but the phrase “let go” trips her up, ends her frenzied joy, begins a downward spiral that yanks her back to Louise telling her mother she has got to “let go of [her]!” Once again, Rose is not needed; once again a daughter is lost. When June left, Rose was furious, but she could go on, she could start a new act. Without Louise, there's no place to go; she can do nothing, is nothing. Then why did she do it all? What did it get her?

Everything changes: music, lights, setting, Rose. Self-examination turns “Rose's Turn” into an encapsulation of Rose's whole frustrated, angry life, which produces a breakdown, sending her completely over the edge. This is a “Rose's Turn” that uses everything Patti LuPone can dig up and keep digging into the longer she plays it; a “Rose's Turn” that everybody, without exception, stands up and cheers. You have to.

When Rose gets richer, the other characters get richer and Gypsy gets richer. In this production, where all the actors interact with Rose to some degree, Patti couldn't change without every other actor changing—from Jim Bracchitta, both in the Jocko scene and in the burlesque house, to Sami Gayle and Bill Raymond in the kitchen scene, to Leigh Ann Larkin and Pearce Wegener in the hotel room, to Alison Fraser in the burlesque house, to the Farm-boys, the Toreadorables, to every single member of the company, because it's a company of actors. As at City Center, work was done regularly sitting around a table; the company, being that company, heard, saw and jilt what was happening to Patti and Boyd, to Patti and Laura, to Laura and Boyd. By second nature now, they dug deeper again, found more, invented more.

It didn't seem that Laura and Tony Yazbeck could improve on their scene built around “All I Need Is the Girl,” but they did. It now existed on two levels, the literal and the metaphorical. The dream he ached for was for more than a girl—and enhanced immeasurably by her dream to be worthy of him. Everyone dreams for something; the number was now for everyone. Everyone hoping that Louise would get what she was yearning for had always been there, but Laura's yearning made the scene and song more moving—which hadn't seemed possible.

The biggest change in her performance came from something seemingly unconnected: Patti's new bows after “Rose's Turn.” Her bows had been done in a fashion gauged to bring off the trick devised so many years ago in London for Angela Lansbury. Those bows, however, were done by Angela as Rose and later by Tyne Daly as Rose. Patti's bows were done by Patti LuPone, Star—that's who bowed at City Center. This new Rose had to bow differently. What is such a great delight and so rewarding about working with Patti LuPone is that when she's challenged—in this case, to bow as her Rose would bow after having the triumph she believed she has deserved her whole life—she comes up with bows that are original, dazzling, funny, touching, and always true to the character.

Those bows took us directly into another change I was after: playing the final scene between mother and daughter to make it clearly the climax of the whole play, as was always intended.

The first line of the scene that follows the bows starts with a laugh because of the mood those demented bows have established. That laugh gives the illusion that the relationship between mother and daughter is in fine shape.