Jonathan Kent’s production of this fabulous musical, unseen in the West End for over 40 years, has got even better since its Chichester debut last autumn. Since the show is about Momma Rose’s attempt to turn her progeny into vaudeville stars, it sits perfectly in a traditional proscenium theatre.
Even the overture, played with gusto by the pit orchestra under Nicholas Skilbeck’s baton, creates a sense of anticipatory excitement. The show itself, first seen on Broadway in 1959, is a testament to the power of the integrated musical in that the book by Arthur Laurents, the music by Jule Styne and the lyrics by Stephen Sondheim are all partners in a genuine coalition. On the one hand, they evoke the tackiness of the touring vaudeville circuit of the 1920s and 30s where children were mercilessly exploited. But the show’s co-creators also come up with an unforgettable protagonist in Momma Rose herself: “a showbiz Oedipus”, as Sondheim called her, wrapped in self-delusion but also periodically engaging in her determination to take on the industry’s titans in order to promote her children.
Every facet of the character is caught by Imelda Staunton who gives one of the greatest performances I’ve ever seen in musical theatre. At first, she seems the kind of pushy, plucky, determined showbiz mum we’ve all met. But Staunton, as the evening goes on, introduces infinite shades into the character. She can be soft and wheedling with her faithful beau, Herbie, whose arm she gently caresses in You’ll Never Get Away From Me. But you literally see her iron grip in the first act climax, Everything’s Coming Up Roses, when she seizes daughter Louise by the scruff of the neck and urges her to “take a bow”.
In a superb piece of acting, Staunton also reminds us that Momma Rose hungers for the limelight herself. She is exquisitely funny when, as her ageing clan audition for a Broadway mogul, she scurries about the stage wielding props. In my own favourite number, Together Wherever We Go, Staunton resorts to the elbow-jutting jauntiness of an old vaudeville trouper.
But Rose’s dream of stardom reaches its apogee in the final number when, as the character breaks down, a mink-wrapped Staunton grotesquely mimics the strip-teasing motions of her now celebrated daughter, Gypsy Rose Lee. Sondheim invokes Sophocles. Staunton’s tremendous performance reminded me more of Brecht’s Mother Courage: another woman who, through her single-minded devotion to her children, inevitably loses them.
The show has also gained since Chichester in that Peter Davison has now taken over the role of Herbie, Rose’s lover and the family act’s agent, and invests the character with a warmth that was missing before. Lara Pulver charts Louise’s growth from shy wallflower to coldly calculating stripper with great skill and there is assured support from Scarlet Roche as a cartwheeling Baby June and Louise Gold, Julie Legrand and Anita Louise Combe as a trio of hardened ecdysiasts.
Anthony Ward’s designs and Stephen Mear’s choreography, evoking the vanished world of vaudeville, add to the gorgeous pleasure of an evening that both celebrates showbiz and at the same time exposes the psychotic nature of addiction to stardom.
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