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NOT SO ROSY Bette Midler has long perpetuated the image of a domineering, conniving Mama Rose as fag hag Auntie Merman and it seems absolutely right she should one day do the musical Gypsy. Her brash, bulldozing style isn’t Ethel incarnate, of course; Merman’s to-the-rafters voice and slug-em-with-my-purse acting were all she really needed. Walter Kerr once described Merman as “a natural force, like the Colorado River...I always think of her as standing still and belting. I don’t know why.” We do know why: she’s a power source generating paralysis—everything and everyone around her comes to a halt when she starts singing show stoppers as showdowns. We feel the neurotic pushiness, the irrepressible volcanic drive; she’s enjoyably frightening. She’s also the core legacy problem of the musical: having been built around her dykeamite power, how does any other powerhouse play her other than as a ferocious butch psychotic? Pursuing her own fame in the name of her children, Mama Rose is an archetype of the dreaded stage mother, but her reported harridan days came much later, when she wrote Louise/Gypsy letters damning her to hell for stripping and living the high life while at the same time begging for money. In the musical as opposed to Gypsy Rose Lee’s amusing autobiography, Mama’s grand fault is being too busy hatching her next scheme to have time to show the love she has for her kids or even Herbie the agent (who never existed in real life). She’s a woman emotionally shaped by the Depression, a woman whose own mother abandoned her, as well as several husbands; a woman of necessity who isn’t above heisting silverware from Chinese restaurants or blankets from cheap hotels in order to make coats for herself and her girls. (Out of this era came many of our own mothers and grandmothers unable to show their love except as frosty survivors; some of them never quite recovered enough to be able to love.) Whatever else is wrong with the 1962 movie—and there’s plenty—Rosalind Russell plays Rose as an indigent Mame as belated social climber; we don’t believe she’s a mother, there’s rootless connection to familial bonds, and, because this absence is strongly felt in the Midler version as well, it’s assumed to be just as pronounced with Merman but she gets a pass because no one went to the Broadway show to see her acting as a mother. (Neither did Hollywood: playing mama to Johnny Ray and Mitzi Gaynor in There’s No Business Like Show Business is a sickie fun joke.) Midler’s mother deficiency is apparent from the very first scene. With pink red curling iron hair, dressed in a brown coat with a collar looking like confetti, she’s bumptious drag queen as a vision of Martha Raye doing Simone Signoret. (Later on, she looks like a frumpy Audrey Christie doing Signoret.) She’s beating the clock in transitions, too quickly shifting into some sort of pain when singing “Some People/I Had a Dream” to papa Ed Asner, speeding onward without build up in pivotal scenes with Peter Riegert’s Herbie and, in what has always been an inexcusably condensed rush job made more so, “Small World.” Because the singing has been done “live,” Midler is far from good voice, and while not a requirement she sound much better, the voice wobbles badly in “You’ll Never Get Away from Me.” She’s maniacal, even ugly, in “Everything’s Coming Up Roses”; there isn’t any self-confidence in the voice or staging. She does have one fine bit—“Together,” in which she seems happy. She stays still long enough to show some dramatic tension in her sad reprise of “Small World,” after Herbie walks out on her. But when her big “Rose’s Turn” finale arrives and has to pull it all altogether, she’s obnoxious. (The fate of Russell too.) Having directed the grungy, naughty Dirty Dancing, Emile Ardolino, who died a short time after completing Gypsy, was under orders from the creators not to change anything, which is the worse kind of respect to give dated material needing cuts and revisions. (Streisand realized this but her dream of playing Mama Rose ended when Stephen Sondheim vetoed her requested modifications.) Unlike Mervyn LeRoy’s clodhopping in the 1962 movie version, Ardolino ends up substituting whatever wanning spontaneity and freshness with madhouse energy. The fact is, and it’s no put-down, Midler is no Merman; there are no elements of the dangerous, the accidental creating excitement, no sense of a tidal wave coming to quicken our responses. When Merman shatters ear drums and whales out her lines, she’s artless, an abomination to whom we surrender. Midler’s theatrical personality is her floozy art; the attraction of audiences is to her unstoppable silliness, the unfailing mimicry, the eternal Bathhouse Betty routine. Friends say in defense: “She’s got balls down to here.” The distaff caricaturist with balls is inherently a freak show, so the question is: why are male creators and producers of Broadway musicals obsessed with female monsters? What’s always been misleading about Gypsy is that it’s not really about Louise; her story still hasn’t received the attention it deserves. Text COPYRIGHT © 2007 RALPH BENNER All Rights Reserved.
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