And If You're Real Good, I'll Make You Feel Good

I was late getting my ten-year-old daughter to school yesterday morning. I had a good excuse. You see, I had her out quite late the night before at a strip show.

Before you forward my IP address to childabuse.com, let me explain. Leah’s theatre company was doing a production of “Gypsy” starring kids from Grades 7 though 12. Even though she’s only in fourth grade, Leah was cast in the show as a member of Baby June’s dance troupe but she pulled out during rehearsals because she had too much going on (I can’t imagine any moment in my childhood where I had “too much going on” ) with her ongoing rehearsals for “Bugsy Malone,” her recent performance in a school play about westward expansion, and various other end-of-the-year projects and activities. But on Thursday night we went to see her friends and the older kids in their final performance of “Gypsy.”

I keep vacillating between marveling at the incredible talent displayed by some of the kids in this musical and feeling outraged that this theatre company would have 14-year-old girls playing strippers bumping and grinding it across a stage. Unlike the edited versions of musicals this group provides for its younger cast members (in Leah’s version of “Oliver” her Bill Sikes didn’t kill Nancy and didn’t die himself—changes that made me nuts!), not a word was cut out of this version of “Gypsy.” They performed every song, every risqué lyric:

If you wanna make it,
Twinkle while you shake it.
If you wanna grind it,
Wait till you've refined it.
If you wanna stump it,
Bump it with a trumpet!
Get yourself a gimmick and you too,
Can be a star!

In fairness, there’s no stripping until relatively late in the play. As you probably know, most of the musical deals with the pitfalls of an aggressive parent forcing her disinterested children to live out her own unrealized dreams in the theatre (a theme that all the family members in the audience that night, myself included, would do well to reflect on). Mama Rose is often seen as a vicious monster who doesn’t give a whit about her daughters’ needs. Certainly many of her actions are terribly damaging such as freezing her growing daughters in pre-adolescence so that they wouldn’t have to change their successful kiddie act. Every year, Baby June and Louise would celebrate their tenth birthday again and again. Leah, who like most kids her age can’t wait to get older, was particularly struck by the fact that Louise and June actually lost track of how old they were.

But despite her self-serving machinations, I think it's a better play when Mama Rose is played as more vulnerable than conniving, more hurt and damaged than hurtful and damaging, more mother lion and less barracuda. I think Bernadette Peters pulled this off in the recent Broadway revival that Kendall I saw. And so did the young teen who played Mama Rose on Thursday night. She gave a poignancy to the role that Ethel Merman may have lacked, making it clear that while Mama Rose’s actions were appalling, the love she felt for her children was never in question. This girl showed that however misguided she was, Mama Rose truly believed that turning June and Louise into stars was their best shot at a better life.

You can do it, all you need is a hand.
We can do it, Mama is gonna see to it!
Curtain up! Light the lights!
We got nothing to hit but the heights!
I can tell, wait and see.
There's the bell! Follow me!
And nothing's gonna stop us 'til we're through!
Honey, everything's coming up roses for me and for you!

The actors in this production were uniformly excellent (not always the case with this theatre company—believe me!). The three girls playing strippers Tessie Tura, Mazeppa, and Electra brought the house down when they taught Louise the tricks to being an effective burlesque performer. I cheered their big song but I couldn’t help but cringe a little bit at the sight of these girls ramping up their sexuality for a paying audience. There’s no actual stripping in “Gypsy,” of course, in the version Leah and I saw or in the original (it premiered on Broadway just a few months before I was born in 1959). But the suggestion of sexuality and objectification of women is definitely a big part of the story. The way the lyrics from Baby June’s act are recycled by Gypsy for her burlesque act is a clever twist but I’m grateful it wasn’t Leah in the center spotlight oozing sex appeal while slowly singing the words:

And if you’re real good
I’ll make you feel good
I want your spirits to climb
So let me entertain you
And we’ll have a real good time, yes sir
We’ll…have…a real good time!

Louise actually takes control of her life by becoming successful stripper Gypsy Rose Lee but though this success frees her from her mother’s tight grasp, she is still dependent on the lascivious desires of the men in her audiences. I was praying that there were no lascivious men in our audience Thursday night, and realized how uncomfortable I would be if that were Leah up there doing a simulated striptease even to this friendly crowd. When Leah was in “A Chorus Line” earlier this year I remember one father’s reaction when his daughter first appeared on stage in her costume. “Wow, she looks HOT!” Eww. The early sexualization of girls in our culture is something that I feel very strongly about and I will go to the mat to prevent Leah from wearing any of the Britney Spears/Christina Aguillera slutty fashions that are so fashionable right now among preteen girls.

But I guess I’ll stop short of picketing children’s productions of “Gypsy.” Every time I start to think it crosses a line I remember the play’s brilliant book and score. Does that make me worse than Mama Rose? Exploiting my child is okay as long as you do it with music by Jule Style and lyrics by Stephen Sondheim? Leah has always enjoyed songs that were well beyond her years. Once when she was very young I inadvertently got her hooked on the soundtrack for the La Boheme-inspired musical “Rent.” “I wanna hear the candle song!” she’d shout over and over again from her car seat in the back. That was the song “Light My Candle” sung by heroin addicts Roger and Mimi which included such Disney- like lines as “They say I have the best ass below 14th Street, is it true?” Oy. On the other hand, I am against some of the censorship that I find levied against children today. During one of her free reading periods at school a few weeks ago, Leah was reading the book “Wicked” by Gregory Maguire, upon which the Broadway musical is based. It’s the story of the witches of Oz, long before Dorothy entered the scene, and it’s a difficult, complex read. There are some adult themes in the book that Leah and I discussed but I was flabbergasted when she came home and said her teacher told her she couldn’t read it in class anymore because it was “inappropriate.” Ridiculous.

Ironically, my only memory of the real-life Gypsy Rose Lee was from her funny performance in that quintessential 1960s children’s film, “The Trouble with Angels,” starring Rosalind Russell (who played Mama Rose in the film version of “Gypsy”) and my favorite icon of irascible youth, Hayley Mills. Did you know that following her career as a high-class stripper, Gypsy Rose Lee was the author of several mystery novels? One of them was made into the 1943 film “Lady of Burlesque” starring Barbara Stanwyck.

For me, the one sour note in the musical “Gypsy” is the sudden about-face at the end when Gypsy and Mama Rose reconcile after Gypsy overhears her mother’s bitter song of regret:

Why did I do it?
What did it get me?
Scrapbooks full of me in the background.
Give 'em love and what does it get ya?
What does it get ya?
One quick look as each of 'em leaves you.
All your life and what does it get ya?
Thanks a lot and out with the garbage,
They take bows and you're battin' zero.

I think it would have been so much more powerful if Rose ended the play alone on the stage, rejected by her daughters. I know I was just promoting my version of the kinder, gentler Mama Rose but I still want to see her face the consequences of her actions at the end of the show. And in truth, the real-life Mama Rose was much darker than Ethel Merman, Angela Lansbury, Tyne Daly, Bette Midler, or Bernadette Peters would have had us believe. She ended up running a lesbian boardinghouse on West End Avenue in New York and killed one of her lovers there. She was not a nice woman. On her deathbed in 1954, Rose had these final words for her successful daughter: “When you get your own private kick in the ass, just remember: it's a present from me to you.” Work with those lyrics, Mr. Sondheim!

I wonder what play Leah will perform in next with this theatre company. “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?” with a cast of ten-year-olds? How about a kiddie “Klute?” An all-moppet version of “Sophie’s Choice?” Pre-teen “Best Little Whorehouse in Texas?” Whatever it is, I’ll be there in the first row cheering her on.

Through thick and through thin,
All out or all in.
And whether it's win, place, or show.
With you for me and me for you,
We'll muddle through whatever we do
Together, wherever we go.

Comments

[Elaine Soloway]

Danny, as a certified Sondheim fan (I've seen all of them except "Frogs") I loved today's blog re: "Gypsy." It is one of my favorite shows, not only for the music/lyrics, but for its complex mother-daughter relationship. As a mother often in the wings, never envied my daughters' (like Mama Rose) because I never had the crucial ingredient they both possess: audacity. Mama Rose had it, and Gypsy Rose Lee eventually got it. Sounds like you'll be a papa in the wings, too, alternating between kvelling and shuddering. Welcome!

[The Retropolitan]

If there is one musical I will probably never ever watch again, it's "Gypsy." Back in my days as an assoc. producer at 'Character Studies,' it's the episode that I was most directly involved with, so for months and months I lived, slept, ate, and breathed nothing but Gypsy Gypsy Gypsy. I can tell you all about Gypsy, and the various productions of it. I even got to go through all of Ethel Merman's scrapbooks from that time, and see all of the many dozens of opening night telegrams that she received when she opened that show. I even got to see some of the long-lost film footage left from the rehearsal of that show, and some actual photographs of Merman onstage during the first run. Cool stuff!

Luckily for our production, we had the cooperation of the very nice June Havoc (aka Baby June), who lent us some materials, as well as some of the supporting cast of the different productions. If you ever get the chance, the Museum of the City of New York has some amazing theatrical archives, and the director there -- Marty Jacobs, I think -- is a great guy.

Now, I will return from this brief Gypsy interlude to the land of never thinking about it ever again.

[Danny]

What a fun assignment, Retro! I will check out that museum next time I'm in New York. That is, if I don't put a gun to my head first trying to get those lyrics out of my skull. My daughter and I have been tormenting ourselves all weekend with neverending "Gypsy" medleys. Leah keeps singing songs that are inappropriate for a ten-year-old:
You can sacrifice your sacharo
Working in the back row
Bump in a dump till you're dead
Kid you gotta have a gimmick
If you wanna get ahead!

And I'm being driven nuts by:
Some people sit on their butts
Got the dream, yeah, but not the guts
That's living for some people
For some hum-drum people I suppose
Well, they can stay and ROT!
But not Rose!

Heeeeeelp! I think we need to join your anti-Gypsy 12-step group.

I'm surprised to hear about June Havoc's participation in your show. I thought she was dead set against the musical and estranged from her family. Didn't she even try to sue the producers of the Broadway show?

[The Retropolitan]

From what I recall, she was against the show (at least initially.) Our program was about the character of the mother specifically, which I think put a different slant on things -- and I think that she primarily helped us out with the real historical aspects, which (if I recall) was her gripe with the musical in the first place. Karen Moore, the actress that played one of the two young leads in the Merman version, was very very nice; I think we also interviewed Sondheim for the episode. Lots of good stuff!

Gypsy Rose Lee's son with Otto Preminger, on the other hand, did not cooperate. And that's all I have to say about that. ;)