Chip and I saw Gypsy the other night. It’s a bona fide Broadway spectacle, and Patty Lupone is most certainly a force of nature (and I mean that in the grand, sort of scary, Niagara Falls way). As we were being pinned to our seats by the sheer force of her personality, I got to thinking about the cult of celebrity and the effect it has on the way the audience experiences a show.
Here’s what I mean: To me, the Rose character is kind of a monster. I think she has what my sister Judith, who’s a mental health professional, would call a borderline personality disorder. In addition to being horribly cruel and manipulative to those she loves, she actually has a breakdown of sorts right on the stage. I mean, what is “Rose’s Turn” if it’s not a full blown–and searing–meltdown? And I don’t mean that in a bad way! That’s the genius of the show and the character, I think. We’re watching this incredibly powerful, thwarted soul fighting because she literally cannot do anything else. And we’re watching a family that puts the “fun” in dysfunctional adapt and evolve around this distorted personality–all wrapped up in musical. That’s just cool, I think, and it neatly serves the higher purpose of theatre: allowing us to view ourselves, our world and the way we experience our world in a distilled and precise way.
Watching Rose rip up the stage left me breathless, shaken and teary–because Lupone wasn’t Lupone to me at that moment, she was Rose, a soul in torment telling the truth of her life honestly and nakedly. And doing it on an empty stage in an empty theatre that is the mirror image of her empty life. She takes her bows to imaginary cheers, blows kisses to imaginary fans, and that’s what makes it heartbreaking.
Here’s what was weird. At the end of the song, many people in the audience leapt to their feet, cheering, weeping, waving their programs. It was jarring to me, but then I realized those people weren’t watching the play; they were watching Lupone, and in a faintly creepy way watching themselves watching Lupone. In the theatre that night, she took those bows and blew those kisses to a shrieking throng. It seemed to me a disservice to the work–and to the artist. The fans were inserting themselves into the performance and ignoring the way that performance fit into the larger reality of the play. And while I’m sure it’s gratifying to get those accolades, I think it must be hard for Patty Lupone to stay in character in those moments. When the celebrity of the actor supercedes the dream the playwright has created, it means something’s out of whack.
It made me a little sad, to think that so many people weren’t paying attention to the story being told up there. Yes, yes, Gypsy is by design a tour de force for a certain kind of performer, but it’s not a one-woman show. In their zeal to connect with their idol, those people missed the larger, more compelling point of the exercise, which is to enter the dream and feel the feelings and live the lives–all the lives–being played out in front of them. Otherwise, it’s just a concert. Not bad, but not theatre.
