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How Gypsy Director George C. Wolfe Reimagined Theater’s Legendary Stage Mother


With Audra McDonald, he found a more wounded, more modern Rose.

Every inch of the space was alive with activity: the actor playing Tulsa stretching alongside other dancers in the room next door; the three strippers from “You Gotta Get a Gimmick,” the showstopping Act Two number, rehearsing their moves on the sidelines with the choreographer, Camille A. Since Gypsy opened in 1959, Rose has been played by Ethel Merman, Angela Lansbury, Bernadette Peters, Tyne Daly, Imelda Staunton, Rosalind Russell (in the movie version), and Patti LuPone. We talked about the scene I’d seen a couple of weeks before and McDonald’s singing of “Some People.” Typically, it’s played as the big star’s go-get-’em song that explains her ruthless determination and launches the action, but he was particularly fixated on the multiple meanings of the word dream.

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