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Is It Swell? Is It Great? Audra McDonald Takes Over Gypsy

Despite some iffy production choices, she delivers the world on a plate.

Woods never quite blows the roof off during her big striptease climax, despite the energies of Santo Loquasto (sets) and Toni-Leslie James (costumes), who cycle her through spangly gowns and Josephine Baker-esque intimates and ultimately surround her with a lavish Garden of Eden diorama that looks like what you’d get if Busby Berkeley hired Henri Rousseau. To the discomfiture of her daughters (played in their younger years by Kyleigh Vickers as Baby Louise and, when I saw the show, the dauntless mini-diva Jade Smith as Baby June), Rose offhandedly eats dog food as the play begins; later, she steals blankets from a bunkhouse to turn into coats and cutlery from a Chinese restaurant because “we need new silverware.” When her girls score an audition at Grantzinger’s Palace, a vaudeville house in New York, the big-cheese producer’s secretary (Mylinda Hull) snarkily informs him that their act is delayed getting started because “they’re having a little difficulty with their scenery.” But then we see the scenery in question — this time, it’s farm-themed, as Rose creates endless variations on the same routine for June and her backup dancers — and it’s sizable and sturdy, unquestionably built in a Broadway scene shop. Though Wolfe hasn’t double underlined it in his production, the reality of McDonald as the first Black Rose on Broadway also finds full manifestation in the complex knot of hurt, defiance, and rage that is her “Rose’s Turn.” It’s impossible not to remember this woman shoving her lighter-skinned, lighter-haired daughter into the spotlight, then smacking a blonde wig on her remaining daughter once the baby runs away — or not to think back, as that happens, to the dance montage in which we watched her girls grow up and simultaneously witnessed the three young Black boys who had been performing with Baby June as her “Newsboys” (Jace Bently, Ethan Joseph, and Jayden Theophile) get switched out without comment for three grown-up white boys, all flashing Colgate smiles.

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