I heard this this morning on NPR.

https://www.npr.org/2024/12/16/nx-s1-5226924/gypsy-audra-mcdonald-broadway

It's worth listening to.

Certainly shall! 

NYT:      In A Stripped-Down Gypsy, Audra's Gonna Show It to Ya
                    Hold your hats and hallelujah, our leading musical tragedienne offers an ultra-dramatic Rose in George C. Wolfe's Broadway revival.

Vulture:  Is It Swell?  Is It Great?  Audra McDonald Takes Over Gypsy
                    Despite some iffy production choices, she delivers the world on a plate.

Variety:  Audra McDonald Electrifies In George C. Wolfe's Sensational Revival


[BWW's full review roundup HERE: currently 83.3% favorable, with nineteen "thumbs-up" reviews, one "thumbs-down" (NY Post) and one mixed (Vulture).]

The latter, from Sara Holdren, is brilliant as always; Jesse Green turns in a thoughtful and beautifully-written rave for the NYT; and Adam Feldman is reliably perceptive in Time Out.  The New Yorker review should come out in a few days, when hopefully Helen Shaw will have something interesting to add.  In any case, I'm glad the critical response has been largely favorable.

---

Yesterday Vulture also published a fascinating interview with George C. Wolfe, featuring some of his research and sketches, and one with Joy Woods (Louise):

How Gypsy Director George C. Wolfe Reimagined Theater's Legendary Stage Mother
With Audra McDonald, he found a more wounded, more modern Rose.

Everything's Coming Up Joy Woods
The Broadway breakout has a voice for the ages.  Now, she's taking on one of the greatest musicals of all time: Gypsy.

Yay!!  Please give us a detailed account when you see it, @Leighton !

In my limited (and long-ago) experience of the Lyttelton, I've always assumed it was the least flexible of NT's stages — but, between its size and excellent sightlines, and the theatre's enviable resources, I can theoretically imagine a replica of the Shed production there, perhaps with a shallower thrust (or perhaps not; more recently I know they've done traverse stagings in the Lyttelton, and that it has an expandable forestage, so perhaps the space is more flexible than I thought). 

But I'm hugely curious whether Mantello and Zinn (or, for that matter, Ives and Tunick) are in fact planning to simply replicate their NYC original; while it will presumably be recognizably the same show overall, I wouldn't be surprised if there end up being tweaks, at the very least.  As elegant as HWA was here at the Shed, I can't imagine having a potential "second pass" at it a year and a half later, with another dream cast, at a world-class institution like the National, and not wanting to keep exploring.

Either way, I'm keeping my fingers crossed for this to make its way to NT Live and/or NT At Home at some point.

Opening tonight!



Also, new production photos HERE.

Today is a boring day, but I did make reservations to see two world premiere plays in January and February. I am seeing The Reservoir on January 26 and The Suffragette's Murder on February 19. And that's about it for what I've accomplished today. 

It is about 60° right now, which is great walking weather.

My mother is gifting me some money for Christmas; as soon as it hits my account I'm booking a ticket!

Full casting has been announced and is now listed on the NT website, and it's a very exciting group indeed:


(It's taken me a year or two — of very irregular watching, maybe half a dozen of his videos over that time? — to warm to this Mickey Jo fellow; but if influencers really have to be a thing that exists in the world, we could do worse).

As part of their "Read the Screenplay" series,  Deadline has published Winnie Holzman and Dana Fox's movie adaptation, which can be read online for free:

Wicked:  Read The Screenplay For The Highest-Grossing Broadway Musical Movie In U.S. History

The series includes dozens of other recent screenplays, going back at least as far as 2020's The King of Staten Island.  I recently read Scott Beck and Bryan Woods's script for Heretic and Coralie Fargeat's for The Substance (and while I'm still a bit squeamish about seeing the latter film especially, at least now its over-the-top shocks may be cushioned by knowing more or less what to expect).  Up next:  Justin Kuritzkes's Queer and Challengers, Kate Gersten's The Last Showgirl, Clint Bentley and Greg Kwedar's Sing Sing, Peter Straughan's Conclave, and on and on... 

Wolfe reiterates his view of Gypsy as a world of "not enough" ("a dynamic of people wanting, desperately wanting that thing that is just beyond their reach"), and McDonald her conviction that Rose is no monster, but a "fiercely protective mother ... who does not realize that the umbilical cord has been cut."

If his point seems a bit obvious, and hers a bit like hairsplitting, both observations are nevertheless shrewdly playable and well-supported by the text.  And while this production's casting raises interesting historical and representational questions, it seems those may play out mostly beneath the surface of an otherwise fairly traditional interpretation.  (When you're working with the most revered musical of the past 65 years, and the most laureled musical-theatre actor of the past 25, your job may largely be to let both do what they do with minimal conceptual fuss, and let audiences debate the relative virtues of colorblind vs. color-conscious casting amongst themselves).

I look forward to seeing the show with my mom a week from tonight.