Compelling story and memorable songs
make GYPSY a musical theatre classic

A touring Broadway production of GYPSY, one of the jewels of American musical theatre, comes to Penn State at 7:30 p.m. Thursday, October 25, in Eisenhower Auditorium. The musical, based loosely on the memoirs of Gypsy Rose Lee (the famous striptease artist), includes the popular standards “Everything’s Coming Up Roses,” “You Gotta Have a Gimmick,” “Small World,” and “Let Me Entertain You.”

Created by Broadway icons Jule Styne (music), Stephen Sondheim (lyrics), and Arthur Laurents (book), the show is set amid the worlds of vaudeville and burlesque. GYPSY focuses on Rose, whose character has become synonymous with the show business mother driven to make her child a star. In Rose’s case, that would-be star was Rose’s younger daughter, June.

The touring production coming to State College, produced by Phoenix Entertainment, stars Kathy Halenda as Rose and Missy Dowse as Rose’s oldest daughter, Louise (Gypsy Rose Lee).

Halenda has appeared in more than 180 productions, including a dozen national tours. Major roles on tour have included Nancy in Oliver!, Mae West in Ziegfeld, Golde in Fiddler on the Roof, and Maggie Jones in 42nd Street. The Brassy Broads of Broadway, her one-woman show, premiered in New York City.

Dowse, on leave after her third year as a drama major at Hofstra University in Hempstead, N.Y., is making her national tour debut after starring in regional productions of Thoroughly Modern Millie, Little Women, and Grease.

Last March Dowse performed in a benefit reading of Agnes of God with Talia Shire and Susan Sullivan at Hofstra’s Adams Playhouse.

The part didn’t call for much singing, but when Dowse did raise her voice in song “her glorious soprano shined through as usual,” wrote a reviewer for the Hofstra Chronicle. “She gave a dazzling, heart-breaking performance as Agnes….”

Dowse, who was born and raised in Smithtown, New York, says there are plenty of reasons why GYPSY has remained popular for half a century.  

“Arthur Laurents, and Stephen Sondheim, and Jule Stein were all involved in it, and they’re all just genius,” says Dowse, speaking by phone from a tour stop in Tulsa, Oklahoma. “The fact that the book is so wonderful has helped it stand out amongst other musicals.… The overture, it’s so beautiful, and the story is so wonderful. It’s just everything, I think. I can’t really put my finger on one thing. Just as a whole, the show is gorgeous. I love it.”

Dowse’s character undergoes a remarkable transformation through the course of the show.

“When she first starts out she is very shy and naïve and put in the background,” Dowse says of Louise. “Rose really focuses on June because June is the sister with the talent, and Rose sees June as the one who’s going to be the star and wants to see her name up in lights. So Louise goes unnoticed a lot of the time. But she is really the only person that stays with her mother through the end because, one by one, people leave Rose.”

Louise just wants to make her mother happy.

“So finally, when Rose sees a chance for Louise to be a star, Louise does it for her mother,” Dowse observes. “And then it turns out that it’s something she’s pretty good at. So she evolves into this person with much more self-confidence and self-assurance. And she becomes this wonderful personality, Gypsy Rose Lee, that just took burlesque and so much of our culture by storm…. And she just becomes this wonderful, glamorous person who no one ever thought she would be.”   

Hofstra does not have a musical theatre program, so Dowse’s academic training has centered on acting. That drama training, in conjunction with musical theatre pursuits outside the classroom, has been ideal preparation for touring in GYPSY, Dowse says.

“Louise is an acting role first, by far,” she points out. “I just wanted to make sure that I stayed true to Gypsy Rose Lee instead of just the personality, especially in the first act. A lot of the challenges came with the changing of physicality, and the changing of voice, and just the changing of who she is as a person and evolving—not just going from one extreme to another, because you see her grow up so much throughout the whole show. She just goes through such a progression to get to those places where she has her blow-up in the last dressing room scene. Just to get there and keep it fresh every night,…it is a challenge, but it’s a fun challenge that I look forward to every night. It only gets more exciting each night.”

Leading theatre critics, among them Ben Brantley and Frank Rich, have called GYPSY the greatest American musical. In addition to the original production in 1959, which starred Ethel Merman, the show was revived on Broadway in 1974 starring Angela Lansbury, 1989 starring Tyne Daly, and 2003 starring Bernadette Peters. A 1962 Warner Bros. film adaptation starred Rosalind Russell and Natalie Wood.

Artistic Viewpoints, an informal moderated discussion featuring a visiting artist or local expert, is offered in Eisenhower Auditorium one hour before the performance and is free for ticket holders. Artistic Viewpoints regularly fills to capacity. Seating is available on a first-arrival basis.