Review: In a Stripped-Down ‘Gypsy,’ Audra’s Gonna Show It to Ya

It’s only fitting that we pore over “Gypsy” as if it were holy writ. It was, after all, written by three of the holies: Jule Styne (music), Stephen Sondheim (lyrics) and Arthur Laurents (book).

One of the greatest American musicals, it is also, along with “West Side Story” and “Guys and Dolls,” one of the most frequently revived. The story of Rose, “a pioneer woman without a frontier,” pushing one daughter into vaudeville and the other into burlesque, thus invites a Talmud’s worth of exegesis.

For theater lovers, so did the prospect of George C. Wolfe directing Audra McDonald in the latest incarnation of the 1959 show. Praisers and carpers could not even wait for the opening on Thursday, at the Majestic Theater, to start the inquisition.

I understand their eagerness. The revival, certainly the most original of the five that have made it to Broadway, offers traditionalists much to worry on. Granted, a lot of what they have been mulling is minutia: The show has restored a 10-bar lead-in to the ballad “Small World”! Most of McDonald’s keys have been raised, sometimes in mid-song! The famous strobe effect that magically ages the young cast members into adults has been ditched!

And of course, unavoidably, there is race. Though it would be absurd (and a shame) not to get a Rose from McDonald, our leading musical tragedienne, it’s true that Rose Hovick, the woman the character is modeled on, was white. And on Broadway at least, she has always been played by white women: Ethel Merman, Angela Lansbury, Tyne Daly, Bernadette Peters, Patti LuPone.