There is a lot that is legendary about Gypsy, currently playing in a Broadway revival at the Majestic Theatre starring six-time Tony winner Audra McDonald. Its lead role, Rose, is considered by many (and McDonald herself) to be the King Lear of musical theatre, a role so dramatic and musically meaty that any leading lady worth her salt would give anything to sink her teeth into it. The part was created by Ethel Merman, one of the most legendary leading ladies in Broadway history. And many of the luminaries who have followed in Merman’s footsteps have won Tony Awards in the role. In fact, there hasn’t been a Broadway Rose who hasn’t at least been nominated for her performance.
And then there’s the music, written by Broadway legend Jule Styne with lyrics by Stephen Sondheim. The latter’s legendary status hadn’t yet been achieved when Gypsy premiered in 1959, but his level of artistry was certainly already in place. He even famously solely wrote the iconic closing number “Rose’s Turn” out of town when the production needed a replacement for the dream ballet director-choreographer Jerome Robbins hadn’t had time to get to.
But once we’re talking the music of Gypsy, one has to talk about the orchestrations. Penned by Sid Ramin and Robert Ginzler, they are almost as legendary as the score itself. Nowhere is that more evident than in the Overture, which many theatre fans call the best in the entire Broadway canon. It’s not just an effective medley of Styne’s excellent tunes. It’s a spectacle of musical fireworks, a roller coaster that starts with the kind of brass call that tells you you’re about to see something grand, sweeping, and entertaining.
A few tunes later and it takes things truly over the top with a trumpet solo, a spotlight for the best in the industry every time the show comes back to Broadway.
It's not unusual for older shows to come back in revivals with dramatically reduced orchestrations. Big orchestras are expensive, after all, and producers are always looking for places to cut costs. And yet Gypsy on Broadway has been immune to this disappointing trend. Producers—and audiences—know that when Gypsy is on, so is a big, brassy orchestra. This latest revival has 25 players in its orchestra, a size that is rare for the Main Stem these days.
When this revival’s music supervisor and conductor Andy Einhorn is asked what makes the orchestration so great, he doesn’t point to any of the bells and whistles. Instead, it's the clarity and storytelling. “I think Sid Ramin and Robert Ginzler captured the essence of not only Jule Styne’s beautiful music, but the wit of Sondheim’s lyrics at the same time,” Einhorn says.
By way of example, Einhorn cites the introduction to “Some People.” Rose is eager to make her kids vaudeville stars and works every minute of her life to make that happen. But in the scene that leads into “Some People,” her father has encouraged her to stay at home and lead a more traditional life. Rose fires back, “Anybody that stays home is dead,” and the orchestra follows it with two punctuated chords and a french horn that sustains on a single note as she finishes: “If I die, it won’t be from sitting. It’ll be from fighting to get up and get out!” Having essentially defined her entire driving force as a character, the song naturally launches. Einhorn says that horn is the idea that carries her into singing the song, a level of musical sophistication that shows why Gypsy is one of the best of the Golden Age–style musicals, the apex of what Rodgers and Hammerstein began with Oklahoma! just 16 years earlier.
As Einhorn puts it: “You end up with this perfect synthesis of the original source, the music and lyrics, and the added subtext of orchestration, the power of hearing the rush of the strings, or the pop of the brass, or the effervescence of the flutes. And when you hear all that combined, there’s something I do believe speaks directly to the heart.”
But even though Gypsy’s score and orchestration have a reputation for being almost operatically sacrosanct on Broadway, Einhorn found this not to be the case once he started preparing for this revival. “What has happened with a show like Gypsy, because of the various women that have played the role, is that each time the show was sort of modified to that particular talent,” he explains. “And in doing so, keys start to change, slight adjustments are made, and the materials become this sort of, for all intents and purposes, choose-your-own-adventure novel.”
Einhorn says when he got the materials currently being sent out to theatres that license the show, it became clear that he was looking at a hybrid of the last several Gypsys.
Which is all well and good, but also felt like a great opportunity to go back to the original. That process can be less straightforward than one might think for older shows like Gypsy. It wasn’t unusual in those days, for instance, to simplify or reduce the orchestra a bit when a show went out on tour. It's also not unusual for those touring orchestrations to become the only surviving materials for the show.
Luckily, Einhorn has connections. He contacted Josh Clayton, director of score restoration for the New York City Center Encores! series, and Jason Buell, the Styne Estate’s archivist. The three endeavored to restore the entire orchestration back to its 1959 original.
And while this restoration will be valuable to have on hand for future productions of Gypsy, Einhorn wasn’t actually working towards academically recreating the original orchestration for this revival, at least not fully. Though every Broadway Gypsy has made adjustments here or there, ranging from key changes to some wholly new arrangements, this Gypsy is more different than most.
As Rose, McDonald is a major vocal departure. The role was written for Merman, complete with her trademark brassy belt. McDonald is a Juilliard-trained soprano who lives almost exclusively in her head voice. Einhorn knows the casting raised a few eyebrows when it was announced, but as someone who has served as McDonald's music director and arranger for her concerts, he never had even the slightest concern.
Einhorn thinks if director Daniel Fish can completely reinvent the sound and presentation of the classic musical Oklahoma!, why can't Gypsy be reinvented? “For 60 years, one type of voice played this role,” he says of Rose. “I hope what this does is unlock the view that there’s other ways to do shows.”
And, Einhorn says, he wasn’t the only one who knew it was possible. “Sondheim, before he passed, gave his blessing on this production,” he says. “If he had a question about it, we wouldn’t be doing this production.”
Of course it helps that McDonald isn’t just a soprano. She’s a six-time Tony-winning soprano, a world class actor and certainly among Broadway’s best. Though, according to Einhorn, the singing is secondary to what makes McDonald so singular. “She will always find a way to get inside of the material,” he says. “Audra is not wired to do anything that does not fundamentally align with the inside of her DNA.”
Einhorn says, in many cases, Audra could have comfortably sung in Merman’s keys. But that wouldn’t have been McDonald’s Rose. The way McDonald gets inside her roles is deeply personal, and that is what has informed their key changes and arrangements far more than making sure a particular song gets to the Tony winner’s money note.
Several of the songs have new interior modulations that will immediately catch the ear of Gypsy fans. Einhorn says they always came out of McDonald’s interpretation of the text and the character first. Making it vocally thrilling came second. “One of the things I’ve always said about Audra when arranging anything for her is she thinks like an actor first,” he says. “She will come from a place of what the text is asking of her.”
But there’s something else about McDonald’s Rose that sets her apart from the Roses before her. McDonald, and McDonald’s Rose, is Black. It’s clear watching this production, even in looking at a cast list, that director Wolfe did not want to simply place McDonald into a normal Gypsy production and ignore her race. In this production, Rose’s favored child, the ever-talented Baby June, is light-skinned and mixed race, whereas her other daughter, Louise, is dark-skinned. Suddenly, Rose’s story of backgrounding Louise as she stops at nothing to make June a star takes on a completely different nuance. Rose’s character, too, gets a completely different read when she becomes a Black woman fighting to survive and thrive in a world that has been built specifically to keep her down. McDonald and Wolfe’s take on the show asks us if Rose is the monster she’s been in the Gypsys of yore—or is she a victim of an unjust, racist world?
READ: Under George C. Wolfe and Audra McDonald, Gypsy Is Revisited Through a Black Lens
The team knew that story needed to be told in the music too, which gave Einhorn some license to do further arrangements, and bring in additional orchestrator Daryl Waters to tackle the new material. Waters was the natural choice for the gig, having worked in a similar area with Wolfe (and McDonald, for that matter) on 2016's Shuffle Along. Waters is having a busy season, too, with credits on A Wonderful World, BOOP! The Musical, and Pirates! The Penzance Musical.
One of the biggest changes comes right at the top of the show, when June and Louise’s career is at its most nascent—and in Wolfe’s version of the musical, still most connected to their Blackness. The original version of the song “May We Entertain You” is a fairly standard vaudeville-style waltz. As Waters tells us, that wouldn’t be the case at a theatre more accustomed to Black performers and audiences. “We had to figure out some way to keep the initial integrity of that song, but make it something that would have been at home in an African American venue,” Waters says. Einhorn and Waters solved this by devising a version of the song with a stronger beat, and in four instead of three. The arrangement allows the music to help tell Wolfe’s more nuanced version of Gypsy’s story, with Rose starting out getting her kids performing in Black theatres and aspiring to getting them in higher class, white ones, and the messages it telegraphs to her children.
And while there were other areas where Waters added new sounds to the score—notably a Duke Ellington-inspired moment during Louise’s Act Two striptease, in which Waters calls on Ellington’s love of jungle-like rhythms and his use of the horns—he says that much of the score already sounded correct.
“People were taking from each other—orchestrators, musicians, composers,” Waters shares. “They really jazzed up this score. It’s so well done. You’ve got these screaming horns coming at you, which was pretty innovative for Broadway then.”
In other words, appropriation of Black music by a mostly white 1959 Broadway industry ironically worked out for this particular revival.
But don't worry, Gypsy purists. They haven't thrown the baby out with the bathwater. Musically, this is still the Gypsy you know and love—Einhorn says they're playing about 75 percent those restored original orchestrations. And even when there are fully new arrangements, Einhorn was careful to maintain what came first.
For instance, Camille A. Brown being tasked with choreographing a new "All I Need Is the Girl" meant she needed a new dance arrangement. John Kander (yes, that one—he was Gypsy's original dance arranger, which is why those arrangements are so superb) arranged the original expressly for Jerome Robbins' choreography. Brown's routine deserved the same level of synchronization.
"When we started to open that up, I felt like I had to be the arbiter of saying, 'I want to not touch this section. I think we can look at touching this section. I think we should start from the original.' And then it should start to veer away, but then we need to come back from the original," Einhorn says. Even in the dance's fully new portions, Einhorn says he pulled ideas from Kander's original to link it back. "It's a delicate balancing act of trying to honor what's been done, but also contextualize it today, contextualize it within this production and within the vision of the creators that have an idea about this world," he says.
As with any project this detailed and meticulous, it’s clear that it was a labor of love. “It’s sort of the greatest musical nerd project ever,” Einhorn says smiling. Being as close to the music as Einhorn is, he says he even appreciates the music’s more hidden elements. Gypsy is a brass-forward orchestration, but Einhorn says that fans would do well to listen to the strings, too.
“They’re like the most beautiful garnish on top of a beat of meat that’s made of brass and winds,” he says. “It’s that final layer that you put on top that brings that sheen.” He says an especially good moment to listen for is in the beginning of the Overture when the orchestra is playing “Everything’s Coming Up Roses.” “There’s these rich octave leaps that happen in the string writing that, combined with the melody, it really makes your heart soar.” Einhorn also cites “Rose’s Turn,” which features some high, ethereal string lines while the brass and winds are going full force. The strings, Einhorn says, are Rose’s cry. “I could give a master class on how brilliantly that orchestration matches the subtext.”
With Broadway often reducing orchestras down to their most bare, Gypsy is a shining example of what you can do with a full ensemble.
“I actually think it strikes you in the middle of your core,” Einhorn says. “There’s something about this particular orchestration that I think gets under your skin.”
