Audra McDonald Is Returning to Broadway! There’s Just One Catch.
The recent announcement that Audra McDonald will be starring as Mama Rose in “Gypsy” has thrilled Broadway fans. I’m as delighted as anyone, and eager to catch the show when it opens in December. McDonald is the queen of American musical theater, and “Gypsy” is often considered the best musical ever (and if there were no “Follies,” it would be!).
But I delight less in a detail that has emerged. In the roles of Mama Rose’s two daughters, June and Louise, the show’s producers intend to cast actresses who, like McDonald, are Black. Or more specifically, June, whose prospects as a young performer Rose first has the most hopes for, will be cast as biracial, while Louise, who ultimately breaks out as a star in her own right, will be cast as Black. Rose’s father will be played by a Black man. In other words, Rose isn’t just being played by a Black actress. She is being played, it seems, as a Black character.
This is off, for a few reasons. One is historical. In 1920s America, when the show is set, racism and segregation remained implacable forces in popular culture, and the only stardom a Black Rose would have realistically sought for her kids would have been among Black audiences.
Yes, Black performers of that era, such as Bert Williams and Ethel Waters, did cross over to stardom among white audiences, but it was quite rare. For Rose to think her kids had even a chance at becoming America’s sweethearts — that they could achieve a position akin to the one Shirley Temple occupied — would be a delusion so quixotic that it would have to be the story’s central tragedy.
Maybe this production will be modified to suggest that Rose has her eye on the Black Vaudeville circuit? But Gypsy’s music sounds nothing like the blues and proto-jazz that circuit was all about, and the idea that a Black stage mother would be promoting her Black children in the early 1920s with a twee song like “May We Entertain You” is, frankly, ludicrous. Black performers in that era promoted themselves mainly with, big surprise, Black music.
The norm, then and afterward, was careers like those of Lena Horne, Dorothy Dandridge and Nina Mae McKinney — the last of whom you may not have heard of for a reason — in which bigotry strictly and unjustifiably corralled what they were allowed to do. And let’s not even get into Louise’s eventual boffo success as a stripper under the stage name Gypsy Rose Lee. Who were the nationally famous Black strippers of the mid-20th century, and what do we get from pretending there were any?
