Music Review: Gypsy – 2024 Broadway Cast Recording

Gypsy – 2024 Broadway Cast Recording (Warner Music Group’s Arts Music and Octoverse Media) is now available on all digital and streaming platforms.

Star rating: four stars ★ ★ ★ ★ ✩

It is, perhaps, telling that when the latest revival of Jule Styne and Stephen Sondheim’s musical Gypsy was announced, the five letters in the show’s title took equal billing with the five letters in its star’s name. This wasn’t just Gypsy, this was AudraGypsy.

It was inevitable that at some point, one of Broadway’s most revived shows would star theatre’s most lauded (and awarded) leading lady. The question was only how would the role of Mama Rose adjust to Audra McDonald, as it has done to numerous actresses before. From Ethel Merman to Angela Lansbury, from Bernadette Peters to Patti LuPone, it’s a role that has been as much about its performer than it is about the real-life inspiration: Rose Hovick, mother of both Gypsy Rose Lee and June Havoc. Even within the frame of Arthur Laurents’ book, there has been enough wiggle room for Broadway’s biggest leading ladies to stamp their mark upon the stagiest of stage moms.

For those of us who have so far been unable to witness McDonald’s interpretation, we do at least now have the opportunity to hear what that sounds like with the release of a new studio cast recording. And one of the first things one notices form the music direction and arrangements by Andy Einhorn (with additional arrangements by Daryl Waters) is how sumptuous the full orchestra sound is.

From one of the most recognisable overtures to some of the canon’s best known and loved numbers (‘Some People’, ‘Small World’ and, of course, ‘Everything’s Coming Up Roses’ are all classics, and that’s just in Act I), there’s something about the pristine studio sound that captures all the little nuances from the band that can be hard to miss in a live theatre.

But a cast recording also means, of course, that we miss the visuals of the vaudeville pastiche numbers that make Gypsy such a delight to watch on stage. Without those, some of the numbers lose their bite. Joy Woods as Louise and Jordan Tyson’s June sing out well, though, as do Summer Rae Daney and Marley Lianne Gomes who precede them as their “baby” Louise and June at the top of the show.

It’s with ‘Some People’ that we first get an idea of McDonald’s version of Mama Rose. That track starts with some dialogue excerpts that give a clue to the character’s rooting as a strong, Black woman from the South, before the unrecognisable singing voice kicks in. We get the full range of McDonald’s vocal styling, from Broadway belt to that operatic vibrato that has propelled her to six Tony Awards (technically only three of which were for musicals, although both Master Class and Lady Day at Emerson’s Bar and Grill, classed by the Tony Awards as plays, relied upon her singing skills).

McDonald’s casting as the first Black actress to play Mama Rose on Broadway is audible, then, but there’s also something about the purity of her belt that also brings the role closer to the traditional lead actress role of the Rodgers and Hammerstein-style musical that the original Gypsy was breaking away from, and the character performance that Merman and Lansbury bestowed upon the role. McDonald’s interpretation certainly has a warm, mellifluous mix of tones that absolutely works.

Nowhere is that more apparent, of course, than in the climactic ‘Rose’s Turn’. As Mama faces up to how pushing her daughters into the spotlight has been a vicarious means of gaining the stardom she’s always craved for herself, there are some cracks in McDonald’s voice. But they’re deliberately placed, and maybe a little too much so; a layer or two of artifice standing between the performance and the real pain at the heart of the character.

Perhaps, if witnessed live, some of the polish of the studio recording might be chamfered away and we’d witness a much more real version of Mama Rose. Maybe this is a character that should never be as clean and crisp as presented here. It’s still a fine record of a beautiful performance, but it feels as if Audra’s turn is one perhaps best witnessed in the flesh.

Scott Matthewman