NEW YORK -- Patti LuPone's up-and-down career couldn't have prepared her better for the role of Momma Rose in the new Broadway production of "Gypsy." In some way the casting was inevitable. But with so many illustrious predecessors, who could have imagined the result would be so breathtakingly one-of-a-kind?
This is not the brassy tour de force that we can reconstruct from the cast recording of Ethel Merman's patented original. And one shouldn't expect Angela Lansbury's tragicomic finesse, Tyne Daly's working-class realism or Bernadette Peters' sex-kittenish wiles, to cite the other previous Broadway Roses.
LuPone doesn't offer a fresh psychological diagnosis of the archetypal stage mother except to reveal her first and foremost as a creature hard-wired for applause. Deprived of an audience, she's perpetually on the hunt for the spotlight, even if it's ostensibly meant for her performing-seal daughters.
What distinguishes LuPone's accomplishment is the fiery fusion of music and drama that she pulls off with seemingly spontaneous expressiveness. Speech slides into song as naturally as water returns to air, and the ensuing rainbow of vocal color is like the proof of some rarely observed scientific law.
The production, which opened Thursday at the St. James Theatre under the direction of Arthur Laurents, the book's estimable super-senior author, isn't perfect. Occasionally, when the cast members (top-notch where it matters most) aren't performing Jerome Robbins' glorious choreography (reproduced by Bonnie Walker), the staging resembles a concert version in which they've been asked to arrange their own blocking.
Laurents, in short, isn't always adept at handling the tale he so creatively derived from the memoirs of burlesque star Gypsy Rose Lee. The storytelling is rather choppy in the first half. LuPone's scene with Pop (Bill Raymond), her naysaying dad, who won't give her the 88 bucks she needs to get her kids on the Orpheum Circuit, strangely misfires until she starts singing "Some People," the anthem decrying ordinary oblivion as a form of death.
The initial meeting between Rose and Herbie (Boyd Gaines, excellent as usual), was always too rushed. After a few seconds of banter, the two begin wondering about collaborating personally and professionally for the rest of their lives -- a leap that stretches credulity even in the anything-goes shorthand of musical comedy. Here, the scene is played so fast it practically skids.
