A Black Rose, Racial Histories, and the 2024 Broadway Revival of Gypsy

A very long time ago I played the clarinet in the pit orchestra for my high school’s production of the musical Gypsy. Those teenage memories (not to mention other versions I’ve seen since then) were certainly at the back of my mind when I went to see the new Broadway revival at the Majestic Theatre last month, directed by George C. Wolfe. But I also had a renewed curiosity about this particular show after reading John McWhorter’s editorial for the New York Times published months before the revival opened in December 2024. With music by Jules Styne, lyrics by Stephen Sondheim, and book by Arthur Laurents (loosely based on the 1957 memoirs of Gypsy Rose Lee), the musical revolves around Rose as the ultimate stage mother who pushes her two daughters into show business. McWhorter focused on the choice of Audra McDonald as Rose, the first time a Black woman would perform this role on Broadway, as well as the casting of her daughters June and Louise as biracial and Black (Joy Woods and Jordan Tyson, respectively).

A six-time Tony Award winner, McDonald was a logical choice for this star turn; however, McWhorter worried whether the casting choices for Rose and her daughters might be misunderstood as historically accurate representations of Black characters. He questioned how “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.” Despite the crossover success of rare individuals such as Bert Williams and Ethel Waters, Black performers could not achieve mainstream stardom:

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.

But recoding characters, at least historical characters, as Black just because Black people are playing them is just another kind of denial of racism. It pretends that in the past (or even the present, for that matter) Black lives and white lives were interchangeable. In the era in which Gypsy is set, lynching was still common and legal in many states. Black working-class mothers had a lot to worry about, but winning over mainstream—which is to say white—audiences was not high on the list.

McWhorter concluded that "A talent as rare as Audra McDonald shouldn’t play a Black Rose. She should just play Rose.”

McWhorter suggested that Audra McDonald’s Rose be treated in the same way as the previous Broadway appearances of Ethel Merman, Angela Lansbury, Tyne Daly, Bernadette Peters, or Patti LuPone. To some extent, this seemed to be the case when I was there: McDonald’s entrance and songs were greeted by cheers and vigorous applause, and race was never mentioned explicitly as part of the main story. As New York Times reviewer Jesse Green noted, “Race is real but not the point and not even solid-state.” The backup Newsboys for June’s vaudeville act in a later scene. These now-white chorus boys share not only an act but also a boardinghouse room with Louise, and one of them subsequently elopes with June with no repercussions other than motherly outrage. There are no negative reactions to the love story of a white Herbie (played by Danny Burstein) and a Black Rose.

This production highlighted both racial identities and racial histories in ways that felt revelatory—even without obvious changes to the dialogue or lyrics.

For me, however, this revival of Gypsy opened up a Pandora’s box of questions about the history of race in American musical theatre, not just about Black presence as a foundational part of musical theater’s development, but also how racial differences extend beyond the strict partitioning of Black and white. Full disclosure: I came out of the Majestic Theatre thinking not just about McWhorter’s questions about casting but also my own research on race and musical theatre. Rather than erase how identities are affected by skin color or fully obscure the highly unequal conditions faced by Black performers in vaudeville and burlesque in the early twentieth century, this production highlighted both racial identities and racial histories in ways that felt revelatory—even without obvious changes to the dialogue or lyrics.

McDonald’s performance added new dimensions to Rose’s relentless energy and overwhelming emotional investment in her daughters’ careers. Ben Brantley described Ethel Merman, for whom the part was written in 1959, as “a monolith, unhindered by psychological nuance” whose “unselfconscious, unwavering strength and fixedness…made her ideal as a forward-moving shark of a woman for whom introspection was anathema.” Brantley notes that “Sondheim once referred to her as a ‘talking dog.’” In the revival, race was not called out as part of the reason that Rose’s own ambitions were stymied, but it sure should have been. In the scene between Rose and her father (played by Thomas Silcott), Pop associates himself with steady but tedious work for the railroad and the duties of home and family. When associated with a Black female character, Rose’s rebellion seems even more meaningful as it challenges expectations of feminine respectability that were also accentuated by the obligations of racial uplift. McDonald’s Rose says goodbye and good riddance to Black middle-class ideals of conventional feminine behavior and harbors a justifiable distrust of traditional social structures of marriage, education, and domestic work. Librettist Arthur Laurents once described Rose’s character as “a monster of a mother sweetly named Rose,” but director George Wolfe has asked, “Do we call this woman a monster, or do we see her as a woman who says, ‘I ain’t doing wife, I ain’t doing mother’? And what does that say about of ambitious women?”

The ferocity and poignancy of Rose’s final number (especially the lyric “Well, someone tell me, when is it my turn?”) seemed to build on McDonald’s own experiences with the specific challenges facing Black female performers. McDonald told one interviewer that while she had played “one of Uncle Jocko's kiddies in Fresno, California in 1980 on a production of Gypsy there,” it did not occur to her then that she could someday play the lead on Broadway: “never in a million years did I think I would be playing Rose in Gypsy...I understood that I was a little black girl so I thought my options would be limited.”

As Rose, McDonald seemed in constant motion—micro-managing her daughters’ acts, scheming her way into acts, and dreaming up new ideas. Whether or not race has anything to do with it, show business offers alternative channels for this energy through the promise of self-invention and mobility. But what Rose dreams—for her daughters and for herself—seems to echo what Jayna Brown has described in her book Babylon Girls as the particular fantasy of the Black chorus girl: “For a black constituency during the 1920s,” Brown writes, “black chorus women were important figures of hopeful migratory movement, urban ebullience, and promise. Moving in sinuous unstoppable unison, black chorus girls’ agile mobility became the triumphant and pleasure-filled affirmation of opportunities gained.” In her history of Black intimate life in the early twentieth century, Saidiya Hartman imagines similar dreams for Black chorine Mabel Hampton, who appeared in Black musicals such as Come Along, Mandy and Blackbirds of 1926:

At the music hall, cabaret, and private party, Mabel tried to dance her way into feeling free, to compose a wild and beautiful life, to step onto an errant path that might guide her to the wonderful experiences afforded by Harlem. Every step executed on the dance floor was an effort to elude the prohibitions and punishments that increasingly hemmed in the ghetto and that awaited young women daring to live outside the boundaries of marriage and servitude or move through the city unescorted by a husband or brother.

Wolfe’s revival brings out the musical’s latent potential to signal the complex racial histories of American vaudeville and burlesque, in which ethnicity and race, as well as other human qualities, were flattened into caricatures.

As McWhorter cautions, it is important to stress that show business in the 1920s was in fact rigidly regulated by racism both in terms of representation and labor. In her biography of Gypsy Rose Lee, Karen Abbott points out that “Baby” June Havoc’s early shows included at least one “hilarious” blackface number, as was common in both white and Black vaudeville. Martin Beck’s Orpheum Circuit (as well as rivals such as Alexander Pantages’s circuit) strictly limited Black acts, usually to one per show, and Black patrons could only occupy the second balcony. Most Black performers were booked through the Theater Owners Booking Association (TOBA) initiated by Sherman H. Dudley in 1909. TOBA performers received lower pay and worked under much more difficult conditions (as captured by some Black artists’ complaints that TOBA stood for “Tough On Black Asses.”) While Wolfe’s revival does not openly call on these aspects of theatre history, it does register more subtly some of the ways that both Black and white vaudeville and burlesque were shaped by the constraints of gender and race. The show began with June’s audition for an all-Black children’s show run by Uncle Jocko (Jacob Ming-Trent). As angrily revealed by Rose, the outcome of the audition is fixed because Uncle Jocko has a sexual interest in one young contestant’s sister.

Even in all-Black shows, racialized beauty standards dictated opportunities and rewards. Chorus lines of Black women became an innovation in American musical stages as early Sam T. Jack’s Creole Burlesque Show in 1890. The Creole Show was said by James Weldon Johnson to “glorify the colored girl”; however, its display of “sixteen light-skinned teenage girls” also adhered to blatant colorism, as did subsequent Black chorus lines in popular shows such as Eubie Blake and Noble Sissle’s 1921 Broadway hit Shuffle Along. Bearing these examples in mind, the perceived contrast between June and Louise in Wolfe’s revival seemed not just a matter of talent but also of skin tone. With her blonde wig and high-pitched voice, June’s act echoed Shirley Temple, while sister Louise performed as a chorus boy or was hidden in a cow costume. The transformation of Louise from an insecure girl to a mature and self-confident woman was particularly poignant since it also suggested Louise’s acceptance and embrace of her Black appearance. As she struggles to fill the void left by June’s departure, Louise first rejects wearing a blonde wig, forcing the act to change into one that contrasts her dark-haired lead with a chorus of bewigged “Hollywood Blondes.” Later in the show, Louise is left alone in her dressing room moments before she is compelled to perform her first striptease number. Looking at herself in the mirror, she suddenly realizes that she is pretty.

These touching moments pave the way for Louise’s later success on the burlesque stage as she changes from shy novice to charismatic stripper. In the time-lapse sequence of “Let Me Entertain You,” she goes from awkwardness to flirtatious elegance to boldness. Told by other strippers that “You’ve Gotta Have a Gimmick,” Louise’s defining trademarks comprise not just elegant dress and flirtatious comic banter, but the novelty of exotic primitivism as the sequence ends with what is announced as an “Egyptian” number. Choreographed by Camille A. Brown, this spectacular final dance echoes renowned Black dancers such as Aida Overton Walker, who performed “Oriental” Salome dances in New York from 1909 to 1912, and Josephine Baker, who rose to fame in Paris in the 1920s with her danse sauvage. That Louise strategically chooses this racialized display over the more restrained performances urged by her mother suggests her own savvy as well as her daughterly rebellion.

Even without making noticeable changes to the story told in Gypsy, Wolfe’s revival brings out the musical’s latent potential to signal the complex racial histories of American vaudeville and burlesque, in which ethnicity and race, as well as other human qualities, were flattened into caricatures (i.e. the “Toreadorables”) and performers of color negotiated racism and racial fetishism both onstage and offstage. In my book Oriental, Black, and White, I examine the histories of overlapping Black and “Oriental” characterizations in nineteenth and early twentieth century American theatre that included productions of Aladdin; performances of white and Black comedians specializing in humorous “Chinamen” acts; white, Black, and (occasionally) Chinese vaudevillians who performed in blackface; and Black female dancers appearing in “Oriental” dances. Louise’s “Egyptian” number seems to echo the many instances in which earlier Black female dancers appeared in “belly dance,” “nautch,” “Egyptian,” or what was even occasionally called a “hooch-ma-cooch” number (the last referencing the “cooch” or “hoochy coochy,” a Black social dance form popularized at New Orleans Conga Square in the early 1900s). These designations evoke the many instances of racial amalgamation in early twentieth century American popular theatre.

Such aspects of the revival made it easy to forget any reservations that a “Black Rose” never could have existed, and affirmed for me how audiences rarely walk out of any production of Gypsy (subtitled “A Musical Fable”) judging its story against the actual lives of Rose, June, and Louise Hovick. But rather than stopping with the question of whether McDonald’s Rose should be played as Black or white, the issues of racial casting and representation presented in this revival cover even more ground. For instance, this version of Gypsy reminded me of how constantly the musical refers to Chinese food—from the dog named Chowsie (short for chow mein) to the consumption of egg rolls to the scene in which Rose steals cutlery from a Chinese restaurant. As Audra McDonald’s Rose offered Mr. Goldstone (Andrew Kober) an eggroll, I was struck by how completely credible it was to have Black as well as white characters sustained by restaurants run by Chinese immigrants. The final chapter of my Oriental, Black, and White provides ample evidence of the interest in Chinese food from Black communities, which was often remarked upon in Black musical theatre. Of course, Chinese immigrant characters never really take center stage in Gypsy. And in this revival, as in every other production that I’ve seen, the Chinese restaurant worker was played by a non-Asian actor, an act of yellowface so sadly familiar that no reviewer ever mentions it. But since debates about casting, race, and representation have been raised from the get-go, it seems appropriate to wonder about this casting choice as well. (After all, even the pictures of “Tana June” and “Indy,” performing as Chowsie the dog, were featured in the program.)

The casting decisions for this Broadway revival of Gypsy not only raise questions about the continued lack of opportunity and visibility for BIPOC performers in prominent New York venues but also make us conscious of the continuation of white-dominant casting in so many professional, community, and student productions of Gypsy. (As Rose comments, New York is not the center of everything.) It also makes us think about how changes to entrenched theatrical practices can add different kinds of significance, intensity, and value to a show. After he finally saw the revival, John McWhorter changed his mind about recommending that Audra McDonald play Rose as white. In his follow-up op-ed, he concluded that McDonald’s Rose, performed as “identifiably Black, clear especially in the vocal cadence and inflections she has chosen,” shows him that “especially with older musicals, written when substantial roles for Black actors were rare, bending reality does not necessarily destroy the piece but can even enhance it, opening up opportunities for Black actors and in no way fostering ignorance about America’s past.” While I applaud McWhorter’s mea culpa in announcing that “Audra McDonald Was Right,” it is important to consider this revival’s casting and performance choices as more than just an opportunity for one star or an instance of “bending reality” that allows for a Black Rose but stays silent on the racism of the past. Racial representation in America has never been limited to just a simple choice between identity categories clearly marked as “Black” or “white.” Just as recent biographies reveal how complicated the lives of Rose and her daughters actually were, so does this recent revival of Gypsy point to the complicated history of Black performers in vaudeville and burlesque as well as the deep entanglements of interracial interaction and representation. In the end, the choices of this Broadway revival—whether in casting a “Black Rose” or playing a Chinese waitress in yellowface—are important not just as they reveal the changing casting practices of here and now, but rather as they lead us to reconsider the complex and highly charged legacies of racial performance that continue to have influence today.