Perfect casting makes Shaw’s Gypsy remarkable

It’s hard to imagine anyone other than Kate Hennig playing the role of Rose in Shaw Festival’s production of Gypsy. The nine-year Shaw veteran is a tour de force as the pushy, blindly-ambitious stage mother of two young performers, determined that first her younger daughter June, then her older daughter Louise, is to become a star. 

Perhaps one reason Hennig embodies the role so well is that she stepped in for Nora McLellan as Rose when Jackie Maxwell directed Gypsy back in 2005, the last time it was performed at Shaw.

Experience must count for something. But with her look, her voice, her stage presence and her loud belly laugh, Hennig seems to have been born to play the mother of the well-known burlesque and strip-tease performer Gypsy Rose Lee. She owns the stage during the three-hour Shaw presentation, directed by Jay Turvey.

The original 1959 Broadway production, featuring Ethel Merman in the role of Rose, was based on the 1957 bestseller Gypsy: A Memoir, the often heartbreaking life story of America’s most celebrated stripper. In that book the woman born as Rose Louise Hovick divides her life into three acts, the third ending with her journey to Hollywood. 

The play, however, largely shines the spotlight on the family’s matriarch, a thrice-married woman obsessed with seeing one of her daughter’s names in lights. 

Act one begins with June and Louise as young children, drawn into their mother’s scheming to find success for them on the vaudeville circuit in the early 1920s. The setting is Gypsy Rose Lee’s hometown of Seattle, Washington, where Rose bullies and blackmails a local vaudeville producer, played by Allan Louis, into taking on the girls’ act. 

Rose’s troupe of child dancers and singers performs the first of a series of rollicking production numbers here, with Baby June as the focus. A reluctant Louise is meanwhile relegated to one of her younger sister’s supporting cast, through incarnations as first a newsboy and then a farmer, as Rose tweaks the children’s act seemingly based on what props are available to her.

Then it’s on to Los Angeles, where she meets Herbie (an excellent Jason Cadieux), whom she persuades to become the girls’ manager. Hennig delivers a knock-out performance of Small World in her attempt to win Herbie over. He soon is hoping to be husband number four to the “pioneer woman without a frontier.”

Early in Gypsy, Louise is portrayed by the talented Hannah Otta, a 12-year-old St. Catharines actor. In another perfect casting move, Hannah is almost the spitting image of Julie Lumsden, who plays the older version of Louise for the remainder of the play. It might even take a few minutes and a couple of blinks before audience members realize there has been a change. 

Winnipeg-born Ariana Abudaqa is the young Baby June in Gypsy. On the day The Local attended, though, Hannah’s 10-year-old sister Sofia stepped into the role and performed it superbly. It was a special treat to see the two sisters, who are heavily involved in Niagara-
on-the-Lake’s Yellow Door Theatre Project, work together on the Festival Theatre stage. 

Having worn out their welcome in California, Herbie and Rose drag the kids to Akron, which is where we first see Lumsden as Louise. In that Ohio city Louise celebrates her birthday alone in her room after Rose and the others chase away an angry hotel manager. Lumsden delivers a soulful, heart wrenching performance of Little Lamb, lamenting the fact that her mother won’t even tell her how old she is.

Through Buffalo and Omaha, Rose pushes harder and harder to make the extroverted June (now played by Madelyn Kriese) a star, in the process continuing to neglect the quieter and less enthusiastic Louise. 

Both sisters begin to tire of traipsing across the country with their mother. They fantasize about what it would be like if Herbie and Rose married and settled down. When that doesn’t seem to be happening, June runs away to marry back-up performer Tulsa (a wonderful Drew Plummer). 

But that doesn’t deter Rose, who comes up with a new plan to make her shy older daughter a star. Hennig belts out the well-known Everything’s Coming Up Roses to conclude act one.

Act two is almost a completely different style of play. With the first act heavy on comedy and lavish production numbers, the second delivers the pathos and the tragedy of a mother pushing her daughter a little too far. 

As the Great Depression arrives, vaudeville becomes a thing of the past. Rose and Herbie struggle to find work for Louise, who knows she will never be June. Louise winds up mistakenly booked for a gig at a burlesque venue in Wichita, Kansas, and finds herself sharing a dressing room with seasoned striptease performers. 

Destitute and desperate to help her mother, Louise offers to perform a striptease act to earn some money. That leads to a highlight of the second act, You Gotta Get a Gimmick, a hilariously ribald number performed by the strippers Tessie (Elodie Gillett, also Turvey’s assistant director), Mazeppa (Jenni Burke) and Electra (Krystle Chance), complete with butterfly wings, a trumpet, and a strategically lit bra, respectively. 

Realizing the end of her dream is near, Rose reluctantly agrees to marry Herbie and settle down, but at the last minute offers up her daughter to fill in for the venue’s star stripper, who has been arrested. 

Lumsden’s face reveals the embarrassment and unease felt by Louise as she takes the spotlight for her first strip tease, stumbling through some awkward moves while singing Let Me Entertain You.

From there, it’s off to Detroit, Philadelphia and New York City, as Louse becomes increasingly secure in her skin as a stripper. And Rose now realizes her daughter no longer needs her. 

Rose’s sad journey is encapsulated by the final number, Rose’s Turn. Her performance of the song is both poignant and somehow triumphant, as Hennig belts out the tune in front of a neon-lit sign proclaiming her name.

That neon sign is just one of the examples of the trademark attention to detail paid by designer Cory Sincennes and director Turvey. Others include a gilt-embossed arch embedded with a silent movie-style title card on both sides that announce the location of each scene and the strobe light effect by lighting designer Kevin Fraser that leads to the transition of the child actors to teenagers.

Then there’s the orchestra. Directed by Paul Sportelli, the ensemble is as powerful and adept as it’s ever been, delivering the horn-heavy music written by Jule Styne with lyricist Stephen Sondheim. Their performance alone would be worth the price of admission.

Gypsy is a must-see this season at the Festival Theatre, on now until Oct. 7. Visit shawfest.com for tickets.