By Helen Musa

The super-ambitious Queanbeyan Players are embarking on a production of the musical Gypsy, seven years after the local council abruptly cancelled a planned production featuring Geraldine Turner in 2019.

The 1959 Broadway show, with music by Jules Styne and lyrics by the fledgling Stephen Sondheim, was made famous by Ethel Merman in the role of Mama Rose and is usually seen as a vehicle for powerful female characters.

Briefly, Rose, the ultimate aggressive stage mother, supported by her manager-boyfriend Herbie, stops at nothing to make her talented younger daughter, June, a vaudeville star, while her older, supposedly less-talented daughter, Louise, is ignored and used as a background prop.

That is, until Louise transforms herself into Gypsy Rose Lee, the most famous striptease and burlesque artist of her time, who wrote the 1957 memoir on which the show is based.

Dubbed the “intellectual stripper”, Gypsy mixed sophisticated wit, reserve and lively conversation with a slow, playful striptease, casually chatting with her audience as she performed.

When I popped into the Queanbeyan Uniting Church Hall for a rehearsal of Gypsy, I found director Jude Colquhoun and musical director Brigid Cummins working through a vocal warm-up and a scene from Act One.

The two are busy taping up the rehearsal room to make space for a 22-piece orchestra, which will appear on stage, while behind the scenes Queanbeyan Players members are rummaging through their sheds for period pieces to help create what will largely be a recycled set.

Colquhoun tells me it is five years since she last directed a show for the Queanbeyan Players, HMS Pinafore.

Declaring herself a devotee of classic Broadway musicals and Gilbert and Sullivan, she is particularly thrilled to have had her proposal to direct Gypsy accepted. But she hastens to explain that this is one great Broadway musical that is often misunderstood.

That is because, despite being about showbiz, it is not a great big A Chorus Line-type extravaganza, although choreographer Belinda Hassall is having fun with the dance. 

As Colquhoun explains, the perennial drawing power of Gypsy is that it is really about family relationships, so that even though it is set in the late 1920s and 1930s, the show feels remarkably up to date.

To be sure, the central character, Mama Rose, has become an icon of the pushy stage mother and, even in community-minded Queanbeyan Players, there have been more than a few of those over the years.

“You see the pattern,” Colquhoun says.

The plot revolves around a relatively small number of principals, with Emily White as Rose, Emily Pogson as Louise, Steven Galinec as the long-suffering Herbie, Paris Ellis as June and Ash Syme as Tulsa.

In all, the cast numbers 24, including understudies and double-ups for the six child actors, all under 12.

“It’s bloke-light, female-heavy… Everyone has a line, something to do,” Colquhoun explains.

And, she affirms, “It’s a bloody wonderful cast”.

She was overwhelmed by the number of people who auditioned, with her only regret being that this small-scale musical meant she couldn’t find roles for all the aspirants.

She wasn’t for a moment inclined to look outside the local area for a central star.

“My idea was that we have so many women of the right age and calibration,” she says, singling out Emily White as Rose and Emily Pogson as Louise as “phenomenal”.

Several local burlesque artists turned up to try their hand, but there is a great difference between Gypsy’s style of striptease and the contemporary, more exposing kind.

“The old and the new are very different,” Colquhoun says. “Gypsy was a tease artist who showed skin, but not a lot, working on the principle that you show them something and then you don’t.”

Pogson has a demanding acting role, playing Louise as she gradually transforms into Gypsy. During the rehearsal, she sings the affecting Little Lamb alone in her hotel room on her birthday, reflecting on her confusion about her real age and identity after her mother has constantly lied about her age to keep her vaudeville act looking young.

And who needs a Mama like that?

Gypsy, The Q, October 30-November 8.

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