TT: Mother knows worst

In today’s Wall Street Journal I report on a revival of Gypsy at Pennsylvania’s Bristol Riverside Theatre in which Tovah Feldshuh plays Mama Rose. Here’s an excerpt.
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If you’re looking for a really big pair of shoes to fill, try playing Mama Rose in “Gypsy.” Not only did Ethel Merman, the greatest of all musical-comedy stars, create the role back in 1959, but subsequent Broadway revivals featured Angela Lansbury, Tyne Daly, Bernadette Peters and, most recently and stunningly, Patti LuPone. As if that weren’t competition enough, Rosalind Russell played Mama Rose (badly, alas) in Mervyn LeRoy’s ill-fated 1962 film version, and Bette Midler did the honors three decades later on TV. Throw in Betty Buckley’s insufficiently remembered 1998 performance at New Jersey’s Paper Mill Playhouse and you’ve got…well, a storeful of fancy shoes.
All of which brings us to the Bristol Riverside Theatre revival of “Gypsy,” directed by Keith Baker, in which Tovah Feldshuh takes on the challenge of playing the ultimate stage mother. Ms. Feldshuh is not a natural musical-comedy star–she was charmless and uncharismatic in the “Hello, Dolly!” mounted by Paper Mill back in 2006–but Mama Rose, unlike Dolly Levi, is her kind of part, and though her singing is less than ideal, she still makes a strong impression.
What is most appealing about Ms. Feldshuh’s performance is its modesty of scale. Her Rose is a tough, determined, sexually appealing woman who clearly comes from the wrong side of the tracks and does her best to conceal her vulnerability, sometimes successfully and sometimes not. Yes, she can be scary, and rightly so. To turn a mousy little nobody like Louise (Amanda Rose) into the world’s most famous stripper, as Rose does in “Gypsy,” is not a job for the faint of heart. But even though ambition has soured and twisted her personality and comes perilously close to wrecking her daughter’s life, you are at all times aware that Ms. Feldshuh’s Mama Rose is a human being, not a Godzilla-like monstre sacré made of pig iron or solid brass.
It’s hard to say whether this approach would work in a Broadway-sized house, especially since Ms. Feldshuh’s near-baritonal singing voice lacks the two-fisted punch to which her illustrious predecessors have accustomed us….
Fortunately, Bristol Riverside’s 302-seat auditorium is small enough to let Ms. Feldshuh play Rose without any sense of strain….
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Read the whole thing here.