Review Round-up: 'Here She Is World': Audra McDonald in 'Gypsy'

Greg Evans, Deadline

"There aren't enough dressing rooms on Broadway to contain all the expectations for the new 'Gypsy' . . . But along with the high hopes is the question that's been whispered since the production was announced months ago: Would McDonald, an opera-trained vocalist prized for her impossibly pure soprano, have the grit and belt for the rough-around-the-edges anti-heroine Rose, a character entrusted with a bundle of the finest, gutsiest anthems and ballads ever written by those formidable theater creators Arthur Laurents, Jule Styne and Stephen Sondheim? . . .

"The answer is a qualified, perhaps even reluctant, yes. I can't recall a better wrong-for-the-part performance in recent memory than McDonald's Rose. . .

"Supported by a fine roster of co-stars – notably Danny Burstein as Herbie, Joy Woods as Louise and Jordan Tyson as June – McDonald gives – no surprise here – an impeccable dramatic performance. . . Less convincing is McDonald's occasionally jarring vocal performance. There's no disputing that she's an amazing singer, one of the best on Broadway. Yet her frequent jumps from her chest voice – the rafter-raising belt most associated with Rose – and her head voice – the velvet soprano so prized by the six-time Tony winner's legions of devotees – takes us unsettlingly out of the moment. Momma Rose starts a verse; McDonald finishes it. . .

"So, that caveat out of the way, Wolfe's 'Gypsy,' which replaces the original Jerome Robbins choreography with new dances by the fabulous Camille A. Brown, easily takes its place among the long line of memorable Broadway 'Gypsys' and their stars, Ethel Merman, Angela Lansbury, Tyne Daly, Bernadette Peters and Patti LuPone (and, in a 1993 TV movie, Bette Midler), belters all."

Christopher Isherwood, the Wall Street Journal

"Any production of 'Gypsy' rises or falls on its Rose, and Ms. McDonald's lifts this staging to majestic (sorry) heights. Days later I was reliving her 'Rose's Turn' in my mind with a mixture of elation, wonder and sorrow, the last arising from compassion for the devastating revelation of a woman's misbegotten life. Who, after all, does not have dreams that withered, ambitions left unfulfilled? Who has not at some point felt that we walk through life as ghosts, just wanting 'to be noticed,' as Rose wanly says in the musical's moving final scene?"

Johnny Oleksinski, the New York Post

"'Gypsy' is, by the estimation of many – including me – the greatest musical ever written.

"But you wouldn't know it from the slow and unsteady revival starring Audra McDonald that opened Thursday at the Majestic Theatre.

"The quintessentially American story about driving and moving from place to place while scraping by with a pipe dream of stardom does not satisfyingly drive or move. With stop-start direction from George C. Wolfe, the sixth Broadway production of Jule Styne, Stephen Sondheim and Arthur Laurents' musical runs out of gas early.

"She's less aggressive or mean than she is frantic, speaking lightning-fast in an almost mutter while buzzing about the stage, cajoling to get her daughters ahead. The actress goes for maybe half the biting laughs that are available to her. For a character described in the script as not nice, McDonald's interpretation is, well, awfully nice. A Rose without thorns."