Audra McDonald’s ‘Gypsy’ Showstopper
Eight times a week at the Majestic Theater, Audra McDonald delivers the emotional peak of Gypsy in a mere 4½ minutes—a searing rendition of “Rose’s Turn” that compresses the full arc of tragedy into one unforgettable performance. Aristotle’s elements of tragedy—pity, terror, self-delusion, and catharsis—are all packed into this single number, which explodes out of the cheeriest of theatrical forms: the American musical.
By the end of the song, McDonald appears utterly exposed, as if ripped from a Francis Bacon portrait. In this climactic moment of George C. Wolfe’s revival, an old standard is reborn—rawer, darker, and more revelatory than ever. Even musical theater devotees are walking out of the Majestic stunned, shaken by the sense that they’ve just witnessed something wholly original.
Audience members and critics alike have described the performance as spiritually transformative. LA Times critic Charles McNulty called it nearly religious; a theatergoer friend reported feeling so emotionally disoriented after the number that she didn’t know where she was upon exiting the theater. McDonald’s Rose doesn’t just revisit a classic—she redefines it.
“Rose’s Turn,” the emotional centerpiece of the 1959 musical Gypsy, becomes something far deeper in McDonald’s hands. The number, written by Laurents, Styne, and Sondheim, serves as a reckoning for Rose—a domineering stage mother in the final days of vaudeville. Through McDonald, the song tears away the character’s defenses, forcing her and the audience to confront buried truths.
Wolfe describes the number as a relentless stripping-away of identity. Musical director Andy Einhorn adds that watching McDonald perform it is like “watching something crawl out of the heart.” In shaping the performance, the creative team drew inspiration from Tony Kushner, children’s dance moves, musical dissonance, and the stark vulnerability of being the first Black woman to play Rose on Broadway.
One of Wolfe’s touchstones was a brutal passage from Kushner’s Angels in America, about how people change—violently, viscerally. That metaphor echoes through McDonald’s raw performance on the passerelle, the catwalk that leaves her physically and emotionally exposed. Her portrayal pushes beyond ego and ambition into the territory of generational trauma and abandonment.
McDonald, already a six-time Tony winner, uses her distinctive soprano to channel a range of feeling that spans rage, sorrow, and longing. “Rose’s Turn” starts as a defiant cry for attention but quickly collapses into a fragmented breakdown—possibly the first of its kind in musical theater history. With Wolfe’s guidance, McDonald unearthed the deeper questions Rose tries to ignore: “Why did I do it? What did it get me?”
While past performers emphasized Rose’s bombast, McDonald reveals a woman plagued by abandonment—by her own mother, and eventually, by her daughters. That pivotal moment comes when she shouts, “Ready or not, here comes Momma!” Wolfe calls it “the dreaded word,” signaling Rose’s final emotional unraveling. It’s not just a performance—it’s an exorcism.
McDonald’s maternal connection to the role became deeply personal when her own daughter left for college. That experience informed her emotional vulnerability in rehearsals and performance. She began to see Rose not just as a mother trying to reclaim her spotlight, but as a daughter herself—still desperate to be seen by her long-gone mother.
Vocally, McDonald defies expectations. She doesn’t belt the number like her predecessors but sings it “with my voice,” pushing it emotionally and technically. With Einhorn’s help, the key was raised a third to allow for a final, soaring moment. They also restored the original 1959 orchestrations, rich in unsettling dissonances—like nervous clarinets that mirror Rose’s unraveling.
Wolfe and Einhorn had McDonald slow the tempo of the number, allowing her to sit with the hardest questions. The choreography devolves into haunted echoes of the routines Rose taught her daughters, while McDonald’s voice slips into a guttural, bluesy growl—a rebellion against the expectation that Black women must always be composed.
On nights of special significance—like when Vice President Kamala Harris was in attendance—McDonald channels ancestral energy through the song. She once sang it “for the collective” of all Black women, so viscerally that she lost her voice. After the number, she emerges from the wreckage to take her bows—restored by cold towels, tissues, and resolve. “It’s fine,” she says wearily. “It’s the job.”
