BIG SHOW, BIG HEART, SMALL SPACE
This, I urgently must tell you, is rather wonderful: an example of the way that sometimes a big show in a small theatre can be a revelation. It was eight years ago that the West end fell back in love with the Laurents-Styne-Sondheim ‘fable’ about the childhood of Gypsy Rose Lee and her pushy mother, when Jonathan Kent’s glorious, big, splashy Chichester production came to the Savoy. It reminded us how brilliantly it mixes the comedy of pastiching the vaudeville-to-burlesque 1930’s with a poignant eye for neediness, maternal delusion and betrayal.
We were also reacquainted with Sondheim’s genius lyrics (nobody else could start a big number with “Have an egg roll, Mister Goldstone” or let a stripper in a centurion’s uniform warn colleagues to get a gimmick: ‘bump it with a trumpet’ don’t ‘sacrifice your sacro working in the back row’. But there is an immediate and even more moving quality about seeing Joseph Pitcher’s production close up under the low beams of the Mill’s little theatre with a cast of fourteen – three of them actor-musicians with instruments forming half the band – plus two children. The tots casting rotates, of course, but I am sure that on any night you always will absolutely be given the right shudder by Baby June’s first scene. Hilariously high kicks and gleaming baby-teeth below the Shirley Temple curls set your own teeth correctly on edge before, elegantly in mid-number, the infant shrill-monster turns into the adult performer Marina Tavolieri. And her poor sister Louise, in boy’s costume, becomes Evelyn Hoskins.
Hoskins is in herself a revelation, slouching and shy, forced onto the stage by a domineering mother whose crazed ambition is to make her little sister June a star and Louise a useful support act and seamstress. Hoskins’ voice is lovely, in the wistful “Little Lamb” particularly, and when she finally morphs into the burlesque stripper Gypsy Rose Lee she is deft , credible and moving as her initial unwillingness changes to addiction, and at last to defiance of Mama Rose.
Rebecca Thornhill as the matriarchal monster is also a revelation (she has played it in Manchester, and since then I’ve seen her as an unforgettable Mrs Burke in the Girl from the North Country tour) . Honey-voiced even when shouting, striding with nervous competence (especially in the audition scene as she tries to adjust it on the hoof, dodging round the dancers) she creates her own Rose, different from the strident Ethel-Merman style in a good way, a modern way. My companion, veteran of posh London school-gates, said she recognized the classic ambitiously demanding everyMum. But Thornhill also conveys Rose’s personal neediness and vulnerability, even before the huge final number, and interacts beautifully with Daniel Crowder as the likeable agent-lover Herbie.
There’s character and humanity in it all the way and oh, the choreography! Joseph Pitcher, associates Alex Christian and Rachel Moran and the versatility of the ever-mobile actor-musicians Tim MAxwell Clarke,Seren SAndham-Davies and Susannah van den Berg, creates a masterpiece of small-stage movement. There’s tap and splits, romps and robotic exactness, tableau-building and contrasts, vaudeville whoopee and burlesque coyness. For two and three-quarter hours the whole show flows, grips and enchants. It also knows when to stop in its tracks, as in the frozen moment when Baby June has defected and tMama turns on the harmless Louise with a terrifying “I made her, and I can make YOU!”” People gasped.
So by the time Van den Berg knocks out her Mazeppa centurion number, with Natalie Winsor turning on her flashing blue tits and crotch as Electra, even though the denouement is to come you already feel spoilt. As if you have been given more than you possibly deserved. And your ticket will have cost less than the West End, with a hearty dinner thrown in. Honour to the Mill.
millatsonning.com to 15 July
rating five
theatreCat 