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As any old Hollywood hack will tell you, “star quality” is a weird and wondrous thing. And as the same old Hollywood hack will tell you (and surely already has, in decades of bad novels and even worse movies), you can discover star quality, nurture it and develop it, promote it and exploit it, sometimes even kill it outright. The one thing you can’t do is invent it. Some people simply have it, and the world waits to find those people.
A couple of Masquerade Theatre seasons back, all Houston theater critics and most people in the audience found themselves remembering the movie title, “A Star Is Born.” That’s because we’d been lucky enough to see Rebekah Dahl in the title role of Annie Get Your Gun. That’s a fun show all by itself, full of Wild West hootin’ and hollerin’ that Texans presume is our own. Dahl was phenomenal as Annie – one of those singing-dancing-acting performers you can’t take your eyes off of. Yet for anyone who feared it was some kind of career high point, with the only question being how well she could maintain the excitement, the musical about Gypsy Rose Lee now on display at the Hobby Center’s Zilkha Hall provides exciting evidence of growth.
Interestingly, Gypsy is one of those shows in which the title character isn’t really the main character. Born Louise with a sister named June and a mother named Rose, the burlesque entertainer the world came to know as Gypsy Rose Lee was and is intriguing enough. As played and danced (and yes, even stripped – a little!) by Laura Gray, “Gypsy” was a portrait of childhood ignored. Always playing background to the sister their mother saw as the family’s ticket to vaudeville’s bigtime, Gypsy was a years coming to the basic conclusions that all humans hope to reach if they’re lucky enough – that they are smart, attractive and entirely worthy of love. Still, in the musical titled Gypsy, the real dominating (and domineering) force is girls’ mother, Rose.
As the “Mama” who tosses her kids onstage from the time they can walk and who focuses so obsessively on them that several husbands wander off, Dahl is many fascinating things at the same time – funny, admirable, courageous, hard-working, scary, a little insane, and more than a little pathetic. She serves up a full-blooded woman many of us have known at least in small doses, but now set squarely before us, front and center, all evening long. The fact that the road Mama walks leads to personal sadness and bitter disappointment verging on nervous collapse should come as no surprise. In the end, few children appreciate such over-the-top efforts. What’s important to Dahl’s eye-catching (and dazzling singing and dancing) performance is that she makes us love, admire, hate and fear Mama Rose (and all those who are like her) in absolutely equal amounts.
Masquerade artistic director Phillip Duggins directed the show with sensitivity and a deep appreciation of its comic majority to spotlight more fully its near-tragic minority, letting the book by Arthur Laurents and the terrific songs by Jule Styne and Stephen Sondheim light up the night. Gypsy seemed to drag a bit on opening night, but many shows do and then pick up speed with additional confidence. The large cast of adults (and a neat sprinkle of children from Masquerade’s Tribble School) was dead-on 99 percent of the evening, standouts among those supporting Dahl and Gray being John Gremillion as the long suffering agent-almost-husband Herbie, Beth Hempen as June, Braden Hunt as Tulsa – and Kristina Sullivan, Libby Evans and Allison Sumrall as a laugh-packing trio of gimmick-happy strippers.
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