This musical is of its time, to be sure, and looks back a bit from its own time as well, but it still feels pretty relevant and resonant today, save for the awkward tones the word "Gypsy" now carries.
The musical is an adaptation of striptease artist Gypsy Rose Lee's memoirs and details her life as the "other sister" to a child groomed by a fanatic Stage Mom to be a vaudeville star. When she aged out and left at the right time, Lee became the next project and entered burlesque—and liked it. The musical makes some chillingly grotesque parallels between burlesque and child-exploiting performances while not condemning sex work and sexual performance as a whole, which are viewpoints that stand very well today where child pageantry and stage moms are reviled and sex work is being reassessed as a great racket for consenting adults. These elements must surely come from a faithful translation of Lee's sentiments, and I'm glad they're kept. The music is by Stephen Sondheim, so it captures madness, tragedy, and lyrical wit in all the usual ways, and though it's an older musical and more show-tuney in sound, that works with the subject matter.
My only real criticism with the film is the amount of sympathy it offers to the mother, who seemed in real life to be both a narcissist to the core and even killed two people in altercations (these are not in the musical). By turning her into a character, they also allow her to learn a little and realize her wrongs, but in reality, people like her (and it seems, the real person herself) do not change under normal circumstances. Today it seems irresponsible to make a narcissist into a tragic figure, but that is an area where the knowledge of the time was just different.
Overall, this film is an interesting exploration of stage-mom abuse and doesn't portray stripping or striptease as a descent, but as decent means, which makes it hold up pretty nicely.
Theatre A suprisingly resonant story.
This musical is of its time, to be sure, and looks back a bit from its own time as well, but it still feels pretty relevant and resonant today, save for the awkward tones the word "Gypsy" now carries.
The musical is an adaptation of striptease artist Gypsy Rose Lee's memoirs and details her life as the "other sister" to a child groomed by a fanatic Stage Mom to be a vaudeville star. When she aged out and left at the right time, Lee became the next project and entered burlesque—and liked it. The musical makes some chillingly grotesque parallels between burlesque and child-exploiting performances while not condemning sex work and sexual performance as a whole, which are viewpoints that stand very well today where child pageantry and stage moms are reviled and sex work is being reassessed as a great racket for consenting adults. These elements must surely come from a faithful translation of Lee's sentiments, and I'm glad they're kept. The music is by Stephen Sondheim, so it captures madness, tragedy, and lyrical wit in all the usual ways, and though it's an older musical and more show-tuney in sound, that works with the subject matter.
My only real criticism with the film is the amount of sympathy it offers to the mother, who seemed in real life to be both a narcissist to the core and even killed two people in altercations (these are not in the musical). By turning her into a character, they also allow her to learn a little and realize her wrongs, but in reality, people like her (and it seems, the real person herself) do not change under normal circumstances. Today it seems irresponsible to make a narcissist into a tragic figure, but that is an area where the knowledge of the time was just different.
Overall, this film is an interesting exploration of stage-mom abuse and doesn't portray stripping or striptease as a descent, but as decent means, which makes it hold up pretty nicely.