I realized the other day that I’d been avoiding seeing Gypsy. My main reason was that I was enjoying all the backstage turmoil at the Shubert Theatre ruthlessly recounted every morning by Michael Riedel in his New York Post column. Surely the show itself could only be an anticlimax. I’d have been happy for it to go on previewing forever, as the producers ordered up new sets, fired choreographers, shuffled casts, and denied rumors about how lousy the star was, etc.

It hardly seems possible to have got into such a mess with Gypsy. The 1959 musical biography by Jule Styne, Stephen Sondheim, and Arthur Laurents is indestructible. It’s nominally about Gypsy Rose Lee, but actually about her mother, Mama Rose, the mother of all stage mothers. Just as her daughter is merely a vehicle for Mama’s ambitions, so a showbiz biotuner is merely a pretext for an investigation of something dramatically much juicier, and much more universal: parents and children. And, from that first sly sleight of hand, the show pulled off any number of others. To some of us, it’s the greatest of all Broadway musicals; certainly, it’s the most Broadway, fusing the two strains of the American musical: the dramatic ambition of the Rodgers and Hammerstein musical play set to the gloriously brassy blare of musical comedy. And in bringing together those two traditions Gypsyreaches moments of genuine operatic intensity that the more self-conscious “Broadway operas”—Weill, Menotti, Bernstein, Sondheim—rarely manage: Mama Rose is