My daughter is in high school, and I've advised her that if her school ever does Gypsy, she should dust off her trumpet (yes, she has one) and audition for Mazeppa.
"It does me no injury for my neighbour to say there are 20 gods or no god. It neither picks my pocket, nor breaks my leg."
-- Thomas Jefferson
Is it wrong for me to say that I knew who Tessie Tura was long before I knew what tessitura was?
If anyone ever tells you that you put too much Parmesan cheese on your pasta, stop talking to them. You don't need that kind of negativity in your life.
gotta love when a thread gets resurrected nearly a year later for NO REASON whatsoever.
If we're not having fun, then why are we doing it?
These are DISCUSSION boards, not mutual admiration boards. Discussion only occurs when we are willing to hear what others are thinking, regardless of whether it is alignment to our own thoughts.
Well at least they didn't start a new thread... Because that would have just been horror of unspeakable HORROR!
You guys are pretty vicious on here... Almost like damned if you do, damned if you don't. So they resurrected an old thread. I think everyone will be ok!
Oh, good. For a second there, I was worried someone was complaining.
"TheatreDiva90016 - another good reason to frequent these boards less."<<>>
“I hesitate to give this line of discussion the validation it so desperately craves by perpetuating it, but the light from logic is getting further and further away with your every successive post.” <<>>
-whatever2
A bit of history.... Below is from the Washington Post when Faith Dane (the original Mazeppa) ran for Mayor of Washington DC in 2002:
"Faith met many figures on the arts and literary scene of her day. Through mutual friends, she says, she got to know James Jones, author of "From Here to Eternity." He gave her her first bugle as a present to cheer her up.
He told her it was the one Montgomery Clift blew in the movie version of his novel. It was during a low point for Faith, in the mid-1950s. She was past 30, and her career seemed stalled. She kept getting fired "because of my big mouth," she said. She decided to develop a nightclub act and hit the road. She took the bugle.
Show business exacts some of the hardest dues from itinerant players, scraping through dives and carnivals, dependent on the kindness of coldhearted club owners, falling back on pure personality when all else fails to win over an audience. For three years Faith worked her way through joints in New York, Miami, New Orleans, Nassau. Once she resorted to wrestling doped alligators in a carnival show on a Florida Indian reservation.
Eventually she developed an act with 26 numbers -- piano, jokes, sketches. She'd come onstage with a shopping cart full of junk. She'd pull out items -- a hat, a scarf -- and start improvising. When she pulled out the bugle, she always got laughs. She devised a number she called "A Stripper in the WAC [Women Army Corps] Drum & Bugle Corps."
She read that auditions were being held on Broadway for a new show called "Gypsy," based on the memoirs of Gypsy Rose Lee, the burlesque queen. Some of Broadway's heaviest hitters were involved: co-producer David Merrick, director Jerome Robbins, book writer Arthur Laurents, composer Jule Styne, lyricist Stephen Sondheim, star Ethel Merman.
Here was Faith Dane's big chance.
The luminaries assembled for her audition had low expectations. Faith was one of a series of vaudeville-style acts they were testing to give "Gypsy" authenticity. She got a shot only because her father was Arthur Laurents's high school history teacher and her cousin was Laurents's friend.
She slipped out of her sequined gown, revealing a flesh-color body stocking with bikini-style coverings, and unleashed the Stripper in the WAC Drum & Bugle Corps. She saluted and marched and bumped her hips and blasted the bugle. For the finale she bent her posterior toward her judges and blew the bugle at them between her legs.
The jaded audience went berserk. Robbins and Laurents howled. Gypsy Rose Lee laughed so hard she cried and had to peel off her false eyelashes.
"It was one of the most spectacular auditions ever in the history of Broadway theater," recalls John Wallowitch, who played piano accompaniment at the audition and went on to become a prolific songwriter and distinguished cabaret star. "It was hysterical. It was a beautiful, wonderful theatrical audition by a theatrical animal. . . . Even Sondheim cracked a smile."
Sondheim declined to be interviewed for this story, but during a panel discussion on "Gypsy" published in 1985, he recalled the tedious process of those auditions. "It was all worth it for one thing, incidentally," he said. "Faith Dane and her trumpet. . . . That went right into the show."
Faith got the part of Mazeppa, the veteran stripper passing on hard-earned wisdom in the song "You Gotta Get a Gimmick." She sang like a collision between a horse trailer and a dump truck.
"If you wanna bump it, bump it with a trumpet," she belted. Once I was a schlepper, now I'm Miss Mazeppa With my revolution in dance You gotta have a gimmick, if you wanna have a chance.
"Gypsy" (1959) ran for 706 performances and Faith stopped the show many nights, Wallowitch says.
She also appeared on the original-cast album and reprised Mazeppa in the 1962 film, with a doe-eyed Natalie Wood looking on. "
Jill is going to be Mazeppa,Debbie is going to be Electra and Pat is going to be Tessie Tura Mazeppa is dressed in a centurion costume and plays the trumpet In the 2008 revival she wore a Paul Revere tricorn and red, white, and blue in strategic places, Electra "is electrifying" and has a showgirl style costume that lights up with lots of little light bulbs (but the lights don't all come on a once) There are costumes found on Enlighted http://www.enlighted.com/pages/electra.shtml but in the 1962 film she was a Christmas Tree. and Tessie Tura is "more demurer" in a floaty ballet dress type costume. Preferably has floaty wings like a butterfly In the 2003 revival she is liking a swan from Swan Lake
Then there was Mary Louise Wilson as Tessie in the Lansbury production, a performance that I think is definitive and totally different than any other one of Tessie.
Mary Louise played her just a tough as Mazeppa so that when the two of them went at it, we thought that it could turn into mud wrestling at any moment.
Yet, her short crossover scene with Agnes (played by Denny Dillon), which is just a 45 second bit to give Louise some prep time, became revelatory as it showed how Tessie's opinion of Rose Louise et al had changed during the previous two weeks. We saw that Tessie was a tough shell with a soft center. Director Laurents was busy with the principals, and it was Mary Louise who rehearsed and rehearsed with Denny to get that scene pitch perfect.
Mary Louise was also Lansbury's standby. She never went on.
One of my favorite lyrics though, is Electra's, "I never have to sweat to get paid."
I have always felt that the script at this point in the second act is constructed to give Rose some rest time since she has to play the last 15-20 minutes of the show at a fever pitch: lose her boyfriend, coax and coach Gypsy through the strip,make a costume and probably a wig change, have the be-all and end-all of mother-daughter arguments and then have a musical nervous breakdown alone on stage. And then, hardest of all, a short resolution scene that ends the play.
The song is an entertaining way to give Rose some time to go to the can, put her feet up and have a cup of tea.
"If my life weren't funny, it would just be true. And that would be unacceptable."
--Carrie Fisher
The song also alludes to the gimmick that made Gypsy Rose Lee famous: she was the erudite stripper who was too classy to remove more than a little of her clothing on stage.
"Then there was Mary Louise Wilson as Tessie in the Lansbury production, a performance that I think is definitive and totally different than any other one of Tessie.
Mary Louise played her just a tough as Mazeppa so that when the two of them went at it, we thought that it could turn into mud wrestling at any moment."
I didn't see Wilson, but Marilyn Cooper (later a Tony Award winner for WOMAN OF THE YEAR) replaced her when the show closed in New York and reopened in Florida; Coopie also managed to top the two strippers who went before her. Part of it was that she was barely 5 feet tall so her portrayal of an elegant, statuesque ballerina was particularly ridiculous. (They cast a very tall Mazeppa and Electra to increase the contrast.)
And part of it was as you suggest with Wilson: Cooper could turn on a dime and be tougher than anyone in the room. (I'm talking about acting here. She was a total sweetheart as a person.) The contrast stopped the show.
***
I am not a big fan of slapstick, Shakespeare's clowns (a fair comparison, BTW), or any form of so-called "low" humor, but "You Gotta Get a Gimmick" never fails to leave me howling on the floor of the theater. I think a very wise decision was made to write the song for character rather than one-liners. If they had gone the other way, we'd all be tired of the one-liners by now.
The Reason I like You Gotta Have a Gimmick it is a fun and hyper song is to get female freinds involed ever since Hey Mr Producer! The gimmicks vary from a trumpet to electric lights and a butterfly cape, most recently Caren Fitzpatrick, Percy Figueroa, Claudia Ratzlaff are going to be Mazeppa, Electra and Tessie Tura in the film burning down the house besides getting my friends involved I always think TV Characters like in 1981 ABC promo for example Muriel, Joanie and Laverne there beach costumes remind me of something http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3sZpegOcp0c&feature=related
And never fails to leave me howling on the floor of the theater.
The whole Gypsy soundtrack is wonderful. I bought the soundtrack when I was 17 and felt guilty about spending $2 for a record album. But I was so smitten with Natalie Wood.
