Gypsy’s famous stage mother, played by shrieking Audra McDonald, is racialized in Broadway’s latest instance of gaslighting.
The choice of Audra McDonald as “Broadway’s Greatest,” for Time magazine’s cover story, was not indisputable but proves that the obsolete publication has lost significance. Its pretense as a cultural marker was timed to match McDonald’s Tony Award nomination for playing Mama Rose in the revival of Gypsy. It was meant to coincide with the presumed victory of her winning a seventh Tony Award, thus making statistical history alongside Gypsy’s political makeover as a black show. But the real news, as it turned out, was Nicole Scherzinger’s win for Sunset Blvd., blocking McDonald’s ascension. Time was humiliated just as Newsweek had been for its premature “Madame President” cover crowning Hillary Clinton in 2016.
The advance planners of the legacy media machine arranged for McDonald’s coronation by scheduling Oprah Winfrey, who has never performed on Broadway, to be the presenter for the Best Actress in a Musical category. It would certify McDonald’s triumph in a way only Oprah could: as a specifically racial and womanist achievement. That confirmation of the diversity agenda would, ironically, rewrite the cultural canon and impose racial superiority. Oprah could hand McDonald the glory she had sought for Kamala Harris but was denied. (The NAACP had similarly awarded Harris a consolation prize during its recent Image Awards ceremony.)
After the Tony loss, Oprah’s reparations for McDonald kicked in. Social media was flooded with clips of McDonald’s Tony-night performance of Gypsy’s climactic number, “Rose’s Turn.” And Oprah’s earlier video hosannah to McDonald, on Oprah Daily, was revived: “To watch someone perform at their highest vibration, a performance straight out of the soul bed. It was so stirring, her soul stirring ours, the audience, and us all having this glorified, shared, frequency experience, like she was absolutely tapped into the god source.”
McDonald herself would match Oprah’s gushing overstatement with an exhibition of highly wrought theatrics and repulsive calculation. Coming after Scherzinger’s tour de force rendition of “As If We Never Said Goodbye,” McDonald strained to upstage the competition. Shockingly, her “Rose’s Turn” emphasized all the offense of the production’s modern, Hamilton-ized racial undertones.
Earlier in the week, on a CBS Morning Show interview, McDonald told Oprah’s consort Gayle King that her characterization in the Gypsy revival obeyed director George C. Wolfe’s new interpretation, reflecting Millennial race consciousness. The original 1957 Gypsy had mythified the rough-and-tumble experience of Jewish showbiz transients as they moved from vaudeville into burlesque, based on the early years of stripper Gypsy Rose Lee and Mama Rose, her aggressive stage mother pushing her daughters into showbiz.
Instead of producing an original play depicting the segregated vaudeville circuits where Ma Rainey, Louis Armstrong, Bill “Bojangles” Robinson, the Bert Williams & George Walker duo, and many others struggled, Wolfe and McDonald offered an anachronistic, canon-challenging hybrid of white and black theatrical history. Though set in the early 20th century, their production appealed to the Millennial social-justice fad, presenting Mama Rose — in McDonald’s words — as “a single woman who, at this time when black people were being lynched, is trying to protect these babies.”
On Tony night, McDonald attacked the scourge of racism. She ramped up the most famous solo in American musical theater, second only to Carousel’s “Soliloquy (My Boy Bill),” into her personal version of “And I Am Telling You I’m Not Going!” — to evoke Jennifer Holiday’s anguish in Dreamgirls and to vanquish memories of all Broadway Mama Roses who came before her. She growled, whimpered, and shrieked, using hebephrenic vocal gymnastics, swinging her arms at invisible phantoms, and nudging aside ghosts of chattel slavery with her ample hips.
By contrast, the skeletal Scherzinger transformed Sunset Blvd.’s movieland horror story into a film noir Hollywood Babylon. Her barefooted, postmodern siren sang out a film-culture elegy; she deserved the Tony for that night alone. But McDonald choose angry ugliness to tell the world “J’accuse!”
And the PC Tony audience went nuts for it. Their standing-O followed Oprah’s cult-leader directive: “Everyone in that theater got to see Audra McDonald at her highest vibration and share in that frequency. . . . I’m still so moved and vibing from it,” Oprah emoted, testifying to a sensual, almost erotic reaction. But it was also polemical: “I walked out of there wanting to do better and be better. That is what great art does.” On Instagram, she further praised McDonald: “She’s pulling from the ancestors, the forces of life.” Oprah went tribal — part of her Jim Jones act, which was replicated in polarized social media comments about McDonald’s conniption fit.
McDonald renounced the showbiz dazzle that underscored Ethel Merman’s legendary Mama Rose prototype to emphasize the social justice politics that now dominate Broadway and corporate media. When Oprah congratulated McDonald’s fake raw anguish — “That is what great art does” — it proved this era’s ignorance of art’s true effect and purpose. We are culturally deprived, and the attempt to venerate McDonald for her unedifying turmoil backfired. Oprah and Audra sought to institute a new legend based on accusatory narcissism. Audra destroys the connection between delight and purpose that justifies Gypsy and all of showbiz. Scherzinger closed her set with the lyric “We taught the world new ways to dream.” Oprah and Audra gave us a nightmare.