Joe Skinner: Hey, this week we’re taking a break from our video episodes of the show, but please subscribe to our channel on YouTube at youtube.com/americanmasters and on pbs.org/americanmasters. You can watch the video version of our show on those platforms as well as tons of other American Masters content, past episodes, short docs, archive interviews and more. For today’s audio-only episode, I met up with famed playwright and theater director George C. Wolfe to talk about his much hyped Broadway production of Gypsy, which was just nominated for a Tony Award for best revival of a musical. Wolfe directed the show, and I know what a film director does, but I feel like the work of the theater director often gets overshadowed by the playwright. This was a great opportunity to put some shine on a seriously important role in the creative process. I feel lucky to have George C. Wolfe on hand to answer these kinds of questions. He’s probably one of the most high-energy and excitable artists I’ve ever met.
George C. Wolfe: So you have material and hopefully it’s good and it’s smart and it’s engaging, and it’s powerful and it’s wonderful, and so you start digging in and it’s your job to take something that exists on the page and figure out a way to animate it in every single way that you possibly can. Animated visuals, so you work with designers, both set and costumes. Animated emotionally and viscerally, so you’re working with actors and you’re dissecting the text and you’re trying to create an understanding between them and the material so that therefore there is no gap between them and the material. It’s all about going inside and excavating this material and animating it in a way that feels visceral and immediate and compelling and hopefully, ultimately, empowering. The director’s job is to make that which exists on a page live as if it is happening completely and totally in the moment.
Joe Skinner: Hi, I am Joe Skinner, and this is American Masters: Creative Spark. In each episode, our guest breaks down their creative process behind a single work of art. Today, George C. Wolfe talks about how he directed a revival of one of the most widely celebrated Broadway shows in history. Gypsy is a musical loosely based on the memoirs of burlesque dancer, Gypsy Rose Lee, who’s portrayed as a larger-than-life showbiz mom hellbent on finding fame and success for her two daughters, Baby June and Louise. Even if you’re not a big fan of Broadway, you probably know songs from Gypsy like Some People and Everything’s Coming Up Roses. The show’s creators are who’s who of Broadway legends; lyrics by Stephen Sondheim, music by Jule Styne, and a book by Arthur Laurents. Premiering on Broadway in 1959, Gypsy is regarded by critics as the best of the golden age musicals.
Unlike working with original material, you’re bringing back a show that has so much, for lack of a better word, baggage or history, so different audiences might already have a connotation with it. How are you working to divorce people from that? Or are you playing into that? Are you in conversation with that?
George C. Wolfe: No. I think just like in life, one can make choices that are not choices or one can just go on your own journey and believe, trust, know that as you go excavating and if you surround yourself with smart, adventurous people, you are going to discover a series of truths that are special for that project. I think all iterations of Gypsy in New York have carried the markings of the original production, which was directed and choreographed by Jerome Robbins, and that includes his choreography. Arthur Laurents, who wrote the book, has directed any number of them, and they’ve all been very successful and wonderful and smart. And so I was just very interested in wanting to dig into the material because I think the material is dazzlingly smart and it’s complicated, and the characters are very rich and textured in a way that does not always occur in musical theater. And so I was really interested in going on a journey with Audra, with the entire company, and trying to discover not necessarily new truths, but our truths.
Joe Skinner: Actress Audra McDonald has described the lead character of Gypsy as theater’s Mount Everest. It’s one of the most desired roles for any actor to play. Here, the six-time Tony Award winner, is taking it on, marking the first time a Black woman has played the role of Rose in a major production like this. But to take this bold new approach to the material, George Wolfe chose to first do a close read on the source text to better understand its original context.
George C. Wolfe: The Depression. The Great Depression is the background for the show and it informs so many of the choices. Almost all the characters are operating from the position of not enough; not enough love, not enough money, not enough success, not enough attention. It’s that hunger, that desire, that desperate need for more, for more, that fuels them while the country is desperate for more. So I spent a lot of time just looking and studying and digging inside of photographs. There were a number of images that I found that were very important to my understanding of the material. I saw this image of three children, I think in the Dust Bowl, and there was a handwritten sign painted onto a piece of wood saying Three children for Sale. A woman was selling her children because she could no longer afford to feed them.
Now, it’s a musical and there’s songs like Together, Wherever We Go and numbers, and Let Me Entertain You and all this sort of stuff, but underneath it, that’s what I believe this woman was doing. She was trying to run faster than the economic realities of the time, so that when she’s saying, “I’m going to make you a star,” she’s talking about safety and protection from harm, from the realities that could consume and devour all of us. And so that became a really interesting thing, knowing that there’s an economic intensity that is out there ready to consume, that has already consumed much of the country, and that these people are looking for showbiz, are looking for entertainment, are looking for the possibility of getting the dream that they don’t know how to get anywhere else.
There are many different versions of the show that we can do, but I think one of the crucial jobs of a director is making sure everybody’s working on the same show. That economic hunger, that ambition for not just acclaim, but safety from the harshness of the realities that are consuming the country, was also crucial and an important part of the piece.
Joe Skinner: That intense desperate ambition sets up a wonderfully messy soup of humanity and pathos in Gypsy may be best exemplified by one of the show’s signature songs, Everything’s Coming Up Roses. It plays at the end of the first act and showcases Rose’s disposition beautifully. Despite its positive sounding lyrics, she’s been cornered. Her prized daughter Baby June has left Rose and the family project. Yet Rose sings this song, almost as her mantra for survival, as she turns to her other daughter, Louise, to help fulfill her dreams.
Joe Skinner (Interview): Just sticking on the subject of economic precarity, and I can’t help but think about the different resonance that that might have with the moment that we’re in today. Are you thinking about that when you’re in this process too, about how audiences might receive that kind of thing? I mean, there’s so much conversation now happening around austerity and everything.
George C. Wolfe: All of us are in the moment, and we don’t have scales on our skin. We are a soft animal. So we absorb. We absorb whatever is happening. It’s warm in New York City, so when you go outside, you actually look up. Because when it’s winter, you don’t look up, you look down and you try to get to where the hell you’re going as quickly as you possibly can. Every day when we’re showing up for rehearsal or when we’re on a break or when we’re on our way home, we are absorbing the world that we live in. We are absorbing it without actively trying to do it. And then also, the thing that was fascinating to me is that you have Arthur Laurents, you have Stephen Sondheim, you have you have Jule Styne, you had Jerome Robbins, and all of those men were born at a time. They all went through the Depression. And I’m sure they had various degrees of economic security or a lack of economic security, but it lived inside their bodies. So they put it into the show.
My answer in a roundabout way is, I wasn’t thinking about the moment, and the actors weren’t thinking about the moment because we’re living the moment, but our responsibility was digging into this material and finding the sense of joy and possibility and need and desperation that was fueling and driving them. There’s different bartering that goes on throughout the show. At one point I just said, “Any conversation about money is not casual.” Your conversation about money is about eating. The conversation about money is about having a place to stay. Not all of that necessarily comes to the surface and the audience is just sitting there going, “Oh, that conversation is really about eating and money.” No. But it informs the intensity and the passion and the ferocity with which these characters go about living their lives, go about singing their songs, go about reaching for that which is seemingly not achievable, but you must invest fully and totally so that you can achieve it, so that you can feel more safe.
Joe Skinner: There are subtle ways in which George Wolfe pursues a more sympathetic depiction of Rose amidst her economic uncertainty, like a scene where he changes the interpretation of the text away from her literally kidnapping children to something more empowering.
George C. Wolfe: The scenario that was created was there was a rich man driving a car, and then Mama Rose sends her daughters out to hitchhike, and the rich man has a son in the car. And so the rich man stops, picks up the daughters, and then Rose comes and jumps into the car. And then at one point, Boy Scouts pass by and they’re singing a song, and by the end of the sequence, Mama Rose has stolen the little boy, one of the Boy Scouts and another character, so she can build her act. And so that was the scenario, and I’m sure once upon a time, it was done in a delightful, charming, innocent way.
I wasn’t invested or interested in having a mother put her two daughters out so that they could be picked up by a rich guy driving by in a car. So it became fascinating to me because it was Rose, giving Rose a sense of agency, and Rose giving a sense of power. She’s just had a fight with her father and she steals a plaque, and so I decided she steals his car as well. And so she’s driving along. I had her pass by these two boys dancing, and they had a sign called Dancing for Food. And so she drives by, picks them up, offers them Chinese food, and they jump into her car, and then she drives by an orphanage, and there’s some kid who has just escaped and she offers him food, and so he joins the company.
Instead of stealing kids, she’s rescuing them and offering up food as a possibility and incentive. She doesn’t pay them because she has no money, but it felt like it gave her another sense of power. She stole the car, she’s on her mission, she’s going to get these people, and if she has to bribe them with food, that’s what she’s going to do. It just ever so subtly, but substantively, switches up the initial scenario that was presented.
Joe Skinner: And then there are other ways in which George is not making such explicit changes to the scenario at hand, but is more generally working with Audra McDonald to interpret her character within our more modern understanding of a woman’s role in society.
George C. Wolfe: She really wants to be center stage. This is one of the things that Audra and I talked about. There is a genuine love, I think, that she has for performing, and she has imbued that love into her daughter, June. And then later on, she forces that love onto her daughter Louise. I think that she had within her an astonishing creative spirit, but as a woman and in the conservative environment that she was born into, and at the time period … She tried marriage two or three times. That was something that was expected of her, but that had nothing to do with her spirit. It’s also very interesting to me that frequently the character is called a monster, and I violently aggressively disagree with that summation of who she is.
I think that possibly in 1959, when a character stands center stage and says, “I’m done with marriage, pops. I’m going to take my girls on an adventure,” and she’s breaking the rules because she had discovered at this point in her life that if you live by the rules for her and who she was and what she wanted, it was a form of suffocation. And so she’s decided she’s going to go on her own journey, and try to invade and transform and break the rules, so that therefore she can live the kind of life she wanted. I think that she’s less invested in collaborating and more so invested in “do it this way”, “now do it this way,” “now do it this way.” I think that what she is at the end of the day, in the core of her being, is a profoundly frustrated performer and, I think, probably would have been a very brilliant one.
Joe Skinner (Interview): I love that idea that in the ’50s, it’s perhaps somebody that might have been seen as monstrous. In the lens of 2024, 2025, it’s actually empowering and an empathetic character.
George C. Wolfe: And she has a spiritual, psychological, emotional epiphany in the song Rose’s Turn, in which she exhibits the bravery to look at her own actions, to see them, and to own what she’s done to her children. That’astonishing. And that’s an astonishing thing, anytime someone goes on a journey and takes responsibility for the choices they’ve made, good, bad, right or wrong. Taking responsibility is huge, and a lot of people can spend a lot of time making sure that never occurs.
Joe Skinner: In Rose’s Turn, Rose finally admits to her frustration and despair. It’s a showstopper towards the end of the second act of Gypsy, capping an historic performance from Audra McDonald about the economic realities of having a dream in America. But it’s a tricky thing to anticipate how critics and audiences are going to interpret such a layered work. Naturally, a lot of the focus has been on the race-conscious casting of the show, something I knew George had an interesting, complicated and somewhat provocative opinion on.
Joe Skinner (Interview): Your team told me that you prefer Gypsy to be seen through an American lens rather than through a Black lens. I was curious what the distinction that you’re making there is.
George C. Wolfe: I wouldn’t say I prefer. I just say that it’s gloriously wonderful to have Audra, who is a brilliant artist, to have a number of people in the company who are of color, and at the same time are also in a company that is filled with people who are not of color. And so the tapestry, to me, is incredibly vast. It’s an American tapestry. The thing that was very interesting and very important, and I think it’s very challenging but a lot of fun, is that one word has been altered. And yet every single word that is uttered by these characters, regardless of gender, regardless of age, regardless of race, seem truthful and correct.
Rose has an ambition to see June rise to the top. She doesn’t want to be in a small venue somewhere else. She wants the top. So Rose’s ambition is not to end up at a theater where people would say she belongs. She wants it all. One of the things that’s also really, really very fascinating to me is at various times when assorted immigrants, Italian, Irish, Jewish, Caribbean, Latin, and Black Americans as well, that when coming into contact with systems of rigidity, there were two very specific arenas where one could climb to the top. One was boxing and the other one was entertainment. That was the way that you can get “the belt” that says you’re the champion. That was the way that Burke Williams could make more money than the President while performing on a stage with Fanny Brice at the New Amsterdam Theater. He would never get that money anywhere else at the time.
Those ambitions, that desire to skip over and achieve a certain level … There’s a wonderful quote of Melvin Van Peebles which I adore. He said, “People asked me why I made it to the top. And I tell them because there was no room at the bottom.” I think that’s so brilliant and so fascinating. So to me, the landscape of America is rich and complicated and messy, and people collide, and people collide in scary ways, and people collide in glorious ways. One of my favorite moments in the scene is that when Rose and Louise, her daughter, two women of color, two Black women, end up in this burlesque house, which is the last place Rose wants to be, these three women take Louise under their wing; these three strippers. It’s a coming together. All kinds of information of survival and defiance and joy and possibility and defeat are being translated throughout the entire evening. And so that definition feels like something that people all across this country experience every single day.
Joe Skinner (Interview): Well, I think that is a great note to end on. George, is there anything else you wanted to say about the show before we head out?
George C. Wolfe: No. Is there anything else you want to ask?
Joe Skinner (Interview): Well, I just feel like I’ve never met somebody that has so much joy around process and around creativity. What gives you so much joy about it?
George C. Wolfe: Well, it’s fun. It’s fun. And also it’s what you can control. You can’t control what the critics are going to say, but my favorite process of anything that I do is the not knowing period. Gypsy is like my 18th Broadway show.
The thing that keeps it fun and exciting and dangerous and interesting is anytime I do a project, like I said with Gypsy, I study the period, I study the material, and I work very hard to be as smart as I possibly can about the history of it. And then I go into a room and I let all of that go and know that it’s living somewhere in my body and my brain. And then you start to play. And you start to play. And you start to play. If you cast it smartly, and I always try to work on casting shows as smartly as I possibly can, and this is a very smart cast, then you know that in between your impulses and their instincts, you’re going to come up with the solution. And so there’s discovery to be had and there’s a purity, and that’s a loaded word, but there’s a purity in going on that excavation with people who are excited to go on the excavation.
Like I said, a critic is going to come and see it. They’re going to do what they’re going to do. Awards are going to come along. They’re going to do what they’re going to do. You have no control over that. But the thing that you do have control over is the making of the thing. Or as Sondheim, in one of his songs from Sunday in the Park with George, Finishing the Hat: “Look, I made a hat … Where there never was a hat.” Look what we went into a room and look at the show, the spectacle, the fragility, the heart of a piece that hopefully arouses that inside of other people. We made that, yes, from the book, but we made it our own and special and unique, and hopefully something that empowers those who come to see it. And that’s fun. That’s fun to do.
Frequently, when I talk to students, whoever, one of the first things I say is, “Never, ever, I don’t care who it is, don’t let anybody take away the joy in what you do.”
Joe Skinner: That’s our show. A big thank you to George C. Wolfe for taking the time to talk with us. Watch and listen to more episodes of American Masters: Creative Spark wherever you get your podcasts. Don’t forget to rate and review on Apple Podcasts and Spotify, and subscribe on our YouTube channel at youtube.com/americanmasters. You can also watch and listen on our site at pbs.org/americanmasters. American Masters: Creative Spark is a production of The WNET Group, Media Made Possible by All of You.
