I’m not really in a position to name the best actress who ever played the role of Rose on Broadway as I’ve only actually seen two of them, Angela Lansbury and Bernadette Peters. They were both terrific.

Of course, I’ve also seen, I think, every film and video of Gypsy that’s ever been made.

Nor is it fair to proclaim anyone the best Rose. Each person who has inhabited that role has brought something special to it. But I think it is fair to say that Lansbury is my favorite Rose.

There was something unique about the way Lansbury treated the role, something that I don’t think anyone else who has tackled that part has ever done.

By the way, although I have the Playbill from the 1974 Gypsy revival that featured Lansbury, I don’t have the ticket stub, so I can’t pinpoint the date as to when I saw it, but based on other ticket stubs that I somehow did preserve, I suspect I went in October of 1974. But I digress.

Where most actresses tend to emphasize Rose’s monstrous qualities and the way she forces her way on everyone around her, especially her children, Lansbury put the emphasis on Rose’s failure to become a performer in her own right. She “was born too soon and started too late.” Lansbury’s Rose really did want to be a star in her own right, and that failed goal informed nearly every moment of her performance.

So during the vaudeville numbers we saw Lansbury at the side of the stage, not just egging on her girls, but actually mimicking June’s dance steps. Sometimes she even got into the stage action itself. There was something almost ingratiating about her that I never saw with any other Rose. She could really turn on the charm when she needed to. Unlike most of the other Roses, you’d probably enjoy having Lansbury’s Rose over for dinner. Of course, you’d still find that you were missing half your silverware after she left.

Even in the book songs (as opposed to the vaudeville numbers), Lansbury’s Rose was always performing. It’s a shame that we don’t have video of that full performance, but I think you can hear it even in the audio of “Together” from the London Cast Recording of the show. Listen to how Lansbury’s Rose adds vocal inflections to the song that no other Rose does. She is always performing.

Finally, Lansbury did something extremely courageous at the end of the bravura “Rose’s Turn” number. As a reminder, Rose has just left her daughter who has become the toast of the nation as the headline strip tease artist Gypsy Rose Lee and who seemingly no longer has time for her mother. Rose finds herself alone on a bare stage and muses to herself “if I ever let it out, there wouldn’t be lights bright enough!”

And so she lets it all out in one big nervous breakdown of an eleven o’clock number to end all eleven o’clock numbers. When the creators first played it for Ethel Merman her response was, “That’s sort of an aria, isn’t it?” 

At the end of the aria Lansbury received thunderous applause and, seemingly breaking the fourth wall, took a bow. And another bow. And another. I began to wonder if she was milking the applause—and then I realized, no, there’s a glassy-eyed, demented look in her eyes. This is part of her performance. Rose has lost it.

Rose was still bowing to her invisible audience when her daughter walked onto the stage, applauding, “You’d really have been something, Mother.” 

It was incredibly brave of Lansbury to play it like that, but it was all of a piece with her conception of the role. And I suspect that most of what Lansbury did was her own idea, not director Arthur Laurents’s.

Here’s a clip of Angela Lansbury, many years later, reacting to her performance in that 1974 “Rose’s Turn”. Alas, the clip from the performance cuts off in the middle of her eerie bows.

Finally, here’s a video with some grainy footage of scenes from that production. It includes the excerpt of the “Rose’s Turn” that Michael Feinstein showed to Lansbury as well as an extended sequence of the song “Together” that starts at about 4:43 and that includes a dance break.

I’ll write about Bernadette Peters and her approach to the role soon. She also emphasized a softer side of Rose.

And what about Audra MacDonald? Her Rose is in previews now. I haven’t read anything about it, but I suspect that she might also be softening some of Rose’s harder edges.