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Audra McDonald: "Rose's Turn"

 No one planned on "Rose's Turn"; the end of "Gypsy" was going to be a kind of ballet. But the creators ran out of time. So Sondheim said, "Why don't I piece together a soliloquy? I'll use little musical scraps that have made their appearance earlier in the evening. Saves time."


"Rose's Turn" then became a kind of template for Sondheim's career. There would be an extraordinary musical--full of canonical numbers--and somehow, in the last five or ten minutes, there would be a solo that managed to outshine the previous two hours of material. The solo would feature a speaker at war with herself or with himself: Rose, Bobby in "Being Alive," Sally in "Losing My Mind," Desiree in "Send in the Clowns." 

Rose is not a reliable narrator. When she says, "I dreamed my dream for you, June," we aren't meant to take this as the gospel truth. When she claims, "This time, boys, I'm taking the bows," she is of course speaking to boys who don't exist; her actual audience is her daughter, who pities her. What matters is not *what* she says; what matters is the overall sense of discomfort, the sense that someone would like to tear off her own skin, rewrite every phase of her own wasted life. There is always a kind of gap between speech and thought; what we say is a kind of mask, and the mask is frequently slipping. I think no one in musical theater history has understood this as fully as Sondheim.

Audra McDonald adds two things to "Rose's Turn." First, since "Gypsy" is called "A Fable," McDonald goes over-the-top. She isn't aiming for kitchen-sink realism in her song. A Shakespearean actress (with a knowledge of "Henry IV" and "Twelfth Night"), McDonald is dropping a big bucket of "Lady Macbeth" into Sondheim's stew. Additionally, people have always heard certain lines as a declaration of war against misogyny. "Someone tell me, when is it my turn? Don't I get a dream for myself?" (We have seen Rose exhausting herself in an effort to enlist "help" from various men, including her father, her colleague Mr. Goldstone, and her frenemy Herbie.) Audra McDonald takes the climactic lines and makes them "about" race (at least as much as they are about sexism). When Audra is most visibly petulant, she seems to be responding to the idea that "Black people should be 100 percent better than their white competitors, in order to win half the recognition."

Hello, everybody! My name's Rose!
What's yours?

I really liked Audra's Tonys performance--and I think it's a good sign that it has made many people upset. I think this means that the performance will last.

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