Summer 1959. You’re attending Gypsy: a musical fable, based on the memoirs of famed burlesque performer Gypsy Rose Lee. But the show’s driving force is her determined and domineering mother, Rose Havoc, played by Ethel Merman. After one of the most thrilling overtures you’ve ever heard, the curtain rises on a group of adorable kids auditioning for a vaudeville act. Merman barges into the scene, shouting “Sing out, Louise!” as she walks down the aisle carrying a dog. Her daughters—the cloying Baby June and her meek older sister, Louise—are among those auditioning, and Rose will not let anything or anyone curtail their rise to stardom. She finds a patient partner, Herbie, who tries to bring some stability as Rose builds a traveling act for June (who Rose insists is a child even as she enters early adulthood) and some dancing “newsboys” (one of whom is the timid Louise). When June and the newsboys bail on the act, Rose pivots her attention to Louise without much success. When they hit rock bottom (a burlesque house in Wichita), Louise does a strip as a last minute replacement, beginning her transformation into “Gypsy Rose Lee”. As she becomes more successful than she or Rose could have hoped, Louise resents Rose’s continued meddling, and the two have a climactic argument in her star dressing room. Rejected and resentful, Rose ruminates on the sacrifices she made for her daughters and the stardom she always wanted for herself in an epic mad scene of a song. (“Rose’s Turn”).

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