Buckley, Betty

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    Momma Rose’s Many Faces, From Ethel Merman to Audra McDonald

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    To those who worship at the church of the American musical, it was a holy night. For on a Thursday in late November in the city of New York, the faithful had assembled to witness what might be described as the Sixth Coming.Momma Rose was being reborn once again.The occasion was the first preview of the fifth Broadway revival of “Gypsy,” directed by George C. Wolfe at the newly restored Majestic Theater, which had last been the home of the longest-running musical on Broadway, “The Phantom of the Opera.” Rose was being played — deep breath, please — by the record-breaking, six-time Tony Award winner Audra McDonald. The house was packed, the crowd aflutter, and expectations stratospheric.For the uninitiated, let me explain that Momma Rose — as she is somehow commonly known, though she is never called that in the show — is widely perceived by theater cognoscenti as the greatest character ever to inhabit a musical comedy. First portrayed by Ethel Merman, she is to that genre’s actresses what Hamlet and Lear are to Shakespearean actors, a sky-scraping, Himalayan peak. As Arthur Laurents, who wrote the show’s book, described her, she is “a larger-than-life mother, a mythic mesmerizing mother, a monster of a mother sweetly named Rose.”The title character of this 1959 musical is in fact the stripper deluxe Gypsy Rose Lee. But it’s her mother, Rose, who is the show’s very (very) dominating central figure, a human bulldozer who drags her two young daughters through the shabby vaudeville circuit of the Great Depression in the hope of making one of them a star. Written by the sacred trinity of Laurents, Jule Styne (music) and Stephen Sondheim (lyrics), “Gypsy” is regarded by many (including me) as the great book musical and the most probing musical about performing itself. For all its surface brightness and buoyancy, “Gypsy” thrums darkly with the ravenous hunger for attention that lies in the deepest heart of showbiz.McDonald with Joy Woods and Danny Burstein in the new production, directed by George C. Wolfe.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesWe are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Betty Buckley Is Not Wedded to the Same Old Songs

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      The actress is back in concert mode at 76, and doing new material. She’s also looking forward to a bold new take on “Sunset Boulevard.”On her 35-acre ranch in Texas, the actor-singer Betty Buckley has been dreaming of playing a Western heroine at last — ideally in something by Taylor Sheridan, the “Yellowstone” creator, who shoots nearby.“I have literally contemplated going to his ranch and just knocking on the door,” Buckley, 76, said the other afternoon, and laughed.This week, though, she is slated to perform in Manhattan, Thursday through Saturday at Joe’s Pub, with songs and arrangements new to her show. After a year and a half of physical challenges including long Covid and compression fractures in her spine, she has worked her way back into concert mode.A veteran of the 1976 movie “Carrie” and the musical adaptation — a cult favorite that was a Broadway flop in 1988 — she is also back on-screen as an unsettling neighbor in the horror movie “Imaginary,” released in March, and with an animated short that she wrote and narrates, “The Mayfly,” scheduled for the Tribeca Festival in June.The actress played Norma Desmond in both the West End and the Broadway productions of “Sunset Boulevard” in the mid-1990s.John Stoddart/Popperfoto, via Getty ImagesSissy Spacek and Buckley in “Carrie,” which was Buckley’s big-screen debut in 1976. She later starred in a stage adaptation of the movie.United ArtistsA 1983 Tony Award winner for playing Grizabella in “Cats,” and famed for her trans-Atlantic 1990s turn as Norma Desmond in “Sunset Boulevard,” Buckley spoke from her ranch by video call. These are edited excerpts from that conversation.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      in Movies

      ‘Imaginary’ Review: Bear Necessity

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      An imaginary friend causes real trouble in this creepy haunted-house picture.Past and present trauma fuse in Jeff Wadlow’s “Imaginary,” the latest in the Blumhouse catalog of reliably creepy horror movies whose fans typically expect well-executed jump scares, fun plot twists and the occasional rubbery monster. What they probably don’t expect is the sophisticated allegory that “Imaginary” appears to be flirting with — and comes close to pulling off — before losing its nerve.Or maybe it’s my imagination gone supernova alongside that of little Alice (a delightful Pyper Braun) and her stepmother, Jessica (DeWanda Wise), a writer and illustrator of children’s books. After Jessica’s father is settled in a care facility, she and her family — including a rebellious teen (Taegen Burns) and a guitar-playing husband (Tom Payne) who smartly buzzes off on tour when things get hairy — move into her childhood home. Almost immediately, Alice is conversing with a stuffed teddy bear she finds in the basement, an imaginary friend whose increasingly sinister games stir memories Jessica has long suppressed.On one level, then, we have a mildly embellished haunted-house picture, entertainingly realized mainly with puppets and other practical effects. There’s also the familiar eerie neighbor (here played by the wonderful Betty Buckley) whose job is to help us make sense of the story’s woo-woo logic. What’s also playing out, though, are the lonely struggles of a stressed-out second wife, who is Black, to connect with the distant, sometimes resentful white stepdaughters whose mentally ill birth mother is not entirely out of the picture.In that sense, the movie’s devolution into, by my count, at least three attempted endings suggests some dithering over whether to deliver the logical conclusion to Jessica’s sacrificial trajectory, or ease the transition to a possible sequel. As to which prevails, you’ll have to use your imagination.ImaginaryRated PG-13 for weaponized scissors and a gargantuan spider. Running time: 1 hour 44 minutes. In theaters. More