GYPSY

Stephen Sondheim’s response to Imelda Staunton’s stunning performance as Mrs Lovett, Sweeney Todd’s accomplice, madly, hilariously, pathetically in lust with the murderous barber, was that she should play Mama Rose. Another complex role, she’s the stage mother from hell in the 1959 musical Gypsy, whose dream is to realise her own thwarted ambitions through her daughters.

Well, in Jonathan Kent’s magnifi cent revival, at least Sondheim’s dream comes true, if not Rose’s. Arthur (West Side Story) Laurents’ book is adapted from the memoir of Gypsy Rose Lee, the undisputed queen of burlesque in America in the 1930s and 1940s. A psychological drama about dreams and delusions, about mothers destroying their children, it’s as deep and dark and haunting as any play by Tennessee Williams. Jule Styne’s score and Sondheim’s lyrics (Everything’s Coming Up Roses, Let Me Entertain You) combine to create one of the greatest Broadway shows of all time.

Imelda Staunton is knock-out. She first appears bustling through the stalls, almost invisible behind an armful of shaggy dog, to push her daughters through their audition for yet another vaudeville show on the American circuit. A precocious June (a squawking Georgia Pemberton) laps up the limelight; a reluctant Louise is all arms and legs.

Initially Rose’s brass and bluster are funny: ‘Curtain up! Light the lights! We’ve got nothing to hit but the heights,’ she sings. But her attempts to keep the girls forever young, refusing to put more than 10 candles on their birthday cakes, begin to look more monstrous. Finally, when ‘baby’ June is busting out all over and elopes, Louise becomes the vessel of Rose’s double disappointment. But Louise has little talent and vaudeville is dead.

Still, Rose is so busy dreaming, convinced she is the world’s best mother, supported by her long-suffering manager (a rather solid, stolid Kevin Whately), she is blind to reality. She delivers Everything’s Coming Up Roses at the end of the first act with the scary craziness of a woman on the verge of a breakdown, desperately determined to persuade herself that eating dog food straight from the tin isn’t hitting the pits.

Stephen Mear’s choreography is similarly eloquent. First, miraculously, when the tots transmute into adult versions of themselves within one number. Second, hilariously, when three ‘burlesque’ dancers demonstrate You Gotta Get A Gimmick and a towering Julie LeGrand trumpets: ‘I do it with a horn,’ while a fl ashy Louise Gold quite literally electrifi es her assets. And finally, gloriously, when Lara Pulver’s Louise metamorphoses into the sequin-gowned ‘ecdysiast’ Gypsy Rose Lee. It must transfer to the West End, so start saving now.

Until 8 November at Chichester Festival Theatre, West Sussex: 01243-781312, www.cft.org.uk