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Hers is the show business saga you think you already know--but you ain't seen nothin' yet. Rose Thompson Hovick, mother of June Havoc and Gypsy Rose Lee, went down in theatrical history as \"The Stage Mother from Hell\" after her immortalization on Broadway in Gypsy: A Musical Fable. Yet the musical was 75 percent fictionalized by playwright Arthur Laurents and condensed for the stage. Rose's full story is even more striking. Born fearless on the North Dakota prairie in 1891, Rose Thompson had a kind father and a gallivanting mother who sold lacy finery to prostitutes. She became an unhappy teenage bride whose marriage yielded two entrancing daughters, Louise and June. When June was discovered to be a child prodigy in ballet, capable of dancing en pointe by the age of three, Rose, without benefit of any theatrical training, set out to create onstage opportunities for her magical baby girl--and succeeded. Rose followed her own star and created two more in dramatic and colorful style: \"Baby June\" became a child headliner in vaudeville, and Louise grew up to be the well-known burlesque star Gypsy Rose Lee. The rest of Mama Rose's remarkable story included love affairs with both men and women, the operation of a \"lesbian pick-up joint\" where she sold homemade bathtub gin, wild attempts to extort money from Gypsy and June, two stints as a chicken farmer, and three allegations of cold-blooded murder--all of which was deemed unfit for the script of Gypsy. Here, at last, is the rollicking, wild saga that never made it to the stage.

A true icon of America at a turning point in its history, Gypsy Rose Lee was the first-and the only-stripper to become a household name, write novels, and win the adulation of intellectuals, bankers, socialites, and ordinary Americans. Her outrageous blend of funny-smart sex symbol with the aura of high culture-she boasted that she liked to read Great Books and listen to classical music while taking off her clothes on-stage-inspired a musical, memoirs, a portrait by Max Ernst, and a species of rose.Gypsyis the first book about Gypsy Rose Lee's life, fame, and place in America not written by a family member, and it reveals her deep impact on the social and cultural transformations taking shape during her life. Rachel Shteir, author of the prize-winningStriptease, gives us Gypsy's story from her arrival in New York in 1931 to her sojourns in Hollywood, her friendships and rivalries with writers and artists, the Sondheim musical, family memoirs that retold her history in divergent ways, and a television biopic currently in the making. With verve, audacity, and native guile, Gypsy Rose Lee moved striptease from the margins of American life to Broadway, Hollywood, and Main Street.Gypsytells how she did it, and why.

Whenever stripper Gypsy Rose Lee encountered public criticism, she spoke frankly in her own defense. “Thousands have seen me at my--ah--best; and thousands have made no objections.” Noralee Frankel’s lively biography, Stripping Gypsy, the first ever published about the highly mythologized Gypsy, examines the struggles Lee faced in making a lucrative and unconventional career for herself while maintaining a sense of dignity and social value. Frankel shows that the famous Miss Lee was an enigma, clearly struggling with her choices and her desire to be respected and legitimized. Those who know Gypsy Rose Lee only from the musical and film based on her rise to stardom will be surprised by what they uncover in Stripping Gypsy. In all ways, Lee trafficked in the incongruous: she was at once sex object, intellectual, and activist. In addition to her highly successful strip-tease act and film career, she published two mystery novels and a memoir, wrote two plays, and showed her original artwork in famed Modern Art-impresario Peggy Guggenheim’s gallery. Lee also gained notoriety for her participation in liberal politics. As photographer Arnold Newman said, “She was a lady, a brilliant, bright woman who was the friend of many writers and intellectuals.” Though she wasn’t above using her femininity to full advantage, Lee aspired to much more than admiration for her physical beauty. Frankel places Lee’s life in social and political context while detailing a fascinating entertainment career, in which Lee created and recreated her own identity to fit changing times. Frankel’s biography transcends the sensationalism of stripping and asks the public to see the woman beneath the costume, a woman who always kept a little of herself shrouded in mystery.

When Squidward Tentacles, the cranky squid co-worker of the ebullient Spongebob Squarepants, proclaims in the middle of the recent SpongeBob SquarePants: The Broadway Musical, “I’m a pretty squid, mama!” he is doing more than reeling off a quick meta-theatrical one-liner. The joke in the musicalized version of the popular cartoon character’s adventures echoes one of the key lines of musical theatre history. The homage to the Arthur Laurents-Jule Styne-Stephen Sondheim musical Gypsy confirms and caps a greater-than-60-year history of camp-building. What makes this particular musical a go-to reference point for musical and musical-related humor? Much of the credit goes to Gypsy’s original Mama Rose, Ethel Merman. Before “camp” became an established art form and goal in and of itself, Merman’s presence constituted what was simultaneously the ultimate Merman role and a subversive commentary on that kind of role. Gypsy provided songs, quotes and moments that ultimately became shorthand for musical irony and meta-musical humor. From pastiche musicals, to musicals about musicals, to modern romps targeted toward children and families, quoting from Gypsy remains the definitive “this is a musical” statement, most often met with knowing laughter and recognition from appreciative audiences. For Gypsy became a musical that not only questioned and problematized what made a musical a musical, but also it challenged what made a musical star a musical star. What Gypsy accomplished was singularly exhilarating in its perverseness—the show successfully told the story of a monstrous parent whose chief instrument of abuse was musical comedy.

The author notes the dates for the 2019 American Choral Directors Association (ACDA) 60th Anniversary Jubilee National Conference in Kansas City, Missouri, comments on invited performances, and describes the exhibits.

From its origin as an autobiographical play about the construction of her“Striptease Intellectual” persona, Gypsy Rose Lee’sThe Naked Genius underwent transformation by producer Mike Todd into a three-ring circus burlesque extravaganza, with critics deriding the public spectacle of Lee’s authorship. Yet original drafts of the play reveal Lee’s authorial intentions—and her conception of burlesque performance as a mode of psychological striptease, in a play that is itself a complex palimpsest offiction and memoir, confession and artifice.

The American musical has long provided an important vehicle through which writers, performers, and audiences reimagine who they are and how they might best interact with the world around them. Musicals are especially good at this because they provide not only an opportunity for us to enact dramatic versions of alternative identities, but also the material for performing such alternatives in the real world, through songs and the characters and attitudes those songs project.

The premise was not original when White Cargo was a touring success; \"Teddy in the Jungle\" scenes were common on the popular stage during Theodore Roosevelt's expeditions to Panama, Africa and Central America.9 White Cargo variants are also structurally similar to sailor-on-the-island sketches popular from the turn of the century.10 The sketch was common in burlesque houses, but Corio was especially entwined with the dramatic and comic figure Tondalayo. The tropical setting of the \"White Cargo\" sketch was a cipher for occupied territories that stretched from the Caribbean to the South Pacific.13 Military veterans in the audience could project the settings of their tours of duty onto the generic island of the sketch. The woman-as-object is not the exclusive focus of the audience's attention; the alleged male gaze has a plasticity in which the erotic and political form a binocular vision of the scene.18 The \"White Cargo\" skit discreetly recognized the pains of conscription by creating a scenario in which the pleasure of sexual activity takes priority over nationalism and military objectives. [...]should the ethical requirements of the Belmont report-the 1979 basis for the regulation of human subjects research by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services-be taken into consideration when a diary is opened or a letter is transcribed?