A POWERHOUSE PERFORMANCE
TV star Vicki Lewis backs a powerful role in Maltz Jupiter’s ‘Gypsy.
There are many ways for a performance to tower over a production, and physical height is the least of them. Consider instead 5-foot-1-inch Vicki Lewis, who looms over the Maltz Jupiter Theatre’s “Gypsy” with raw ferocity as Mama Rose Hovick, the ultimate stage mother, who pimps her previously ignored daughter into becoming the celebrated striptease artist, Gypsy Rose Lee.
Longtime Maltz theatergoers have seen Lewis score with such other unlikely roles as “Hello, Dolly’s” title character and “Annie’s” comic villainess, Miss Hannigan. As impressive as both turns were, neither has the dramatic teeth of Mama Rose nor the thunderous arias with which she has to end each of the show’s acts.
With naked desperation, Rose pushes her two daughters into the fading vaudeville limelight. But when her favored offspring, fairhaired and bubbly June abandons her, Rose turns to neglected Louise as her new focus of improbable show business stardom, spewing out the lyrics of the otherwise benign number of optimism, “Everything’s Coming Up Roses,” with a power that is downright Mermanesque.
At the show’s finale, Lewis tops herself with an anguished primal scream, “Rose’s Turn,” a guttural soliloquy of regret over living her own dream through unappreciative daughters. We knew that Lewis had the musical chops for the role, but it is her acting that astonishes here.
A production of “Gypsy,” the legendary collaboration among Maltz Jupiter Theatre, 1001 E. Indiantown Road, Jupiter. Through April 9. $61 and up. 561-575-2223. One of the great backstage musicals, of Gypsy Rose Lee and her ferociously pushy mother, with a powerhouse star turn by Vicki Lewis as the latter. adaptor Arthur Laurents, composer Jule Styne and a young Stephen Sondheim as his lyricist, is well on its way to success with a Mama Rose of Lewis’s caliber. But the Maltz production has many other assets, too.
At its helm is director-chore-
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