Gypsy.
LAURENTS, Arthur; Music by Jule Styne; Lyrics by Stephen Sondheim.
Gypsy.
First Edition of Gypsy; In Exceptional Condition
New York : Random House, 1960.
We're sorry, this item has sold.
Out of Stock
Item Number: 133724
First edition of this classic work. Octavo, original half cloth. Near fine in a near fine dust jacket, name. An exceptional example.
First produced on Broadway in 1959 and published in book form the following year, Gypsy: A Musical Fable is the libretto by Arthur Laurents to one of the supreme achievements of the American musical theater, with music by Jule Styne and lyrics by a young Stephen Sondheim. Drawn from the 1957 memoir of the burlesque star Gypsy Rose Lee, the show tells the story not of its title character so much as of her mother, Rose Hovick, the archetypal stage mother of twentieth-century American legend, who drives her two daughters - the favored June and the overlooked Louise - through the last days of the vaudeville circuit in pursuit of the fame she has been denied for herself. When June elopes and the family is reduced to playing the burlesque houses they had once disdained, it is Louise who is pushed onto the runway, and out of that compromise that Gypsy Rose Lee is born. Laurents's book is a model of dramatic construction, building toward the celebrated climactic monologue "Rose's Turn," in which the mother's lifetime of ambition and disappointment is laid bare on the empty stage. With its score of songs that have entered the standard repertory - "Some People," "Everything's Coming Up Roses," "Let Me Entertain You," "Together Wherever We Go" - and its uncommonly serious treatment of ambition, parenthood, and the cost of the American dream of stardom, Gypsy has been called by many critics the greatest of all Broadway musicals, a judgment a half-century of revivals has done little to disturb.
