The Making of Gypsy

Pauline Carey is the author of Magic and What’s in a Name?

This book details the mounting of the original 1959 production of the
musical Gypsy (directed by Jerome Robbins), from the time when David
Merrick bought the rights to Gypsy Rose Lee’s memoir (after reading
only one chapter in Harper’s magazine) until its sensational reviews
and Tony Award nominations.

Arthur Laurents wrote the script for the show, based very loosely on
the memoir of the elegant “striptease queen of America.” He became
interested in writing it when he realized that the real story lay in
Gypsy Rose Lee’s mother. It was Laurents who proposed Ethel Merman for
that role, and Merman in turn insisted that Jule Styne do the music
(Irving Berlin had turned it down, Cole Porter was too ill, and Merman
refused to take a chance on Stephen Sondheim, then an unknown; Sondheim
ended up writing the lyrics).

Keith Garebian crams a lot of information into a slim volume, including
biographies of all those involved and a “descriptive analysis” of
the action scene-by-scene. There are three pages of sources consulted
(but no index), two pages of production notes listing producers,
director, cast, and production team (but no writers), and some
black-and-white production photographs from the New York Public Library.
The author has given us a meticulous record for the archives, but not a
whole lot of fun.