By all accounts, the main event this Broadway season is director George C. Wolfe’s revival of Gypsy, starring six-time Tony Award winner Audra McDonald as the ambitious, overbearing, and fiercely protective Mama Rose. It’s a punishing, seismic role that’s been played by a true murderer’s row of Broadway divas—including Ethel Merman, Bernadette Peters, and, of course, Patti LuPone—but McDonald, the first Black actor to play Rose, was determined to interpret it anew.
