GYPSY

“All the working and pushing and finagling; all the scheming and scrimping… What’d I do it for?… Tell me – what’d I do it for?” – Rose

Rose, June and Louise are eking out a hard living in the dying days of vaudeville. Constantly on the road, always on the lookout for a way to fund their next meal – honestly or dishonestly – there’s nothing glamorous about their show-business life. Rose will fight for her daughters’ success, no matter what the cost, and both girls play along for as long as they can – until first one, then the other, reach breaking point and begin to question Rose’s real motives for their life on the stage.

Regarded by many as the greatest musical ever created, Gypsy is the ultimate mother-daughter story – a gripping, funny and heartbreaking tale of the damage we do to those we love. Rose’s own frustrated dreams of stardom are ploughed into her children; her own childhood wounds push her to glorify and smother her daughters in turn, and eventually to drive them both away.

Set all across America in the 1920s, Arthur Laurents’ landmark show documents the dying days of vaudeville, and the birth of a shocking new form of entertainment – burlesque. Rose’s fanatic determination pushes her family’s loyalty to breaking point, but from the most unlikely of places emerges one of the twentieth century’s most illustrious and ingenious entertainers – Gypsy Rose Lee.

The celebrated score by Jule Styne and Stephen Sondheim is packed with classic songs, including ‘Let Me Entertain You’, ‘Some People’, ‘Everything’s Coming Up Roses’, ‘Together Wherever We Go’, You Gotta Get a Gimmick’, and the iconic ‘Rose’s Turn’.

Three-time Sydney Theatre Award winner Blazey Best (Miracle City, Only Heaven Knows) returns to the Hayes to take on the iconic role of Rose, with Laura Bunting (Rent, Calamity Jane, Assassins) as her daughter Louise.

Presented by Luckiest Productions and One Eyed Man Productions