MOMMA MIA

Audra McDonald triumphs in "Gypsy" on Broadway.

- HELEN SHAW

Joy Woods plays Gypsy (formerly Louise) in the iconic show-business tragedy.

In the nineteen-thirties, Gypsy Rose Lee, perhaps the world's most famous stripper, helped transform burlesque from a vulgar pastime to café-society entertainment, simply by acting refined. She made arch references as she stripped - dropping names like George Bernard Shaw next to her garter. You can find one of her routines on YouTube, in an excerpt from the 1943 film "Stage Door Canteen." Even in the sanitized movie clip, her coy allure comes through. Men gather before her, their eyes avid, but she stays playfully aloof, as cool and elegant as an opera glove.

Promise the audience something, then make 'em wait; that's also the strategy of the fifth Broadway revival of the legendary musical "Gypsy," from 1959, now at the Majestic. The key promise here lies in Audra McDonald, the once-in-a-generation soprano megastar and winner of six Tony Awards, who plays Rose, Gypsy's ambitious juggernaut of a stage mother. Lee's 1957 memoir also called "Gypsy"--was adapted for Broadway in a lightning-quick few months by an unbeatable supergroup: the book writer Arthur Laurents, the lyricist Stephen Sondheim, the composer Jule Styne, and the director Jerome Robbins. With a wink to the truth (even the autobiography played fast and loose with the story of how Louise Hovick became Gypsy Rose Lee), the quartet built the quintessential show-business tragedy: a battle royal between a stardom-obsessed mother and her daughters, whose childhoods she feeds into the industry's hungry maw.