I’ve wanted to write something about “Rose’s Turn” ever since it was covered on Glee a few weeks ago. This song is, of course, the final number in the show Gypsy, and one of the most frequently cited 11 o’clock numbers in musical theater. (The definition of “11 o’clock number” is something that varies according to whom you ask, but there tend to be three constants in people’s answers: 1) the number has to be showstopping, 2) it has to fall at or near the end of a show, and 3) “Rose’s Turn” is a classic 11 o’clock number.)
The cool thing about this song’s turn on Glee was that, for all that it is a very context-specific number, the writers managed to integrate it into the episode such a way that it perfectly fit the Glee storyline despite the fact that this storyline bears almost no similarities to that of Gypsy. You would think that it was written specifically for Glee — which is impressive, considering it was written specifically for Gypsy, and functions very well in that context.
If you haven’t seen it, here’s the song in Glee. A plot summary of the episode, for context, can be found here (courtesy of Wikipedia).
One of the only things that bothers me about the presentation of the song in Glee is that it feels pretty disjointed. Now, while you could probably say that that works in the scene’s favor — Kurt is having a sort of emotional breakdown — I think it’s also a relic of how the song worked within Gypsy, and the fact that the contextual mechanisms don’t all cross over to Glee. Specifically, I feel like there are three factors that work to ground “Rose’s Turn” in Gypsy in a way that doesn’t happen with Glee:
1. In Gypsy, the song is about twice as long.
2. The song makes a number of musical references to earlier songs in Gypsy, which help make it sound familiar to people who have heard the rest of the show.
3. Even moreso than Kurt, Rose (who sings the song in Gypsy) is clearly having an emotional breakdown and the chaotic mishmash of songs serves to illustrate the fact that she’s falling apart.
None of this is to say that I think the writers dropped the ball with their treatment this song in Glee — like I said, I think it works amazingly well in context considering, and I don’t realistically think they could have made it fit any better than it did — but I do think these facts serve to highlight just how well the song works in Gypsy. It’s one of those songs that functions as a real emotional journey, and by the time you get to the end of the number (which Kurt sings above) the destruction is pretty absolute.
So let’s talk about all the things that are going on in “Rose’s Turn.”
First of all, the context: Rose, the middle-aged mother of two daughters-turned-stage performers, finds herself at the end of the show abandoned by both her children, and realizes for the first time that her real motivation for pushing them to become stars was not to see them succeed — but to be in the spotlight herself. “Someone tell me, when is it my turn?” she sings furiously, the facade of maternal selflessness punctured once and for all.
Here’s Bernadette Peters performing the number, with a short explanatory intro, at the 2003 Tony Awards:
You can see why the first half of the performance would not have worked within Kurt’s storyline in Glee. But it functions to give the song an arc, an “up” before the down, a show of coherence before it breaks apart. Which brings me to the composition:
The song has four parts, more or less. Every part makes references to earlier musical and lyrical material, which simultaneously pulls the number together and makes it sound like a mess: these tunes and sentiments are all familiar but very few of them actually go together, and as a result the mood is shifting all the time.
The first part of the song extends from the beginning up to right before “ready or not”: this is the triumphant opening, Rose finally getting a “star turn” of her own (if only in her own head: the number is staged on an empty stage to a purely imaginary audience). It makes references to an earlier song of hers about what it takes to succeed, “Some People,” in addition to her daughters’ vaudeville acts and “Have an Eggroll, Mr. Goldstone.” It is in-your-face confident, sarcastic and defiant.
It then slides into a rushed, discordant vamp (I like how Peters performs this, handwaving through some choreography and humming distractedly under her breath: it implies that she’s already losing her grip on the routine, faltering in her steps before she pulls it together for the next verse). Rose begins the “Mama’s talking loud” section, which takes its lyrical cues from a cut song, “Small World / Mama’s Talking Soft.” This bears almost no musical resemblance to the first part of the song, which suggests again that Rose’s performance and her thoughts are both starting to unravel. She nevertheless seems to hold it together, building to a note of confidence with “Mama’s lettin’ loose / Mama’s got the stuff,” before she suddenly stumbles on “Mama’s letting go.”
The “character forgetting their own lines as a metaphor for mental block” trick has been done before and since in other shows (Follies, for one), but this may be my very favorite instance of it. Again, Peters does a great job acting out the moment in the video. I also really love how the instruments cut out altogether when she sings — really, whispers — “Mama’s got to let go,” as if she’s realizing this for the first time, and it is that realization that destroys the illusion of performance once and for all.
When the trumpets start up — section three — the mood is again completely changed. The melody is once again taken from “Some People” (“all the places I gotta be” etc.), but the chord structure is altered such that the mood is much darker, and Rose’s voice goes much lower, as she practically growls her lines. The pauses in between each line give the impression that she is thinking these things for the first time, one dawning insight after another, until her train of thought coalesces and gains deadly momentum as her anger rises in “all your life, and what does it get you / thanks a lot and out with the garbage / they take bows and you’re batting zero.”
For the record, here’s another thing that makes these lines work: the stresses fall perfectly on the beat. Because the important words and syllables all hit the downbeat, the music emphasizes their meaning: “SCRAPbooks FULL of ME in the BACKground”; “ALL your LIFE and WHAT does it GET you?” Furthermore, the fact that all of these lines are composed of mostly one- and occasionally two-syllable words gives them a curt, clipped quality that helps make them sound even angrier.
There’s a pause in the music, which gives the trumpet line this brilliant opportunity to crescendo (you can hear it especially well in the Glee version of the song: it’s right before “I had a dream”). That ominous crescendo undercuts the seeming optimism of the melodic interlude that follows: “I had a dream / I dreamed it for you,” which is yet another reprise of earlier melodic material for Rose. And sure enough, the tranquility shatters as she drives the thought to its conclusion:
I had a dream;
I dreamed it for you, June.
It wasn’t for me, Herbie;
And if it wasn’t for me,
Then where would you be,
Miss Gypsy Rose Lee?
(emphasis mine.)
The twist occurs at “if it wasn’t for me,” as Rose contradicts what she’s just been saying: that she has been acting selflessly for the sake of her children. Her true feelings are underscored by the mounting intensity of the last three lines, achieved partly through melodic repetition + vocal crescendo and partly through that force-of-nature triple rhyme (me/be/Lee) that culminates in the loudest and angriest trumpet vamp yet. The meaning is clear: she is anything but selfless; she is very angry, and she is angry because she wants credit for herself.
In come the most explicit lines to this effect, which finally elucidate the title of the song:
Someone tell me, when is it my turn?
Don’t I get a dream for myself?
Starting now it’s going to be my turn;
Gangway world — get off of my runway.
The tune is the same as “why did I do it,” just modulated up to a higher and more powerful register, and sung louder. There is a decrescendo, and then we enter section four: “Everything’s coming up roses.”
This is possibly the most incoherent transition yet, musically speaking: different key, different time signature, completely different tune. It’s the emotional continuity that holds it together, as Rose’s anger in the previous section culminates in a should-be-triumphant-but-really-it’s-enraged paean to herself. We’re back to the idea of her “putting on a performance” that was introduced earlier in the song — and this performance is none other than her act one finale — but this time it is completely emotionally transparent, filled with fury and resentment, the culmination of all her feelings so far. It sounds optimistic but borders close to desperation; it also reworks the lyrics from earlier, so that what was once “everything’s coming up roses” — i.e., everything is going great — becomes “everything’s coming up Rose’s,” emphasis on the possessive.
That desperation achieves its fullest representation in the last moments of the song, with the repetitions of “for me.” At one or two repeats, this phrase would be the crowd-pleasing capper on a tour-de-force musical number; repeated six or seven times, however, it becomes borderline uncomfortable, like an encore that has worn out its welcome. It sounds obsessed and delusional. The audience is forced to sit with that feeling through the litany of repetition and the long, discordant final chord that seems to go on forever — fun, right?
A trivia fact I like: the creators of Gypsy originally intended to segue from the end of this number right to the final scene of the musical, without an applause break, because they felt it would be inappropriate to have the audience applaud a woman’s mental breakdown. However, audiences were so insistent on clapping — and so restless when they were deprived of the chance to do so — that Rose ended up having to pause for applause anyway, so that people would be able to get the applause out of their system and settle down for the following scene.
In the 1973 revival of the show, director Arther Laurents had Angela Lansbury as Rose take advantage of this applause break by bowing to the audience as they clapped, and then continue bowing, even once the applause had stopped. Implication: we may be applauding her performance, but she’s still performing for an imaginary audience, and it’s not us. And just like that a necessary pragmatic compromise (applause break) becomes a character acting moment. Genius!
You can see Lansbury performing “Rose’s Turn” at the end of this video, but annoyingly, the video ends while the applause is still going, so you can’t see the final effect.
Unhummable 