Gypsy is widely regarded as one of the greatest American musicals, loosely based on the memoirs of burlesque star Gypsy Rose Lee and centered not on Gypsy herself but on her domineering, endlessly ambitious stage mother, Rose. Determined to make a star of one of her daughters after her own dreams of show business glory went unfulfilled, Rose drags her girls through a grueling vaudeville circuit, pushing her favored daughter relentlessly until that daughter flees the act, leaving the overlooked elder daughter, Louise, to become the reluctant new focus of her mother's ambitions. When vaudeville dies and the act is booked into a burlesque house out of desperation, Louise transforms herself into the poised, witty striptease artist Gypsy Rose Lee, finally stepping out of her mother's shadow. Jule Styne and Stephen Sondheim's score, including "Everything's Coming Up Roses," "Some People," and "Rose's Turn," is considered among the finest ever written for the stage. The show's unflinching portrait of a mother's suffocating ambition and a daughter's hard-won self-assertion gives it a psychological depth rare among book musicals of its era.

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