Gypsy review - the ultimate stage mother rules with hard-bitten brashness

Pitlochry festival theatreMama Rose drags her two daughters from one vaudeville fleapit to the next in a bulldozer of a role There's something of the Mother Courage about Mama Rose. Like Bertolt Brecht's play, in which a woman trades her way through the 30 years' war in a primal effort to support her family, Gypsy is about a mother who acts out of economic necessity to keep her daughters alive. It is not a pretty tale. In an embittered take on the American dream, the Arthur Laurents/Jule Styne/S...