Stamp of Mendes

This is certainly a Sam Mendes production. His directorial identity is stamped all over it. The bare brick wall of the rear of the theatre - or one artfully designed to look like the outside back wall of a theatre - is well-known to his followers at The Donmar Warehouse and is a classic Mendes' trope. The arrival of Bernadette Peters' Rose through the audience is another. Gypsy is ideal material for Mendes' continued exploration of artifice and reality.

Based on the memoirs of Gypsy Rose Lee who was almost singlehandedly responsible for raising the art of striptease from the vulgarity of Burlesque to the glittering heights of The Crazy Horse revue, the book by Arthur Laurents concentrates on the evolution of a timid, talentless showbusiness wallflower into a full-blooded showgirl thanks to the near-psychotic aspirations of her mother, Rose. This is Mommie Dearest set to music and Rose, perforce, must dominate the show.

Struggling to emerge from the shadows of Ethel Merman and even Tyne Daly's past performances, which hover over Broadway like harpies, Peters has her work cut out. Her relative youth is less of a problem than her inability to be truly terrifying. It is a curiously muted performance; a case, as Kenneth Tynan once said on another actress, of a meringue trying to imitate a hamburger.

Rather than dominate the show, the show fizzes and sparkles around her. As Rose trails her extended family from one dead-end gig to another, fuelled by dreams of fame and fortune in Vaudeville, she is seemingly blind to the realities that render her aspirations impotent. The Depression, the arrival of sound in motion pictures, the fact that she is pushing her all-singing, alldancing daughter Jane at the expense of her other daughter Louise into imminent alienation do not register on her at all. She is deaf to the knell that is sounding over the corpse of Vaudeville. She keeps her children in a state of arrested development in the hope of warding off the inevitable. And after three marriages "it takes an awful lot of butter to get you back in the frying pan".

Mendes' triumphs of interpretation and staging - and there are many - are almost entirely intellectual. The show - which should kick the heart as well as the head - rarely dirties its hands with genuine, gut-wrenching emotion.

Tammy Blanchard's Louise is an exception and is utterly convincing as the forlorn ugly duckling who cruelly blossoms into Gypsy Rose Lee. Peters herself has two stand-out moments: her delivery at the end of the first half of Styne and Sondheim's Everything's Coming Up Roses is memorable, with bitterness and desperation edging her voice like a rusty blade. And she sings her final song, Rose's Turn, as if she was on the verge of a breakdown, reminding me, quite appropriately, of Gloria Swanson's exit in Sunset Boulevard.

The most pleasing moments of the show - aside from the coup de theatre in the first half when the child actors morph into their adult counterparts in a strobe light - occur in the second half when Mendes lets rip with theatrical spectacle. "You Gotta Get A Gimmick" number performed by three Burlesque strippers Tessie (Heather Lee), Mazeppa (Kate Buddeke) and Electra (Julie Halston) is an outrageous showstopper of sublime kitsch. Ultimately, the dynamics are pure Mendes; his love of celebrating artifice while simultaneously puncturing the bubble of showbusiness dreams is everywhere apparent. Consequently, the "show" is the thing. It captures the mind and the conscience. But not, I fear, the heart.