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.”
Unhummable 