‘Gypsy’ remake with Barbra Streisand is off
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‘Well, someone tell me, when is it my turn?’ So goes Mama Rose’s plaintive cry near the end of ‘Gypsy,’ and now maybe it’s Barbra Streisand’s too. She’d been planning to star in a new screen version of the classic musical, but Warner Bros. said Monday that the project was no longer active there. No explanation was offered, but as our sister blog Culture Monster reports, Arthur Laurents, who wrote the book for the original 1959 Broadway musical, told the Hartford Courant that he had withdrawn permission for it.
Laurents, 93, who also has directed several Broadway revivals of the show, said his decision had nothing to do with Streisand. He initially was open to the idea because he disliked the 1962 film adaptation with Rosalind Russell but said he changed his mind after talking with lyricist Stephen Sondheim, who told him not to think of “Gypsy†as needing a definitive movie version because it’s a work of theater, where “you can have different productions, different Roses on into infinity.â€
A spokesman for Streisand declined comment.
— Lee Margulies