Leonard Spiegelgasse's Let Me Entertain You

Ever since I was a little kid I remember watching my older sister perform musicals. For her, they were a time in her age she could sing on a stage in front of fifty parents, yet for me, it was a time to sit there and watch the same play over and over. One song they choose to reenact often was “Let Me Entertain You”. This act they performed was from the musical Gypsy, based off an autobiography on the famous striptease artist Gypsy Rose Lee (Louise Havoc) 1957. Gypsy 1962 film version was screenplayed by Leonard Spiegelgasse, with Stephen Sondheim the lyricist for songs composed by Jule Styne. The librettist was Arthur Laurents. I believe the main theme for the musical Gypsy was depicting what happens when parents do not ‘let go” of their children.
In the very first scene we see Rose Hovick (Rosalind Russell) being a ‘helicopter-parent’ and not letting her children perform by themselves during a beauty pageant. In the first number after the overture, “May we Entertain You,” lines in the song are “You’re behind Louise, catch up honey, catch up”. These lyrics show Rose over controlling her children into not acting for themselves. This suppression of their identity will come back in the girl's older years into running away or becoming a famous striptease.
Throughout the entire play Rose Hovick grooms one of her two
Then Rose confronts the audience and shares she only pushed her kids so hard because she believed she could have been a star when she was younger. In “Rose's Turn” she sings about how her character's dreams unmasking, when she tried to show them as her hopes for her daughter, she really just wants to do it all for herself. “I had a dream. I dreamed it for you, June.” To me these lines depicture Rose was so controlling because she was dreaming it all for her June. The song repeats lines throughout the