With a strong voice and a strong will, Ann Peck McBride dominates her daughters and the stage as Mama Rose. Mama breaks her two daughters, Baby June (Brooke Cannons) and Baby Louise (Amy Batchelor), into showbiz the old fashioned way – via blackmail. The cute but cheesy Let Me Entertain You vaudeville show she writes and choreographs features Mama’s favorite – Baby June – dancing and singing her way into the hearts of the audience. But when they fast-forward ten years and they’re still doing the same thing as adults forced to act and look and pretend they are still kids, that’s about all Adult June (Alyssa Marie Webb) can take! Which leaves the door open for Adult Louise (Susannah Hall) to step, or be pushed, into the limelight. Yet despite a few comical variations on Mama’s original script, the vaudeville act is finally used up, and Louise finds herself having to choose between obscurity and vaudeville’s replacement: burlesque!

The cast definitely entertains you with their excellent singing, dancing, and comedy. Ann Peck McBride, decked out in some of the most uproarious costumes designed by Ambra Wakefield, impresses throughout from her charismatic finales in Act I and Act II (Everything’s Coming Up Roses and Rose’s Turn), to her tender You’ll Never Get Away From Me duet with fiancé Herbie (Scott Haring), to her charming Together Wherever We Go trio with Herbie and Louise (Susannah Hall). Susannah is another big standout, from her shy and hesitant flirtation with fellow actor/dancer Tulsa (Robert Marra) in All I Need is the Girl to her far more confident rise to risqué stardom as she becomes Gypsy Rose Lee, the entertainer who will much later write some memoirs that this story is based on.