the one in this musical is a faux mirror, really a portal into the
Phantom’s magic, which is appropriate to a musical that in-
creasingly becomes a through-sung opera but is not the kind
that turns up in the book-and-number shows we are trying to
define.
The mirroring that takes place in the book-and-number mu-
sical preserves the distance of reflection, the space over which
incongruous images can be seen to cohere. When Boy Louise
in Gypsylooks into herdressing-room mirror and sees a new
version of herself reflected there—
the only light on the stage is the glow of the mirror bulbs; the only
figure is Louise. She looks at herself, goes close to the mirror to
check her makeup, then suddenly stops. She touches her body
lightly, moves back, straightens up, and stares at her reflection—she has to have distance from her image. She is seeing her-
self as a girl—“Momma...I’m pretty...I’m a pretty girl,
Momma”—and according to D. A. Miller’s account of this mo-
ment, gay males in the audience are caught up in a crisis of ob-
servation, for they have been seeing Boy Louise in a mirror too,
over another distance, and now she is about to become “Gypsy,”
knowing herself as a woman in numbers that require not dress-
ing up but stripping down. Miller calls this mirror scene “per-
haps the most moving but surely the most invidious moment in
Gypsy.”^5 The important word here is “invidious,” because the
recognition at hand is imbued with trouble—different trouble
for different spectators. The point is not that the mirrored
moments are pleasant but that they are penetrating, difficult,
and brought about over a distance of observation. You must
keep some distance between yourself and the mirror—Christine
misses that point when she follows the Phantom. Distance is
real and necessary to any recognition of the self that is open to
change and not caught up in narcissism. The best reason why
musicals alternate between book and number is that space is
thereby preserved between the modes, a gap of difference that
186 CHAPTER EIGHT
(^5) D. A. Miller, Place for Us, p. 88, from which I borrow the Gypsyquotations.