Want to watch a total meltdown?

Go catch Broadway diva Patti LuPone dissolve into a patch of pain in the musical Gypsy.

Big stars have played this role before. Angela Lansbury found the dark heart of Mama Rose in London and New York in a performance that redefined star power.

Tyne Daly found the sadness at the soul of a tough loser in her Broadway take on the mother of strip star Gypsy Rose Lee.

And sexy little Bernadette Peters burned a patch off the stage giving the woman sensual powers of manipulation just a few seasons ago.

Until now, though, no one has erased memories of legendary Ethel Merman, who owned this role until LuPone came along.

It's not that LuPone is better than Merman -- she's not.

What she is, though, is equal to the huge demands of a dramatic role that requires a hefty musical belt, acting chops and a firebrand performance of dominating star power.

LuPone has all this in spades.

In Gypsy, she plays a stage mother like no other. With a cast-iron constitution, leather lungs -- and a heart we know is about to shatter into a thousand pieces -- she plays out the drama of a woman determined to find some shred of immortality.

That might be for her daughters, but it's also for herself.

No matter that it almost kills all of them in the doing.

If you've ever read Gypsy Rose Lee's wonderful autobiography, Gypsy, you know she was far from lily white.

You also know her sister June Havoc, who later went on to a considerable career on Broadway and in Hollywood, was also tough as old boots. That these scarred women were their mother's daughters is patently obvious. And the musical Gypsy, though it is admittedly a fable, is still a pretty accurate description of the sort of hard-nosed pluck it took to become a star in vaudeville or even burlesque.

By now it's obvious this Stephen Sondheim-Jule Styne musical -- with trenchant book by Arthur Laurents -- is a classic of the New York stage.

Watching the way LuPone sublimates her own considerable personality into the heart and hide of Madame Rose is special indeed.

A Broadway cult goddess, she is the sort of star who can be larger than life. Here, in a perfect vehicle for her stage persona, she allows her red-hot voice to scorch the scenery.

Of course, this is a show about stripping -- and not necessarily the naughty sort that sold seats at Minsky's. It's more about peeling off skin, paring away flesh, revealing bare bones.

LuPone gets at the very skeleton of Madame Rose. When she screams defiance at the world, insisting Everything's Coming Up Roses, it's a brazen victory cry.

When she perambulates the stage linking arms with daughter Louise (who later becomes Gypsy) and poor old Herbie, the man who loves her to pieces, she's an indomitable force. When the curtain comes down on Gypsy's first act, you just know LuPone has even further to go.

In the last scene of Act 2, after young Gypsy has become a star, LuPone's time-ravaged shell of a woman takes to a runway and fires all jets, melting down the theatre.

Was Ethel Merman better?

Maybe. I certainly loved her to death in it.

The thing is, though, Merman was then and LuPone is now. Her performance at New York's St. James Theatre is the stuff that makes a legend.

Gary Smith has written on theatre and dance for The Hamilton Spectator for more than 25 years.